Lineage of Line Age: Transculturation of Global Play-scape Video Games in East Asia

Hui Wang Graduate Student Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg

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Lineage of Line Age: Transculturation of Global Play-scape Video Games in East Asia

Abstract

This essay sets to explore the significance, mode, and complexity of videogame-playing in processes of social reconfiguration and cultural transmutation under conditions of further globalization, digitalization, and multinational capitalism through the online game Lineage in the context of video gaming in East Asia. Growing together with the gaming industry, there are the increased collective zests for the consumption of image, symbolic meaning, sensory spectacles and simulacra, as well as the global enthusiasm for cultural soft power and culture- creative industry. Eventually, these all constitute and transform the political-economic environment of multinational information-capitalism in the so-called post-industrial era, where video gaming is considered an ideal-type commodity and powerful form of cultural statement and participation mechanism. It also expects to shed some light upon the East Asian agencies within this transcultural dynamism, providing a counterargument and third path to those opinions, which consider globalization and contemporary popular culture as either homogeneous techno-oriented pan-Americanization or self-enclosed multiculturalism.

Key words: transculturation, video game, gaming, media culture, East Asia

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… when I was a schoolboy, I always played the Nethack1 game. That’s a text-based Unix game. I loved that, and my dream was to make a game based on that sort of virtual world - so when I encountered the Internet, I was very excited, because this could be a reality! That’s why I created a company to make online games. Tack Jin Kim, founder, president and CEO of NCsoft, 20052

The scene slowly moves along some ruins of an Acropolis-like Greek-style temple. A narration in English with a female voice tells about deeds of heroes in an epic tone. In the dim light through dancing dusts, a headless statue of the remains of a winged goddess that resembles the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre could be seen in front of a Hellenistic-style arch. On the steps toward the altar, against pieces of some broken columns, sleeps a young girl, who is dressed in European medieval armor that is reminiscent of a Joan- of-Arc-like female knight in popular Hollywood films - the metal plate perfectly outlines her humpy chest and reflects the glamour of her fine-textured pale skin. The plate around her waist is exquisitely hollowed out to expose her compact flat belly, below which a mini-skirt is delicately assembled with same metal plates that gracefully curves around her thigh. Apart from that, her straight hair glows blond, her eyelashes match the artificial length of a doll, and her figure is ideally slim, like that of a Barbie. Her face shows characteristics of neither a European nor Asian, but more of the combined features of both, to find the most accurate description, like the idealized cute blond girls found in Japanese comics. Her identity of a medieval European knight is further symbolized by a sword in leather-stripped sheath that she carries on the side, upon which hangs a sophisticatedly decorated pendant of a shining blue gem and gold-casted vine patterns that render the elfish elegance in the films of the Lord of the Rings, glittering a mysterious blue light. The pendant drops on the floor during her sudden waking when, at the same time, the whole temple goes dark, overshadowed by some giant creatures that sweep over from above and cause the ruins to dismantle. The girl runs out to see a huge dragon land on top of the Hellenistic façade. Upon encountering the eyes of the dragon, she is suddenly dragged into flashbacks of war, scenes of massacre and vengeance. The dragon roars and flies away, leaving the girl alone watching its flight afar into the thick clouds above the cliff. The scene dims and reveals the logo of NCsoft, South Korea’s3, also acknowledged as the world’s, leading online game company. Such is the cinematic CGI4 trailer the company has created for the promotion of the second episode of its flagship online game - Lineage II, first released in 2003.5

1 Nethack was an American Dragons&Dungeons role play PC game released in 1987. To play the game, players choose an avatar character among knight, wizard, priest, barbarian, etc., and go on virtual adventures to the “dungeons” and fight various “monsters” such as dragons. The “dungeons” contain multiple layers and are randomly generated by computer algorithms. Lineage cloned this prototype of “dungeons” from Nethack. 2 Tack Jin Kim, interviewed by Rob Fahey, “Interview: NCsoft's TJ Kim builds an online giant,” 2005. 3 In this essay, Korea refers only to the country of Republic of Korea, or South Korea, if not specified otherwise. 4 CGI: Computer Generated Image. 5 Refer to 2002 Lineage 2 official trailer.

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More than twenty years have passed since Lineage I was first released in 1998. It might not sound a long time, but, to any standard, Lineage represents a rare longevity in the ever-changing world of video games. Despite its antiquity, this major MMORPG6 title still generates a revenue of 313,793 million KRW (approximately $269 million) collectively in the first three seasons of 2016, according to the company’s income reports.7 The game design of Lineage has cast visible influence on many other games. It established the unshakable Korean status in the market and contributed a prototype for game design and business model in the whole industry. The game-industry research company Superdata ranked Lineage the second top P2P MMO8 game after the video game tycoon Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft (released in 2004),9 above the much newer games on the list, including blockbuster IPs10 like Star Wars: The Old Republic11 and TERA: Online,12 despite the fact that, in the world of video games, only a few months’ difference is enough to generate massive gaps in technology, visual style, communication, market share, and user preference. It is a fast- changing and highly competitive market, but Lineage not only managed to survive as the only 2D13 game with isometric-overhead graphic of 1998’s technology, but also over competed games of the 21st-century’s frontier solutions. Other games of similar technical level with Lineage, such as Blizzard’s Diablo II (2000)14 and Electronic Arts’ Ultima Online (1997),15 have for long faded into history. As a “myth of online game market,” Lineage stands to proof that it is not only technology and capital that matters. A game could be played for its cultural contents alone, and, like in old times, gaming is not always about consumption of the audiovisual spectacles. There is something of the original “fun” of playing in it, which varies according to different cultural and social contexts, and it is this “fun” that matters.16

In any case, there is no doubt that video gaming is a Western invention. The RPG17 game was born from tabletop war games, sandbox, and card games that have long traditions in Europe and later the United States as hobby activities. The emergence and development of video games are based on home computer industry and R&D in service for the military-space complex during the Cold War period.18 Euro-American cultural elements and narratives, most commonly European Medieval culture, have always dominated and set the industrial

6 MMORPG: Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. 7 The number slightly dropped in the 2018 financial year with a $182 million generated by Lineage I and II PC platform, not counting the newly released Lineage mobile game Lineage M. In 2018, to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of Lineage, NCsoft announced the releasing of Lineage: Remastered – a remaking of Lineage I, using improved visual techniques. Lineage remains number one among the top most influential and profitable titles with rare longevity of online games. NCsoft Earnings Report, 3rd Season, 2016. 8 P2P MMO: Pay to Play Massively Multiplayer Online Game. 9 World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment, Warcraft series, MMORPG, 2004. 10 IP: Intellectual Property. 11 Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare, Star Wars series, MMORPG, 2011. 12 See Superdata online game revenues, TERA: Online, Huizinga Inc., MMORPG, 2011. 13 2D: two-dimensional. 14 Diablo II, Blizzard North, Diablo series, Action role-playing video game, Single or multiple player, 2000. 15 Ultima Online, Electronic Arts, MMORPG, Ultima series, 1997. 16 Johan H. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (New York: Routledge, 1980). 17 RPG: Role Playing Game. 18 S. Kline, N. Dyer-Witheford, & G. de Peuter, Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).

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standard. But the arena of video gaming was not unfamiliar to East Asia - after the 1983’s North American video game crash,19 Nintendo (Japan) has single handedly revived home console game market and since then dominated in both the East and the West.20 In 2016, the video game market of mainland China was estimated to be $24.4 billion,21 making it the fastest growing region in games. The fast expansion of East Asian game industry started in the 1980s in Japan, and, by the late 1990s, South Korea already came to lead the global market of online games.

Although East Asia (South Korea, Japan, China, and Taiwan) still contributes the largest share of revenue for Lineage, this game is also feverishly played in places like Latin America and Russia. Through the creation, reception, consumption, and transcultural prod- usage of Lineage, complex traces of cultural flows and movements are formed. The game was created by a Korean designer based on the virtual world of a Korean girls’ comic and American video game prototype, which served the childhood dream and single model for most game entrepreneurs in East Asia and was itself a result of age-long evolvement based on various games, cultural contents, and technological means. It was molded through the choices and preference of mass Korean players and their impulse for fun and leisure, deeply embedded in the socio-cultural context of Korea in the late 1990s.

What are the cultural dynamisms that gave birth to the video game Lineage and fed to its evolvement as a virtual world? What are the cultural negotiations that led to the mixed visual style, which has become the industrial standard? What legacies has it followed, reinvented, and reestablished in the sans-frontières world of gaming, media culture, and digital virtual space? Or even, how to think seriously about the trendy “eSports,” as they extended from the fantasy role-playing player-vs.-player contest gaming found in Lineage and became a growing scene, which consists of professional tournaments and world championships worldwide? Answering these questions is not to appreciate a single game nor to overstate achievements of game making in specific countries, but to better understand the more general phenomena of multinational capitalism, media and communication, alternative community, and mass participation in cultural reproduction. More precisely, it is to explore the significance, mode, and complexity of game playing in processes of social reconfiguration and cultural transmutation under conditions of further globalization, digitalization, development of info-technology, the collective zest for the consumption of image, symbolic meaning, sensory spectacles and simulacra,22 the global enthusiasm for cultural soft power,23 culture for development,24 and culture-creative industry. Eventually, these all constitute and transform the political-economic environment of multinational information-capitalism in the so-called post-industrial era, where gaming is considered an

19 N.R. Kleinfield, “Video Games Industry Comes Down to Earth,” The New York Times, October 17, 1983. 20 Steve L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon and Beyond: The Story behind the Craze that Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (Roseville: Prima Pub, 2001). 21 Data from 2016 global games market. 22 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: The Body in Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 23 Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 24 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “The Cultural Turn in Development: Questions of Power,” The European Journal of Development Research 7 (1995): 176–92.

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ideal-type commodity.25 This also helps to shed some light upon the East Asian agencies within this system, providing a counterargument and third path to those, which consider globalization and contemporary popular culture as either homogeneous pan-Americanization or self-enclosed multiculturalism. With its industrial, technological, and capital capacity, consumer market volume, and cultural contents, East Asian elements take part in the process of transformation of world’s culture through the niche of gaming. After all, few media types could be privileged with such great expectation to rule the future world,26 making video games not simply a powerful form of cultural statement, but also a complex section of society to assess the social, economic, and cultural constructs today.

Theoretical Approach: The Transculturation of Global Play-scape

In his 1990 text, Appadurai has theorized the new pattern of global cultural economy in the structure of five dimensions of global cultural flow: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; (e) ideoscapes.27 These “landscapes” are not static givens but fluid, irregularly shaped and changing perspectival constructs inflected by agents of various scales, and together they form multiple “imagined worlds” based on the “historically situated imaginations of persons and groups.”28 Video games, especially multiplayer online games, are most often examined within the frameworks of the global media and technoscape. Beyond that, there are researches on the ethnoscape of Internet users and social networks through considering MMO players as alter egos and virtual communities. As one of the most lucrative sectors and potential mass commodity of the culture-creative-industry, the financial and ideological significances of gaming are rising.

Digital gaming today has become part of the culture system and objects that contain information of socio-cultural evolvements. These spectacles and gadgets of cutting-edge technology, empowered with ever renewing means for sensory stimulation, are created especially to attend to the human instincts to play, which Huizinga claimed as the fundamental element and character that is primary to culture and society: “culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning... Social life is endued with supra- biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhances its value.”29

In short, it is not possible to understand contemporary culture and the dynamism and complexity of today’s cultural formation and transformation without comprehending the game world, which constitutes a global “play-scape” of cultural flows that is becoming ever more predominant in society. This cultural landscape is grounded on the continuous sophistication of technology and communication, the further commodification and exploitation of cultural expressions and intellectual creations, the growing power of imagery

25 Martyn J. Lee, Consumer Culture Reborn: The Cultural Politics of Consumption (New York: Routledge, 1993); A. Kundnani, “Where Do You Want to Go Today? The Rise of Information Capital,” Race & Class 40 (1999): 49-71. 26 Refer to Ready Player One by Steven Spielberg: Steven Spielberg, Ready Player One (film), produced by Warner Bros., 2019. 27 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 295-310. 28 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 29 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 46.

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simulation,30 the penetration of Internet and social networks, and hence the changing way of life in aspects of leisure and entertainment. The mass commodity and participatory nature means that gaming is not a predetermined product, but results of continuous cultural negotiation based on complex power relations of various forces and actors that range from technology, business, culture, and social factors.

One core perspective to be introduced here is transculturation. First used by Fernando Ortiz in 1940, “transculturation” was to term the “complex transmutations of culture” in the history of Cuba,31 throughout which diverse cultures are “agitated, intermingled, and disintegrated in a same social bullir (...) mixing of kitchens, mixing of races, mixing of cultures” in dynamic flow and integration.32 Transculturation, as found in Malinowski’s explanation:

is a process in which something is always given in exchange for what is received; it is a ‘give and take’ (...), a process in which both parts of the equation are modified. A process in which a new, compound, and complex reality emerges; a reality that is not a mechanical agglomeration of characters, not even a mosaic, but a new, original, and independent phenomenon.33

These new and independent phenomena are manifested in various game-playing and game design in the globally shared market for production and consumption, making the play- scape independent from territorial limits and meantime occasion for interaction of territorial differences to form new constructs. According to Epstein (2009), the “transcultural perspective opens a possibility for globalization not as homogenization but, rather, as further differentiation of cultures and their ‘dissemination’ into transcultural individuals, liberating themselves from their dependence from their native cultures.”34 In the practice of game making and playing, such individuals gain an agency by freely playing out, consciously or unconsciously, identities of one’s own or imagined cultural depositions and achieve transcendence to “no-culture” and metempsychosis of one’s own cultural identity.

Lineage, as one of the most prominent among these phenomena, is a result of multiple actors and forces. The operations of capitalist multinational business in culture-media industry increased the transit of knowledge, image, and symbolic meaning through global media-scape and facilitated the dissemination of and cooperation in technological innovation and investment. Urbanization in East-Asian megacities has seen the rise of South Korea’s massive youth leisure and entertainment scene, adding the fast diffusion of broadband service

30 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. 31 Fernando Ortiz, Los factores humanos de la cubanidad (La Habana, 1940), 98. 32 Ibid. Translated by the autor; original text in Spanish: “…un conglomerado heterogéneo de diversas razas y culturas… que se agitan, entremezclan y disgregan en un mismo bullir social…mestizaje de cocinas, mestizaje de razas, mestizaje de culturas.” 33 Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el Azúcar (Cuba, 1940). Translated by author; original text in Spanish by Malinowski: “… toda transculturación es un proceso en el cual siempre se da algo a cambio de lo que se recibe; es un «toma y daca» ..., un proceso en el cual ambas partes de la ecuación resultan modificadas. Un proceso en el cual emerge una nueva realidad, compuesta y compleja; una realidad que no es una aglomeración mecánica de caracteres, ni siquiera un mosaico, sino un fenómeno nuevo, original e independiente.” 34 Mikhail Epstein, “Transculture: A Broad Way Between Globalism and Multiculturalism,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 68 (2009): 327–51.

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and popularizing of PC as gaming terminals as results of policy-promoted infrastructural development of national broadband networks and competition among telecommunication companies. The rapid development of information technology, computer using, Internet literacy, and imported American games such as StarCraft (1998)35 all contributed to the vibrant and unique culture of Internet Café (or PC baang) and its social gaming communities, which nurtured the special leisure-sport form of competitive gaming. Besides that, the South Korean government implemented various preferential policies for the development of national games and culture industry, which attract proactive participation of international talents in the interrelated global game industry.36

Despite its trivial appearance, understanding gaming involves multidisciplinary approaches within social and humanistic sciences from visual and textual analysis to critical political economy. As Kerr states:

digital games are socially constructed artifacts that emerge from a complex process of negotiation between various human and non-human actors within the context of a particular historical formation. Digital games cannot be understood without attention to the late capitalist economic systems from which they emerge and the changing political, social and cultural contexts in which they are produced and consumed.37

In order to maximize the immersive experience and mobilize mass participation, video games require localization when exported to other countries. Some games are partially modified with regard to contents and playing modes in different regional servers. Besides the different intensity of marketing, the efforts that Lineage took to penetrate European and North American markets were very different from its strategy in East Asia, especially the domestic market of Korea. These arouse questions over the divergence of game-playing, sense of fun, aesthetic taste, and resonance for narrative and symbolic meanings beyond mere single game. It shows that, even in the networked production and shared market, the culturally mixed, business integrated, and technologically centralized sphere of video gaming, there is a diversity of cultural incentives shaped by different historical legacies, social patterns, demands, and tastes. Since programing and coding are more neutral compositions, and thus less subjected to socio-cultural divergences as other elements such as visual and narrative contents, playing, and business modes, it is these elements that bear the fundamental of cultural variables. Using the words of Jenkins: “It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.”38

For one last remark, today’s video games include complex range of numerous products, of which categorizing based on all-agreed criteria is almost impossible. For the convenience of analysis, this essay limits its scope on one specific genre of video games - the fantasy RPG and MMORPG. East Asia here is understood as both the geographic region and a cultural sphere, where societies and cultural traditions share connections within itself and are distinguished from Euro-America. One focus falls on to South Korea and its online game industry since the late 1990s, around the central figure of Lineage as one of the oldest

35 StarCraft, Blizzard Entertainment, March 31, 1998. 36 D.Y. Jin, Korea’s Online Gaming Empire (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010). 37 Aphra Kerr, The Business and Culture of Digital Games: Gamework/Gameplay (London: SAGE, 2006), 4. 38 H. Jenkins, R. Purushotma, M. Weigel, K. Clinton, & A.J. Robison, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).

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milestones of MMORPG in its short history. For the last few decades, video gaming culture, or digital playing, and its fast development has been highly fluid and interrelated, but it is also dependent on and centralized around the few focal points of technology progress and capital investment. A brief review of forerunners of game making, cultural legacies, and business practices, which introduced East Asia to digital gaming, is necessary for understanding. The global scene of video gaming might be diverse and massive, but tracing the evolutionary trajectory is not as messy as the dazzling products in the markets display, as they are ruled by a few dominating technologies and mechanisms of business in a networked production and distribution. Information, innovation, and major changes are constantly synchronized in all locations.

This article is structured as following. The first section will look back into the early history of RPG video games in East Asia for a brief orientation of its origin based on industrial cooperation between the United States and Japan, which buried the foundation for the in-betweenness and hybridity of the play-scape of digital gaming. This is to illustrate how video gaming is not a one-plus-one-equals-two cultural assembly, but an integrated and independent transcultural dynamism that involves multiple factors and interventions subjected to eternal changing and that is manifested in commodities of multinational capitalism and transnational industrial production. Clarifying this will urge a reconsideration of culture and globalization as to what extent “borders,” the artificial divisions of countries and physical locations, are valid traits and how video gaming is both a bordered and borderless cultural creation that represents the essence of globalization.

The following section will zoom in to look at Lineage. This includes a discussion over the contextualization of online gaming in Korea’s economic, political, social, and cultural circumstance in the late 1990s online game booming and its connection with the international industrial scene. This would provide a clearer and better-proofed mapping of game industry and culture for the empirical analysis of a possible lineage of cultural transmutation around a single game within the larger picture of the play-scape and its cultural variables in the line age.

The final section sets to attend to questions of a more macro level - what is the significance of the rising gaming culture, and how does the play-scape function in contemporary transcultural processes? This question is explored from the perspective of play itself. As an interactive social medium, video gaming not only transmits knowledge and communicates information top-down, but also mobilizes deep engagement and participation, accumulates and exchanges user-generated contents in uncontrolled multiple directions. This characteristic of gaming emancipates the agency of gamer/player/consumer to make them into active producers/transmitters of the next cycle of cultural production. The social significance of game playing leads to the political-economic prominence that legitimates the rising large-scaled game industry, which features gaming as an “ideal-type commodity.”39 Among these meanings rose new forms of productivity and assets such as the trendy national brand and cultural soft power.40 As Nye claims, popular behaviors could be trivial and

39 Lee, Consumer Culture Reborn. 40 Nye, Soft Power.

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kitschy, but it is also true that they who “stands astride popular channels of communication has more opportunities to get its message across” and to affect choices of others.41

A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Play-scape

This hybrid is not a space between ‘two zones of purity’ where mixing occurs, but instead is a significant point at which a global media culture is created that is unlike any national media culture in its composition. M. Consalvo (2006)42

The history of early video game making is represented by a trajectory of multi-center initiation followed by the decades-long intensive collaboration and contention between the United States and Japan.43 Predominant production companies in both hardware and software bear bloodlines of hybridization interwoven of American and Japanese influences. To take a few examples, Sega was an American-founded Japanese company. Taito was a Japanese company started on games based on George Lucas’s Star Wars film (1976) - itself a product inspired by Japanese jidaigeki (時代劇) and Akira Kurosawa’s films.44 Taito’s games were distributed by the American company Midway Media in the Japanese market. Nintendo, originally a card-toy producer in Japan, got its hand on console games through an alliance with the American pioneer Magnavox, for which it was commissioned to produce the accessory optoelectronic guns for the first video game console.45 Nintendo monopolized the U.S. console market for almost a decade after the crash of the video game market in North America in the 1980s, which caused severe damage to American leading companies. During this time, Nintendo soon established its North American company and spread the whole North American market. This sole dominance was only to be broken by the same intercontinental Japanese company Sony, producer of the PlayStation, until the mid-1990s. It was not until 2001 that American company Microsoft managed to find a way back into the “game” with Xbox. In any case, if not counting the marginal intervention of the Soviet-made Tetris (1984), it is safe to conclude that video games are a field of hybridization of especially U.S.-Japan in both technology and industry.

It is important to notice that the competition and collaboration of the Japanese and U.S. companies has greatly lowered the cost of video game production, increased the supply and variety of choices in the market, and made it almost accessible to every middle-class family in the developed countries. In this way, gaming, as the newly rising cutting-edge media type, was ready to contribute a strong boost to the later dominating global mass digital culture. With Internet, urbanization, and its accompanying lifestyle changing, digital playing has become one of the most prominent leisure forms and cultural icons after the Hollywood

41 Joseph S. Nye, Power in the Global Information Age: From Realism to Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005), 78. 42 M. Consalvo, “Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture,” New Media & Society 8 (2006): 117-37. 43 Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games; Consalvo, “Console Video Games and Global Corporations;” Martin Picard, “The Foundation of Geemu: A Brief History of Early Japanese Video Games,” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research 13 (2013). 44 Nicolas Barber, “The Film Star Wars Was Stolen From,” BBC Culture, 2016. 45 Picard, “The Foundation of Geemu.”

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movies, the red bottles of Coca-cola, and the beats of international pop music46. Different from the other more homogeneous forms of global popular culture, gaming counter-argues the notion of Americanization or cultural imperialism, for Japan had frequently taken dominance and over-competed its Western counterpart. With the dissemination of technology and improved information communication methods, game production today is one most decentralized type of industry with studios and long-distance producers located in remote corners around the globe that have enabled possibility of diverse expressions. Most globally circulated games are those neutral from certain national implications. Top lists are occupied by genres of fantasy, Sci-fi, and global adventures. The following analysis of games like Lineage also reveals the aspect of gaming as supplying to the desire of orientalising/occidentalising and consumption of imagined other cultures.

Besides its neutral content, there are indeed some “Japanese traits” noticeable in the Japanese game production. Different from the military-academic origin of video gaming in United States, the establishment and success of console game industry in Japan is based primarily on “the already well-established market of overseas collaborations in the fields of electronics, toys and public and home entertainment.”47 On top of this, the import and cloning of the first arcade and home consoles of U.S. models was quickly followed by the export of the first video games from Japan. To describe this collaborative relationship in a simple way, it was the “pioneer American video game producers” who provided technology and prototype, and Japanese “television manufacturers in home entertainment and consumer electronics corporations” who just began to divert investment to the nascent home computer industry, which helped the emergence of the “Made in Japan” home console and overall personal computer markets.48 The overseas collaboration in business and technology development played a crucial part, but equally important within Japan itself was the conditions of increased free time and disposable income and the growing demand for leisure and entertainment since the postwar high growth.49 These accumulated aspirations met with the outbreak of mass consumerism and increased possession of household electrics, including television and later personal computers, which provided the necessary hardware for the scaled development of video gaming.

In his research on Japanese media culture, Iwabuchi proposed the concept of the smell of popular culture. Unlike the American popular cultural products, which carry strong odor of “capitalist ideologies,” such as the pursuit of democracy and individual freedom, the desirable American wealth, and high quality of life, Iwabuchi claimed that the Japanese products are “culturally odorless.”50 Being concerned that a “Japaneseness” risks of reminding its East Asian neighbors of the traumatized experience of Japanese imperialism, and a racial distinction of inferiority that is connected to the postcolonial stereotyping and discrimination with regard to the Western audiences, Japan intentionally chose to hide these “bad odors” when trying to export its products. These odorless commodities included what

46 Hollywood, Coca-Cola, and Pop music are three main themes that Pop artist Andy Warhol (1928- 1987) repeatedly represented in his paintings as icons of global popular culture. 47 Picard, “The Foundation of Geemu.” 48 Picard, “The Foundation of Geemu.” 49 D.W. Plath, The After Hours: Modern Japan and the Search for Enjoyment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); S. Linhart, “Popular leisure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture, edited by Y. Sugimoto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 216-235. 50 Koichi Iwabuchi, “How ‘Japanese’ Is Pokémon?,” in Pikachu’s Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon, edited by Joseph Tobin (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 53-74.

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Iwabuchi categorized as the “three C’s”: consumer technologies, comic and cartoons, and computer and video games. A similar concept of mukokuseki (無国籍) - meaning the lack of a sense of national origin - is discussed in researches on Japanese comic and popular culture.51 Iwabuchi concluded that “Japanese goods can only sell internationally if they are scrubbed scrupulously clean of cultural association with Japan and presented as a kind of placeless, history-less, cultureless, odorless entertainment commodity.”52 In short, either for Japanese consumers to satisfy their curiosity and admiration for the then leading Western popular culture, or for the Western consumers to conceal the Japanese “racial and historical inferiority,” or for East Asian consumers to avoid the unpleasant memory of past military imperialism and animosity, one guideline for Japanese postwar products and popular culture was to internationalize with “nation-less” contents. It was under this circumstance and principle that video games like the Mario Bros. (1983), Space Invaders (1978) and Dragon Quest (1986) were produced. However, toward the peak of Japan’s postwar economic miracle, these “odorless” Japanese products became objects for investigation themselves for their “Japaneseness” represented by qualities such as hardworking, attention to detail, and efficiency. These low-cost, repetitive, and addictive games with cartoonish flat visual style started to be appreciated as a cultural niche, a counterculture besides the mainstream Western popular culture.53 Hence the supposed “odorless-ness” was in turn interpreted as part of the unique Japanese culture that adds to its soft power. The market-oriented Japanese game industry brought into the global play-scape a special “personality” that the early American military-industrial game culture did not have - it was more fun, and it was pure fun. The research of Kline et al. confirmed this input as:

It was through the Mario games that Nintendo put its unique stamp on video game culture. While many earlier and later games - from Spacewar to Doom - obviously display their deep affiliation with military-industrial culture, Mario appears to be made of different stuff, a stuff of purer playfulness, wit, and humor.54

Yet, it would be too single-faceted to draw conclusions from the industrial and economic aspects alone. So far, this essay has largely treated video games as a commodity of the popular entertainment industry, but the lineage will be incomplete if the essential intellectual inputs and cultural contents are ignored. Games are to be played, and playing is a highly social activity based on shared knowledge of symbolic meaning and cultural legacy, complex psychological mechanisms of excitement, emotion, satisfaction, and resonance. No matter how massively and repetitively produced on the assemble lines of standard industrial networks, digital games cannot not be made out of cultural void. They are not played for the codes that lay the base of their digital existence, or the revenue they generate in the market. The industry and big company producers might impose ideological filters from the top-down and shape gaming through capitalist efficiency. But equally important are the “decoding” and “recoding” forces of individual producers, consumers, and other participants that bring

51 Patrick Macias & Tomohiro Machiyama, Cruising the Animé City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2004); Susan Napier, Animé: From Akira to Princess Mononoke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 52 Iwabuchi, “How ‘Japanese’ Is Pokémon?,” 53-74. 53 Reference to the notion of Japanese postwar popular culture as counterculture and cultural niche both dependent and opposite to Western popular culture could be found in the Superflat artworks and theoretical discourse of Murakami Takashi (2005). 54 Kline, Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, Digital Play, 118.

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changes and innovation from the bottom-up. From this aspect, play and cultural contents are important agencies that shape gaming from beyond the industrial-economic scopes.

In the world of fantasy RPG, although stories always begins with the normative “long, long ago and far, far away,” the invention of this fiction genre is quite recent. It is to the 1954’s novel Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien that developers of the D&D55 games and fantasy world settings in the American company of TSR, Inc. pay their tributes. As a hobby- driven writer of children’s literature, Tolkien collected various elements and expressions from medieval European legends, fairytales, and folklore stories for the construction of his imagined world of Middle Earth. Writings of this British writer provided the foundation and prototype of narrative for fantasy RPG. By employing the quality-point calculation method and turn-based battle structure of early board war-games, and narratives modified from the Tolkien novels, D&D table-top games swept America and Western Europe in the 1970s before digital technology had reached such sophistication to simulate these games on the computer. Basing on fantasy narratives has always been a tradition since the birth of RPG video games. Although diverse sub-genres could be spotted in the market, ranging from the Sci-Fi, cyberpunk, steam punk, space opera, alternate history to oriental fantasy (wuxia 武 侠), and many others, the core cultural elements always involve the 3Ms: Myth, Magic and Medievalism in different forms. The vision to conquer and replicate the fantastic world of human imagination through computer technology motivated early game developers, who were unsurprisingly university students, young technicians, popular fiction writers, film directors, and devoted D&D players, to devote time and efforts voluntarily to the invention and advancement of RPG video games. It was this hobby activity that opened the gate to the limitless potential of a digital virtual universe that integrated worlds of machine calculation, storytelling, play, music and visual arts into one behind the computer screens.

The history of fantasy RPG could be seen as a history of forever struggle for finding the best solution from what machine calculation has in its depository - electronic engineering, coding, graphic design, and multimedia storytelling - to match human imagination. These early video games were not considered seriously until the 1980s. The first computer D&D games that were able to offer color graphics was the Wizardry series56 and Ultima series,57 both released in 1981. These two games dominated the nascent market of computer RPG in the 1980s. Their impact was reflected through advertisements of other games, which promoted themselves as “games to play while you wait for the next Ultima or Wizardry.”58 By the end of the 1990s, RPG video games fully flourished when the American Studio Black Isle published the series Baldur’s Gate59 and Icewind Dale,60 which were both based on the

55 Dragons and Dungeons is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game and gaming rule system, first published in 1974. 56 Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, Wizardry series, Sir-Tech, Role-playing video game, Single player, 1981. 57 Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, Ultima series, Role-playing video game, Single player, published by Origin System, 1981. 58 Jimmy Maher, “Of Wizards and Bards,” The Digital Antiquarian, 2014. 59 Baldur’s Gate, BioWare, Role-playing video game, Single or multiple player, published by Black Isle Studios, Baldur’s Gate series, 1998. 60 Icewind Dale, Black Isle Studios, Role-playing video game, Single or multiple player, published by Interplay Entertainment, Icewind Dale series, 2000.

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2nd Edition Advanced D&D rules61 with the virtual universe of the Forgotten Realms62 - one of the most popular RPG world-settings that TSR had released long before the maturity of computer RPG.

Among TSR’s RPG games was the 1980’s Dragon Quest.63 Using a similar game structure, rules system, cultural contents, and even the same title, Japanese company Enix (later Square Enix) created Dragon Quest64 on home console. This first Japanese fantasy RPG is crucially important for the transmission of Western high fantasy gaming in East Asia. Technically, DQ has combined the overhead movement and full-screen map of Ultima with the first-person perspective and the random battle system of Wizardry.65 Thematically and stylistically, DQ is structured around the storytelling of typical D&D medieval European adventure, where a lone knight is commissioned to retrieve a sacred artifact, on the way to which he fights legendary monsters and kills a dragon, improves skills and weapons, and saves a princess. Although it was the most sophisticated RPG the game console market had ever seen at that time, DQ 1986 received criticism as the story was quite simple and cliché compared to the Western games, where RPG has had a long tradition, and the graphic was described as being static and dull. Dragon Quest 1986 represented a cheap and clumsy copy of the American computer RPG and never received the same phenomenal popularity in the United States as in Japan and Korea. As admitted many times by Horii Yuji, designer of DQ, the inspiration for Dragon Quest in many aspects came from the American pioneering Ultima and Wizardry.66

As the first RPG video game in East Asia that is in many aspects different from its American predecessors, DQ contains points worthy to note that help the understanding of the play-scape of transculturation through gaming. Firstly, DQ was developed for the home console instead of the computer like its American predecessors. It is acknowledged that the motivation behind the creation of DQ was to introduce the concept of D&D gaming, which Horii Yuji had encountered during a visit to the AppleFest ’83 in San Francisco, represented then by the two gaming giants Wizardry and Ultima, to the mass Japanese audiences. According to advertisement flyers of the 1980s, the price of a decent PC in Japan in the 1980s could range from around ¥99800 (worth ¥123,112=$1131 in 2019 after adjusting for inflation) to ¥355,000 (¥437,923=$4024 in 2019). The higher range is similar to the monthly income of a regular employee in Tokyo in the 1980s, and much higher than other prefectures.67 It could be assumed that not so many of these targeted Japanese mass audiences would have possessed a high-performance home PC for sophisticated RPG game-playing. On the other hand, as mentioned in the former sections, home consoles were Japan’s pillar estate

61 TSR, Inc., Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, Player’s Handbook (New York: Random House, 1989). 62 Ed Greenwood, Jeff Grubb, & Karen S. Boomgarden, DM’s Sourcebook of the Realms (New York: Random House, 1987). 63 Dragon Quest was originally published by Simulations Publications, Inc., which was later purchased by TSR. Inc. 64 Hereafter as DQ: Dragon Quest ドラゴンクエスト, Square Enix, Home console video game, Dragon Quest series, 1986. 65 Kurt Kalata, “The History of Dragon Quest,” 2008. 66 Horii Yuji, as quoted in Jason Cipriano, “Dragon Quest Creator Sheds Light,” 2010. 67 Data from 19-41 Average Monthly Earnings of Regular Employees by Prefectures (Establishments with 30 or more Employees) (1955-2005), Historical Statistics of Japan, Labour and Wages, Statistics Bureau of Japan.

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in the global game market since before 1983. It was natural for Horii Yuji to find an ideal solution in Nintendo’s NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) game console. While in the Western markets, the early computer RPG players were mostly college students, IT technicians, and creative professionals; for these consumers, the lighthearted home game console is a childish-teenager activity.

The second input was from visual aspect. The graphic design of DQ added to the impression of this childishness among the American players who were cultivated by the more mature-looking, sophisticated drawing styles of the D&D table games, fantasy illustrations and adventure comics from pre-PC era. In Japan, Toriyama Akira, the distinguished manga artist and author of the Dragon Ball (1984),68 was commissioned to design the graphics for DQ. Toriyama’s design provided the characters of DQ a Japanese comic cuteness, featured by huge watery eyes and mouths, cartoonish round figures, and vivid, exaggerated facial expressions. The dislocation of consumer target is even more obvious considering the Disney root of the Japanese comic itself.69 The Slime, for instance, a monster character of DQ, was based on the Slime monster of 1974’s TSR D&D setting. While the original D&D Slime was, according to descriptions in the TSR settings, a patch of horrible, smelly, sticky green moss found on the walls and ceilings of underground environments, the DQ Slime was, surprisingly, a cute smiling blue drop of water that looks more like an innocent pudding- child.

There are, of course, much deeper social and cultural reasons behind these visual distinctions, which are related to the perception and attitude toward digital gaming, the social context of playing, sensation of fun, and entertainment of that time. What is also worthy to note is that the tradition of employing professionals from the industrial sectors of already established popular entertainment of youth comics has laid the foundation for the Japanese game industry since the beginning. RPG, originally an appropriation of British literature based on European Anglo-Saxon medieval folklore and adventure story-telling, adopted by American hobby gamers to create the D&D, finally travelled to the Far East, where gamers had been looking at the Western world with both admiration and ambition. To some extent, DQ has marked the transformation of the sub-cultural RPG gaming initiated by the hobby- driven niche into a mainstream family entertainment. The characteristics that made DQ possible and popular could not be concluded as mere hybridization, localization, or diffusion of knowledge and technology from the center to the periphery, but a complex process of cultural negotiation back-and-forwardly across different cultural and social contexts. If this is at the same time both and neither global and/or local, Western and/or Eastern, how to comprehend this dynamism of the newly formed play-scape?

Stuart Hall (1995) has defined globalization as:

the process by which the relatively separate areas of the globe come to intersect in a single imaginary ‘space’; when their respective histories are convened in a time-zone or time-frame dominated by the time of the West; when the sharp boundaries reinforced by space and distance are bridged by connections (travel, trade, conquest,

68 Toriyama Akira 鳥山 明 Dragon Ball ドラゴンボール (manga), Shueisha, 1984-present. 69 Ian Condry, The Soul of Animé: Collaborative Creativity and Japan's Media Success Story (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

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colonization, markets, capital and the flows of labor, goods and profits) which gradually eroded the clear-cut distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.70

Ang and Stratton continued to argue that we have come to live in “a world where all cultures are both (like) ‘us’ and not (like) ‘us’.”71 In this world, “familiar difference and bizarre sameness are simultaneously articulated in multiple ways through the unpredictable dynamic of uneven global cultural encounters,”72 and cultural production is no longer clearly located within the boundaries of countries or nations, but follow complex “intraregional flows.”73 Globalization is itself a discursive construct and ongoing process, where the global and the local are continuously negotiating, reshaping, and transforming each other. Video gaming is product of the global in all aspects of industry, business, technology, and media, but it is meantime played, perceived, interpreted, produced, and reproduced by people in the physical spaces of multiple localities. This dynamic and interactive process of mystification between the local and the global, self and other, native and foreign is negotiated within different geographic and temporal contexts.

Instead of imposing the heavily unifying and value-laden models of “center- periphery,” the reality of the developmental trajectory of the play-scape in the late twentieth century, referring to Homi Bhabha’s notion, has continuously extended the concept of hybridity beyond the postcolonial paradigm to a mode of multiple participation of dispersed centers in a space of “in-betweenness”:

What is theoretically innovative and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of original and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences… It is in the emergence of the interstices - the overlap and displacement of domains of difference - that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated.74

In this sense, the coexistence of globality and locality in video gaming could be understood as product of the negotiation between the overlapping and displacement of different inter-subjectivities and collective experiences, integrated through the mechanism of global industrial network and business practices, and based on the cultural flows of overlapped technology and the media-scape.75 The participating factors in gaming - the military-academic investment, the hobby-driven coders, the Tolkien and D&D fans, the intercontinental technology and media companies, the popular culture and international mass media, and the policies that intended to brand nations, communicate ideologies, and export products - all brought in different agencies into this play-scape and co-created the gaming

70 Stuart Hall, “New Cultures for Old,” in A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, edited by Doreen Massey & Pat Jess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 190. 71 Ien Ang & Jon Stratton, “Asianising Australia: Notes toward a Critical Transnationalism in Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 10 (1996): 16–36. 72 Koichi Iwabuchi, “Discrepant Intimacy: Popular Culture Flows in East Asia,” in Asian Media Studies: Politics of Subjectivities, edited by John Nguyet Erni & Siew Keng Chua (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 20. 73 Koichi Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 74 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 2. 75 Appadurai, Modernity at Large.

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scene. This trans-bordering space is built on conditions of a maturely developed mass consumer market, the increased leisure and buying power of society, the free flow of goods and ideas through trade and communication, a shared global media culture, and, of course, the changed lifestyle and attitude toward hedonism and entertainment that is promoted by the need of capitalist growth. To this point, one might easily recall the notion of Culture Industry = “culture monopoly.”76 But it is also important to notice that the different media today, especially the digital play, has enabled and emancipated imagination and expression of not only large capitalist producers but also diverse individuals, carving out a new space for multi- directional communication, interaction, and participation. After all, games only create meaning when they are played, and players get to decide what is fun. This was before the World Wide Web was employed for gaming, which greatly enhanced such capacity.

The Lineage of Line Age

When it comes to gaming, Korea is the developed market, and it’s the rest of the world that’s playing catch-up. When you look at gaming around the world, Korea is the leader in many ways. It just occupies a different place in the culture there than anywhere else. Rich Wickham, global head of Microsoft Windows game business77

Video games have a special status in South Korea. Seth Schiesel once described Korea as home to the world’s most advanced video gaming culture. According to Schiesel, there were more than 20,000 public PC rooms, or Internet Cafés, “PC baangs” as they are called in Korea, which attract more than a million of the total 50 million people. Contests of video games are broadcasted on full-time TV channels as top sports events.78 The related gambling business surrounding “e-sport” led to scandals that hit national headlines.79 The country’s federal Ministry of Culture and Tourism has established a Game Development Institute. Supported by data from OECD80, Schiesel highlighted the infrastructure that facilitated the gaming culture. Korea had 25.4 broadband subscription per 100 residents at the end of 2005, ranked second after Iceland (26.7) - home to EVE Online (2003),81 another world’s top MMORPG - far ahead of the 16.8 in the United States. Even so, the idea of gaming alone at home does not seem to be a choice for Koreans, for whom going to PC baangs and gaming together is a casual social activity like going to bars or movies. The scene is only comparable to the pre-1980s America or Japan before game arcades vanished from the public space under the strike of home consoles.

76 Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, & Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 77 Seth Schiesel, “The Land of the Video Geek,” The New York Times, 2006. 78 Schiesel, “The Land of the Video Geek.” 79 Si-Soo Park, “StarCraft players indicted for game fixing,” The Korea Times, 2010. 80 OECD: Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. 81 Eve Online, CCP Games, MMORPG, 2003.

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But for 21st century’s Korea, it is more a cultural phenomenon than the availability of choices. On the one hand, with the hardware of PC instead of arcades or game consoles, digital gaming in Korea acquired more serious consideration that related it to working, studying, and the national promoted information economy. Woo Jong-Sik, president of the Korean Game Development and Promotion Institute, explained it from the social aspect: “For us, playing with and against other people is much more interesting than just playing alone against a computer.”82

It is not known exactly how competitive gaming was established in Korea as a sport, but Korean players believe that, just as people have to exercise their body, games are to exercise their brain.83 On the other hand, it could be at least confirmed that the stardom of professional gamers and fandom in the national gaming culture is fueled by the media industry altogether. With TV channels devoted to full-time broadcasting of game-playing, Korean media has managed to turn gamers into public celebrities and nurtured a massive audience whose passion for the dissemination of gaming knowledge is indefatigable.

Video gaming in Korea developed based on a tight connection with that of Japan. Since the early 1980s, Korea started to import games, machines, and technology from Japan.84 A game boom, especially in the sector of online gaming, appeared in the end 1990s and beginning of the 2000s. Although the status of Japan in home console is not to be shaken, Korea carved out a special area on the canon of global gaming industry as the world’s largest online game market in 2002. The online game industry in Korea continues to receive support from extensive government intervention and preferential cultural industry policies.85 Based on data from the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in China (2004), Chan has brought into attention the dominant role of Korean online games played in East Asia - with three titles including the Lineage, Korean games took up more than 70% of the mainland China online game market and 65% of that of Taiwan. The infrastructural factors are also discussed in Yoshimatsu’s report86 - namely the expansion of national broadband infrastructure since 1995 and the development of Internet PC game rooms. Many other policies and legislation were also enacted to promote and foster a game industry especially during 1997-98’s Asian financial crisis, with the expectation to transfer the driving force of economic growth into information technology and culture industry. As before mentioned, video games in Korea favored PC rather than game console. It was not only because consoles were limited in importation due to their Japanese origin,87 but also because pure gaming electronics are resisted by Korean families with children whose focus are on study rather than gaming. PC computers were not gaming machines, nor were PC games considered pure games.

82 Woo, as quoted in Schiesel, “The Land of the Video Geek.” 83 Chan, as quoted in Schiesel, “The Land of the Video Geek.” 84 Hidetaka Yoshimatsu, “The State and Industrial Evolution: The Development of the Game Industry in Japan and Korea,” Pacific Focus XX (2005): 135-178. 85 Dean Chan, “Negotiating Online Computer Games in East Asia: Manufacturing Asian MMORPGs and Marketing “Asianess,” in Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games without Frontiers, War without Tears, edited by Andreas Jahn-Sudmann & Ralf Stockmann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 86 Yoshimatsu, “The State and Industrial Evolution,” 135-178. 87 Jin, D.Y. Korea’s Online Gaming Empire.

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It was under these circumstances that Lineage was released in 1998, not as Korea’s first, but as surely the most important MMORPG that was born in the age of its game boom. As before mentioned, Lineage inherited features of the traditional Western fantasy D&D RPG, especially the addictive dungeon prototype of Nethack (1987),88 which had motivated the founding of NCsoft itself.89 A glimpse of the visual style of Lineage reminds the viewer of the America made Ultima Online, released one year before in 1997, an online sequel of the Ultima (1981)90 RPG series, which served the prototype for the Japanese Dragon Quest (1986). Like his Japanese predecessors, when Song Jae-kyeong, Lineage’s designer, planned to build his ambitious game world, he looked to the Western fantasy D&D games. The result turned out to be a game made in Korea, by Korean, for Koreans, that is filled with European medieval castles and costumes, knights and wizards, magic and spells, dragons and dungeons, princes and priests. The character points and battle calculation playing rules was based strictly on D&D gaming rules. But it was not only so. To the surprise of anyone who could easily draw the conclusion that this is yet another copy of the already established D&D RPG, Lineage was molded by a Korean comic. It was a series comic book of the same name (Riniji 리니지 in Korean) by Shin Il-sook (申一淑) that gave the game its title, world setting, and narrative. According to the book’s advertising, this comic tells the story of the Prince of Aden, who was exiled from his home kingdom and sought to revenge to take the throne back from his stepfather King.91 Despite its similarity to Hamlet or a cliché European medieval tale, the visual quality of the comic is reminiscent of that of a Japanese manga. In any case, the comic Lineage fueled the most successful online game as its source of inspiration, supplied to the game’s world setting and narrative contents, maybe even some of its visual prototypes.

In addition, the game has been constantly expanding the universe after initial launch. The original world of Aden is supplemented by two other kingdoms, which were only marginally mentioned in the comic, making it a three-kingdom structure. A religious system was adopted, based on a Genesis of two gods, one of light (symbolic of construction/life/female) and one of darkness (symbolic of destruction/death/male), which resembles both Zoroastrianism and the Chinese Yin-Yang duality. A Greek element could be perceived when the two gods gave birth to five children, who were assigned as gods in charge of different elements (water, fire, earth, and wind, and the youngest goddess was left with no element, so she was in charge of art and poetry). The gods then created the four major races (elf, orc, dwarf, and arteia). The mother goddess also gave birth to the Giants (or Titans) who then enslaved all other creatures. Because the father god of destruction did not get to create anything, he decided to steal the leftover elementary materials, mixed them together, and created the human, which had elements of all but of inferior qualities, adding a Christian touch of the original sin to the human race. Envy possessed the father god and led him to seduce his children into a war, which caused a flood that destroyed the world and ended the age of the gods. From this point, the narrative turned to less of a myth and instead a history of the mortal races and the rise of the human kingdoms. The human grew strong and reproduced many, and they became arrogant as to challenge the gods. Elmoreden became the first human

88 Nethack, The NetHack Development Team, Single player RPG/roguelike game, 1987. 89 Tack Jin Kim, “Interview: NCsoft's TJ Kim builds an online giant.” 90 Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, Ultima series, Role-playing video game, Single player, Published by origin System, 1981. 91 Shin Il-Sook 申一淑, Lineage 리니지 (Manga), Daiwon, 1993-1996.

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empire to be unified, and, after a thousand years, it rose to be the strongest on earth. So the king decided to build a tower to reach the gods. This could resemble either the Babel or the pursuit for eternity in Oriental beliefs. These acts angered the gods who eventually destroyed the tower, while the king was trapped on the top of his own tower and acquired, in an ironical sense, eternity. The great empire clashed into small kingdoms among which rose the three where the game begins.92 If until here, the narrative does not resemble the Bible too much, perhaps more obvious are the fragments of Greek, Nordic, and even Chinese mythologies and histories that were woven into the Tolkien-ish and D&D storytelling with a touch of Oriental worldview about pre-assigned destiny.

Except that, Lineage was also different from its American predecessors in that it emphasizes heavily on player-versus-player combat as the core of game playing. This might be a feature to appeal to Korea’s competitive gaming culture. Following the narrative line, players get together to fight against other groups of players in a virtual castle siege. Different groups - the “blood pledges” - are led by player-characters of the Prince/Princess class. The blood pledge system shares some similarities to the guilds system of World of Warcraft, except that, in the latter, anyone can create a guild, but, in Lineage, the social hierarchy is strictly fixed the moment when the character is being created. For a player who did not choose to be a “born leader,” they will have to choose to join a “blood pledge” to fight under the leadership of a certain Prince. But such unconditional loyalty and high level of compliance with discipline is not necessarily a “Confucian East Asian trait” like Herz93 argued. Lineage was primarily a romanticized popular imagination about medieval Europe, of which notions of loyalty and aristocracy have been admired, reinterpreted, and reinvented in East Asia through an Occidentalized gaze on different medias from classical novels to Disney cartoons.

The differences between Lineage and Western games are carved out from the average socio-culture of playing as “typically Korean”:

What makes Lineage a distinctly Korean experience is that when players assemble to take down a castle, they do so in person, commandeering a local PC baang for as long as it takes. In the middle of a battle, these people aren’t just text-chatting. They’re yelling across the room. Platoons sit at adjacent computers, coordinating among themselves and taking orders from the Blood Pledge leader.94

Such consensus is also found in Jin’s writings, in which she argues Lineage as a “contra-flow” in globalization.95 According to Jin, Lineage is a game “that clearly understands the nature of Koreans” and “integrated with Korean nature,” represented by its “community-based” features, the Player-versus-player play mode, and “appeal to Korean values, which emphasize solidarity, affiliation, and family matters.”96 These characteristics are viewed by Jin as a hybridization between global RPG storylines with Korean or East Asian “mentality.” In addition, Jin also highlights the innovation of Lineage in aspects of

92 Lineage, NCsoft, MMORPG, Lineage series, 1998; Lineage II, NCsoft, MMORPG, Lineage series, 2003. 93 J.C. Herz, “The Bandwidth Capital of the World,” 2002. 94 Herz, “The Bandwidth Capital of the World.” 95 Jin, Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, 127. 96 Jin, Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, 130.

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storytelling and interactivity.97 In its latter global expansions, Lineage II employed the strategy of localization using local development teams and distribution agents. In order to compete in the American game market, NcSoft “adopted American game style” by shifting from the cultural heritage of “Confucian hierarchy” and solidarity to “a hero-king Lone Ranger.”98 Although such superficial division between “Korean” and “American mentality” requires critical assessment, Lineage’s strategy did work to make it one of the world’s most popular online games. Its design, social, and commercial patterns are adopted by latter products in the game industry worldwide. This proves again that contents of games, be it technological, commercial, cultural, narrative, or artistic, are but vessels and media that constituted the global play-scape of culture flows. What incubates transformation and transcendence is the act of play itself and various motives that are generated by it and serves to its need. This process is not homogenous nor even, but unpredictable and in flux depending on slightest sociocultural variables, and therefore it buries the potential of centralized dissemination of global video gaming toward diversification and records of social and cultural formations of its time and space.

Besides that, Korean online games are charged on hourly or monthly bases with prepaid credits. This method relieved the threat of software piracy, making them especially profitable in the piracy overflowing Chinese game market. Lineage, together with other two Korean titles - MU Online (2001)99 and The Legend of Mir 2 (2001)100 - constituted the earliest memory of Chinese online games. The Legend of Mir 2, which featured a world setting of Oriental fantasy of wuxia (or martial art masters), and the character class of warrior, wizard, and Taoist, had immediately attracted 70 million subscribers after its launching in China and became the prototype of clone for most Chinese online games. For the first time, the Western oriented D&D RPG embraced the Eastern fantasy culture. At that time, the Chinese video game market was just emerging.

The Political Economy of Gaming

I can’t wait for Tokyo 2020, the SuperMariOlympics! The Guardian, August 2016

On the closing ceremony of 2016 Olympic Games, Abe Shinzo, the prime minister of Japan, dressed himself in the Mario outfit and came out from a green pipe appeared in the middle of the venue. Up until then, the Cool Japan, Japan’s central political strategy for the promotion of economy and international relations through cultural soft power, has been going on for years. In a deeper analysis of Japan’s policy approach regarding its massive youth popular culture industry, Iwabuchi employed a similar term as “brand nationalism”.101 Now both South Korea and China have set its own vision of cultural soft power, expecting to strengthen the nation and its international competitiveness through branded popular culture and consumer entertainment products and services. During the last few years, the Chinese “red capital” has tensed nerves of American film industry and raised debates in both

97 Jin, Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, 132. 98 Jin, Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, 134-136. 99 Mu Online, Webzen, MMORPG, 2001. 100 The Legend of Mir 2, WeMade Entertainment, MMORPG, 2001. 101 K. Iwabuchi, “Undoing International Fandom in the Age of Brand Nationalism,” Mechademia 5 (2010): 87-96.

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economic and academic spheres.102 It has come to an age when Japanese comic and Korean online games are to cast the same, if not more, influential power on the global political economic scene as had Disneyland and Hollywood, though the ways how these different media function and interact with the rest of society and culture is divergent and require detailed examination respectively.

In order to understand why a “SuperMariOlympics” makes sense, perhaps it is first to resolve the myth of what is gaming and the significance of play. Classical theories have defined play as unproductive, according to Huizinga in Homo Ludens,103 voluntary activities with fixed rules that create a special order residing outside the ordinary pattern of life. It is absorbing, with its own sense of space and time, and is not connected to the achieving of any interest.104 Based on Huizinga’s claim that culture arises in the form of play, the intrinsic playfulness and ludic experience are to be found in every manifestation of serious culture:

Play is simultaneously freedom and invention, fantasy and discipline. All the important manifestations of culture are derived from it. They are indebted to the spirit of research, to the respect for rules, to the detachment that it creates and maintains. (…) They constitute conventions that must be respected in a determined domain where they establish nothing less than civilization itself.105

As a response to Homo Ludens, Caillois stated that “play is coessential to the culture.” This notion is based on the principle that play and culture are basically the “simultaneous presence of two different ranges of activity.” The structure of gaming is being built into the institutions of serious culture, but gaming happens only in their own space and time separated and isolated from “the solidity and continuity of collective and institutional life.”106 This essential unproductivity is found in Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games,107 where he began with the notion that play creates no wealth and ends as it begins, “… it is an occasion of pure waste.”

It seems all the social, economic, and political significance of gaming, which undoubtedly exists, could only be discussed external to play, for play is the initially intrinsic desire that is buried in animal nature, unstoppable forces behind the pursuit for “non- interested” fun. But play could also be the interest-laden focal point, once exploitation of the illusions engendered by play comes in. Gambling, for instance, as a game of chance, does not create anything but merely “transfer the wealth.” However, the expectation it engenders is quite real.108 Gaming creates various illusions: agon - the desire and effort for victory; alea - the trust in destiny; mimicry - the fantasy of being something else; ilinx - the excitement of physical dizziness. Caillois referred to these illusions as experiences of confusion. From the perspective of sociology, he further exemplified the institutionalization of the gaming of chance (Alea) into gambling and lotteries, which corrupts ethics of the working class, seducing them from hard work to rely on superstition and witchcraft for power and luck, in

102 Jackie Northam, “Chinese Mogul Buys Dick Clark Productions, His Latest U.S. Purchase,” 2016. 103 Huizinga, Homo Ludens. 104 Huizinga, Homo Ludens. According to Huizinga, interests are external to play. 105 R. Caillois, “Unity of Play: Diversity of Games,” Diogenes 5 (1957): 92-121. 106 R. Caillois, “Unity of Play: Diversity of Games;” Roger Caillois & Meyer Barash, Man, Play, and Games (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 107 Caillois & Barash, Man, Play, and Games. 108 R. Caillois, “Unity of Play: Diversity of Games.”

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hope to improve their conditions to unrealistic luxury, thus engendering laziness, fatalism, and superstition.109 This is not coincidence, in his famous painting the Garden of Earthly Delights (1515), the 16th century painter Hieronymus Bosch had located all gaming scenes, which include gambling, performance, and music playing, in the section of the Hell. Gaming, driven by the ludic instinct and intrinsic desire to play, as it is in all other manifestations of culture, with its power to seduce the human race to the Hell, could be overwhelmingly “productive” when institutionalized for external interests.

The experience of video gaming, especially after it has penetrated the Internet and the instant mobile digital space, resembles a form of hyperreality – “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.”110 The production and consumption of game’s symbolic contents is “so real” that makes it “hard to tell where your living room ends and the software begins.”111 Video gaming is hyperreal not only for its virtual digital and imagery nature, or its existence as commodity in the consumer market, but also the very essence of gaming is hyperreal according to Caillois’s discussion. In his book Digital Play, Kline, borrowing Lee’s theory of the “ideal-type commodity form,”112 further argues that “interactive game can be seen as an ideal-type commodity exemplifying the current phase of capitalist market relations, which maintains growth through the integrated management of technological innovation, cultural creativity, and mediated marketing.” This characteristic of gaming embodies its “most powerful economic, social, and cultural tendencies.”113

In a similar sense, Kline relates the video game industry to Michel Aglietta’s proposed “neo-Fordism,”114 arguing that video gaming represents a mode of “information production” from the assembly line composed with computer systems and segmented labor forces for the demand of a more customized market, which speculated the epoch of capitalism’s development transferring to rely on the sectors of media and information in the context of a postmodern culture. This reflects and eventually leads to what Morris-Suzuki115 termed as the “perpetual innovation economy” of the “information capitalism”:

…in the manufacturing process itself, firms are forced to enter a state of perpetual technological innovation (…) in order to remain competitive. (…) In high-technology fields, perpetual innovation is characterized by short product cycles - the time it takes from the launch of a new product to the point where it becomes obsolete and production ceases.116

And what other resources could be better to exploit than the unlimited human imagination and the primordial desire for ludic confusion and instinct to play, to fuel the perpetual innovation of such information capitalism? Looking at all the top lists of cultural

109 R. Caillois, “Unity of Play: Diversity of Games.” 110 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. 111 David Brown, Cybertrends: Chaos, Power, and Accountability in the Information Age (London: Penguin Books, 1997). 112 Lee, Consumer Culture Reborn. 113 Kline, Dyer-Witheford, & de Peuter, Digital Play, 29. 114 Michel Aglietta & David Fernbach, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (New York: Verso, 2000). 115 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Beyond Computopia: Information, Automation, and Democracy in Japan,” 1988. 116 A. Kundnani, “Where Do You Want to Go Today?”

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commodities of fictions, films, shows, dramas, and games, the fantasy-bombarded media and entertainment culture might be a best testimony.

It is not necessarily in the postmodern cultural and social context that gaming suddenly became prominent as a pervasive way of life and large-scale industry. But postmodernism has indeed contributed to freeing gaming from its long established negative socio-cultural embodiment to positive aspirations of contemporary life manifested as leisure, sports, and creativity. The new pattern of capitalist production’s ruling and exploitation is ready to employ gaming for more productivity, which prime ministers and common audiences celebrate alike. From all possible choices that could represent Japan with more “culturally pure” and “authentic” expressions, the selection of Super Mario was not only because of its ludic consensus with the Olympic Games itself or the historical significance related to the memory of Japan’s economic miracle. More importantly, it represents a symbolic value of Japan’s ongoing and near future vision and ambition - the revival of a Cool Japan through cultural contents.

As the late comer in this industry and expected to be the world’s largest market of video games in both production and consumption, China has been acquainted with both Japanese popular culture and Korean online games since its initial exposure to contemporary global media and entertainment. Today, China is home to the largest gaming companies in the world.117 Several Chinese Internet tycoons, determined to conquer the promising gaming world, are competing for capital, talent, and market share. The preference and habits of Chinese players have become hot topics that continually bother Chinese as well as international game-makers. In between the binary poles of World of Warcraft among other Euro-American games, and Lineage among other East Asian games, which have been dominating the Chinese gaming scene since its establishing days, up rose the “made in China” games that intend to take advantage of the experiences of both the West and the East with an ambition larger than any. Games like Fantasy Westward Journey (夢幻西游),118 based on the classical Chinese medieval fantasy fiction Journey to the West (16th century), attracted 310 million registered players until 2015119 and ranked the most popular MMORPG in China with a revenue of $400 million in 2009. This number is followed by the $300 million of another Chinese medieval fantasy featured Perfect World (完美世界)120. Yet, with the accumulated capital and confidence, Chinese gamers are not always satisfied with clones of superficially imagined “Chinese culture.” The flooding “Oriental fantasy” has ruined the quality standard of fictional works with overflowing pre-modern elements and ludic seduction that raised new concerns for “nihility of culture and history” from the central government.121 Following the trajectory of Japan and Korea, Chinese gaming intends to go international.

117 Rita Liao, “China to lose top spot to US in 2019 gaming market,” 2019. 118 Fantasy Westward Journey, NetEase, MMORPG, 2001. 119 See report “Success of Fantasy Westward Journey Reinforces NetEase's Position as China’s Leading Game Company,” 2016. 120 Perfect World, Beijing Perfect World, MMORPG, 2005; see Top Moneymaking Online Games of 2009. 121 Jinping Xi, 习 近平, quoted in Chairman of P.R. China Xi’s Speech in the 10th Representative Conference of National Literature and Arts Association, Xin Hua News, 文艺同国家和民族紧紧维 系才能振聋发聩—习近平总书记在文联十大、作协九大开幕式上的重要讲话持续引发热烈反 响. 新华社.

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The 2016 released mobile online game Onmyoji by NetEase immediately hit the “Top Grossing” chart on iOS and surpassed over 10 million downloads in less than one month.122 As shown in its title, Onmyoji (陰陽師) is molded completely on the Japanese medieval esoteric cosmology of Shintoism culture and its popular reinventions in the 2001’s film, comic and novel series since 1988.123 The graphic design of this game featured Japanese animation, which enjoys a wide consumer base among Chinese children and adults. Still, it would be inadequate to attribute Onmyoji’s success to merely a pan-East Asian cultural intimacy and shared nostalgia; at the same time, NetEase has been working on the development of a European medieval fantasy epic MMORPG Epic of Tiara, whose trailer is reminiscent of the opening theme of the trendy American TV drama Game of Thrones.124 According to an interview with the producer, the developing team has been carefully studying not only games of World of Warcraft and Lineage, but also narratives of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the general history of European antiquity and major religions. A casual debate going among the visual designers and artists was accusing each other for being “too Korean” or “too Euro-American.”125 With a confidence based on abundant resources including financial investment and distribution channels from large Internet companies and the world’s biggest consumer market, what these young gamers of China - all born after the 1980s - have in mind is a game that resembles neither Korean nor American, but a gaming world of its own type that would exceed both. However, as the gaming industry grows, the central government has also been tightening its rein of ideological control.126 China might be ambitious with building cultural influences and leading the information industry, but games are not only created by technology or business.

Conclusion

I believe that the future of the Internet is on the entertaining side, not just on the information side… in the games industry, I think we are at the front of the arrival of something new, which will make normal people enjoy gaming… I think in the near future, in three years, a real gaming era will arrive in the online market. So... Who knows? I don’t know. Tack Jin Kim, the founder, president and CEO of NCsoft, 2005127

In about half a century, the lineage of video gaming moved back and forth along the entangled cultural flows of globalization in an age when all technology, media, image, narrative, ideology, belief, knowledge, imagination, and people themselves have been

122 See “Onmyoji Has Swept the Chinese Mobile Game Market; and It’s Coming Worldwide,” 2016. 123 Yumemakura Baku 夢枕 獏, Onmyōji (novel series), Bungeishunju, 1988-present; Okano Reiko 岡野 玲子, Onmyōji (manga), Hakusensha, 1993-present; Takita Yōjirō 滝田 洋二郎, Onmyoji (film), Toho, 2001 (Japan). 124 See “Epic of Tiara.” 125 Interview with the producer and art director, conducted by the author in November 2016. 126 “Bloomberg News: China Freezes Game Approvals amid Agency Shakeup,” 2018. 127 Kim, “Interview: NCsoft's TJ Kim builds an online giant.”

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launched and made accessible “online.” Video games, originally an imported commodity from the West, have penetrated East Asian culture and constructed new spaces of hybridization beyond the West and the East. The consequence of cultural globalization as reflected in the play-scape of video games displayed patterns of not homogenization and monopoly but a diversification that responded to Cowen’s theory on the operative diversity128 that is based on different economic and political motives behind various power relations manifested in cultural, diplomatic, and industrial interactions and exchanges of a global scale. Like in the development trajectory of RPG gaming, the Tolkien-ish anti-war and escapist sentiment overshadowed by World War II, blended into the traditions of medieval European mythology, folklore, chivalry legends, and children literature, gave birth to the D&D RPG in encounter with the hobby-driven leisure war gaming in the military-industrial oriented video game culture in America during the Cold War period. This new cultural form then travelled to the Far East through an Occidentalized reinterpretation and nostalgia for the innovative spirit of early digital explorations of East Asian gamers with their ambition to bridge up the digital gap through play and entertainment for mass consumers.

To a larger extent, contents and modes of playing in today’s video games are becoming more and more sophisticated as they are enabled by technological progress and growth of investment. The massive participation of game playing, driven by the ultimate human desire for fun and the capitalist apparatus for perpetual growth, is adding new meanings to the evolvement of contemporary culture and society. It has come to an age when gaming is capable to change the epistemological pattern of human society, carving out from mundane reality entire dimensions of virtual imagined parallel spaces and enabling individuals to acquire alternative identities and interact as alter egos. These imply potentials to engender new perspectives about selves and the world. In a world where everyone recognizes the self as a “player,” the boundary between reality and the virtual gaming space is continuously blurred. The constructed gaming spaces continuously reshape people’s perception of the real world. Are these virtual spaces new ludic illusions of distraction or new means of empowerment? Gaming might be happening in the virtual world, but the time and material resources invested in playing are real. For those professional gamers today, either labors of the different sectors of the swelling game industry, or the so-called “pro gamers” of full-time competitive players who play games as a livelihood, the future world depicted in Spielberg’s film Ready Player One (2018)129 is more real than ever.

Perhaps it is the aspiration for social equality and expectation for balanced give-and- gain reciprocation that motivated people to create alternative worlds that are filled with adventures and treasures, rules and competitions, where one can immerse oneself in the chasing after non-interested social relations and fortune and success through fair amount of hardworking. Throughout human history, play and gaming have been continuously reinventing themselves and adapting to new technological means, business modes, and social and cultural contexts. From the dances around Neolithic camp fires where humans played gods, to the shooting matches of nomadic tribes where humans played hunting, to the bamboo chips gambled over tables with which humans played luck, to the cards and tarots through which humans played fate, to the D&D sandboxes in which humans played imagination, to the video games of the arcades, consoles, computers, mobile phones… all the

128 Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: Economic Cultural Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 16. 129 Spielberg, Ready Player One.

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lineages of every age, humans could always find a way to game with the most familiar material and most pervasive method of production to represent the most featured social relationship and cultural traits of its time. Games are intellectual creations, and commodities of their time, but, after all, they are, in their very heart, play itself. Which, borrowing the words from Huizinga: if we call “instinct,” we explain nothing; if we call “mind” or “will,” we say too much.

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