Now with the threat of a housing price collapse, South Korean gamers now need to worry that their online in-game transactions may become illegal. Some players of online games engage in a bit of “gold farming”, where they acquire items that have value within a virtual game world and resale such for real-world money. There are even real-world companies that facilitate trading online goods. According to the Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute, “The size of the market was estimated at 1 trillion won, or about $1 billion, last year. Roughly 60 percent of an item trading company’s profit comes from the cyber money trade as well.
What I find odd is that this proposed bill originates from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Just how a ministry of culture should get involved with online gaming, game music, game content development, etcetera beats me. Call me old fashioned but this sort of issue seems more to do with money and less to do with culture, unless Korean culture really is all about making money. It might be an excellent idea to have a governmental ministry of “culture” concern itself with matters that have more intrinsic value rather than handling everything from online gaming to developing media content for business, which should be the domain of communications and technology. This seeming confusion (mash-up) of culture with business and technology reminds me much of what Oscar Wilde meant in Lady Windermere’s Fan when Lord Darlington described a cynic as being “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
I really wonder how cultural “value” is thought of by those working in Korean Government and — like a certain supreme court judge in the U.S. — would “know it if they saw it”.
21 Comments
“Wizzer” White knew pornogrpahy when he saw it, and Korean politicians and bureaucrats know a pork barrel when it rolls into view. MOCT has been in this business for awhile. Under the People’s Open Government, Uri-dang enacted the legislation that allowed more conventional game rooms to provide modest non-cash prizes (that the game room operators connived to turn into substantial prizes that could be readily exchanged for cash). Ever hear of the “Sea Story” (name of game) scandal? Surprise, surprise, significant sums of money started turning up in URI-appointed bureacrats’, including a full rank minister as well as various underlings, bank accounts and Uri politicians’ pockets. Hedging their bets, the “players” also tried to compromise some GNP pols, but with no real success, but since URI actually controlled the ministry, they concentrated their largess there. And it paid off, in the form of licenses being awarded to the various operators who ponied up the payoffs but who transparently failed even the de minimis qualification standards the ministry promulgated in the interest of ensuring the wool got pulled over the electorate’s eyes while the pols were getting ready to debauch it. This new legislation smells, either of any attempt to appear proactive about what could be an even larger scandal of the same sort or to find a new source of illicit political funding now that Sea Story has been drained of dosh.
The MCT has long taken charge for all “content” (as business jargon does these days). Gaming is just another form of content, like music and movies. Certainly games are no less “culture” than lousy films or derivative R&B music.
The NC Soft employee quoted in the original Korea Times article was being either really foolish or disingenuous. The online economy is one of the biggest reasons for the huge success of Korea’s online games. Itembay, which is like an eBay for online games, was making $18 million a month, last I checked (admittedly over a year ago).
First time commenting here. Nice site.
Whoah! The housing market’s gonna sink??
The bastards in the US Congress took away my part-time job at the end of last year (where I made a nice little sum of extra money) when Bush signed the law that made it illegal for banks (virtual/online or real) to transfer funds to/from online casinos.
Yes “usinkorea”, the U.S. Government is trying to enforce American laws on non-Americans in how they attempt to enforce their anti-gambling stance (which is legally dead wrong) but they have never attempted to represent American culture or pretend that their job is to enhance and preserve American culture, unlike the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, who seemingly dabble in everything. As per “Haisan’s” comment Gaming is just another form of content, like music and movies. (to the MCT), this sort of attitude towards one’s culture is so wrong that it is a great disservice to what most people would consider culture to be — anywhere else in the world. The government really does not seem to know the value of anything though they think they know how much it may cost.
Perhaps they should just rename it to “Ministry of Anything That Makes Money for Us”?
Wrong. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities - both admittedly less overbearing than MOCT
I don’t see why. It is not the Ministry of High Culture or the Ministry of Traditional Culture. For years it was just a division of the Ministry of Information, then the Ministry of Culture and Information. In 1993 it was the Ministry of Culture and Sports. Gaming is just one of six teams in the Cultural Industry Bureau, which is one of seven Bureaus in the Ministry.
I don’t understand the idea that culture should somehow be divorced from economics. The Renaissance was tightly tied into the economics of 14-16th century Italy. Movies, music, video games all cost money. So what do you call a person who knows the price *and* the value of things?
For god’s sakes, the Minister at the moment is Kim Myung-gon. That is a man with some serious credibility in the arts. I think you are just being a curmudgeon on this one.
(Btw, both high culture and tradition culture do get a lot of attention from the MCT… in fact the MCT just announced a big new program for promoting traditional Korean culture to the world).
Elgin,
It’s nothing new. Since WW2, the US has had the tendency to dictate to other countries what they should or shouldn’t do. Don’t forget the Helms-Burton Act, the pressure it puts on Canada so that it doesn’t decriminalize marijuana, the pressure it puts on South Korea so that it follows American copyright laws, etc.
Usinkorea, blame that on the fact that most of the biggest online casinos are Canadian owned. Had they been American owned, you’d still have the right to spend your own money as you please. It’s protectionism disguised as morality.
Now, Korean online games… My brother plays a few Korean online games. He was telling me that at the moment, the number of ‘hackers’ is pretty high. The most common hack is the ‘gold hack’, which gathers all the gold in a screen and collects it at the feet of the player. The hackers have become so blase, they don’t even tend to their players once the hack has been activated. He usually just picks up the items and the gold at the feet of the players. He doesn’t mind them cheating for gold, but what bothers him is that they also take all the items, some of which are needed to complete quests.
Spewer, sorry, I forgot about the NEA and NEH. Yes, they are less overbearing than MOCT and certainly do not concern themselves with gaming content because games are not art.
Haisan, the very recent article you mention seems to be a good step in a better direction and that is good news to me. It sounds as if Kim Myung-gon is trying to get back to basic issues of intrinsic quality in Korean culture but that is to be seen because this article is still PR material only. I thought it interesting:
I wonder if this is his way of saying the Ministry has been focused more on the money and less on the art in the recent past?
I am not claiming there is no relevance between money and art, see my first posting on this blog, rather there has been little distinction between the art of making money and the arts when one looks at the emphasis placed upon the money side of things in the government here. If anything, there has been little qualitative thought given to city-level arts management issues and local budgeting for such. There is a persistent problem regarding performance space that is built where there is no demand for such within the local communities, through out Korea and the great lack of thoughtful oversight in budgeting for these facilities and for their operation. This is such an issue that it would deserve another blog entry but then I don’t think such an issue would be of much general interest here.
I’m also wondering why the MOCT has any say over online game transactions or even what’s wrong with“trading in cyber-money,”as the article calls it. What’s the complaint here? To me the practice is silly and a waste of money (yeah I’m a cranky old guy) but not immoral or socially disruptive, so why prohibit it?
Seems like more pointless legislation from the Roh gov’t.
Geez… why make these transactions illegal? Just tax them.
http://news.com.com/IRS+taxati.....40298.html
I, for one, would be greatly interested in this subject.
For the record, I think you are correct about the Ministry of Culture having skewed priorities. I just thought that the MCT getting involved in gaming was not a good example of that problem. Pushing for some serious IP enforcement and eliminating Korea’s brutal cabaret laws (which absolutely kill any underground music scene from developing) would be two more incredibly practical and helpful activities the MCT could do, imho.
Am I the only one who gets the fact that online gaming is in fact a cultural activity like sports or community theater? Sure, you’re using somebody else’s scripts and characters, but that’s nothing new. The only thing new is that it’s happening online. There’s a lot of talk about how online gaming is affecting the TV & movie business, and I don’t mean through schlock like the “Doom” and “Tomb Raider” movies. People are going online to play HALO 2, World of Warcraft, and other games because they like it better than the crap being shoveled out to the big & little screens by Hollywood these days.
I don’t know “wombat”, shooting up heroin on a street corner with other junkies is a cultural activity but I do not think that it is widely admired. American TV is dead, thus I would not want to even mention it even if they put on “An Evening of Classical Jackass”. The missing consideration in your thoughts is *quality* IMHO and I can not easily think of quality when I am busy giving someone a facial with a shotgun in Marathon (though it makes me giggle a lot). Yes, you could talk of a “gaming culture” but that hardly describes the attributes of a culture of quality (Korean culture for example).
Geez …if you get them into the tax system, then it’s much harder to skim illicit political funding from them. Creating a system of regulation, even if it involved impsoing some level of illegality on them, is so much more conducive to extortion, bribery and the other forms of greasing the skids along which politics move in this country.
“Korean culture” is kids in PC bangs eating cup ramen and playing games until they drop dead–the actual games are not culture or even particularly Korean.
I don’t know how much “protectionism” it is or even morality. I’m not even saying I don’t understand why they did it or have a major problem with why.
If you have billions of dollars just flowing out of the economy, it is a no-brainer that the government is going to step in. Any government.
For example, is there any government in the world that does not check people coming into an airport from another country to see what value of goods and currency they are bringing with them and then tax that value if it exceeds a certain amount?
Governments are going to attempt to get their cut, and given the amount of social services we expect a government to provide to the masses, I can’t say I am fully unhappy about that. And if the nation is hemorrhaging too much money beyond its borders on something like online gambling, I don’t fault the government for trying to cut down the flow. It is definately seeking to protect its economy, but how much “protectionism” it is remains a question mark.
It just sucks for me, because I spend a good bit of time studying how to make money playing poker online. It was a great job while I was a graduate student. Now, it is gone.
For someone who’s been here in Korea so long, Sperwer, you don’t know anything about how things work! This should read “Creating a system of regulation, especially if it involves imposing some level of illegality…” — because making things illegal creates opportunities to look the other way, for the right price.
Seriously, though, everyone in the world knows that increasing the power and penetration (ouch!) of the government into the lives and businesses of the citizenry increases the likelihood of corruption. Reduce government, reduce corruption. We saw a marked decrease in public corruption under Kim Dae Jung’s administration which deregulated many sectors, followed by flurries of re-regulation under the Uri fools, whose socialist/statist leanings make them unable to resist extending the fingers of government into everything. Will 1997-2003 be the “good old days of clean government?” ‘Cause it wasn’t all that great.
I guess it depends on the game you’re playing. Marathon, maybe not so much, but there’s a lot more to gamer culture than online deathmatches using FPS games. I was actually thinking more of virtual environments like World of Warcraft, Eve Online and other such MMORPGs - and for that matter, the story behind the HALO series of games is head and shoulders above most of the action flicks/shows coming out of Hollywood these days. Plus, they have interactivity working for them. So, yeah, maybe it’s not the National Opera or even the Boston Pops, but it’s middlebrow entertainment at the very least, several notches above sticking a needle in one’s arm.
Haisan wrote:
I recall that in 1998, one such bad law was repealed that prohibited clubs from having live entertainment (almost no one followed that law). I do not think there are any other really onerous “cabaret” laws in place at this time.
Regarding your interest in city-level arts performance space and the management issues I had mentioned earlier, Korea has an on-going problem with local cities and their building-envy, which ends up costing the taxpayer in the long run.
What happens is city “Y” will hear of city “C” and their plans to build a new 1,400 seat theatre and they will think, “Oh my, we must have one of these as well since we are very modern as well.”, so they budget to build a concert facility or theatre with 1,400 seats BUT there are not enough ticket-buyers in the local population that would pay to see a decent concert or show, thus they can not put any shows in the performance space without losing money since any professional act and the city personnel that operate the space must be paid. Most local city personnel do not have the experience in operating such facilities for making a profit too. All this means that our smaller, hypothetical city will lose money to put any show into their brand-new performance space because they can not sell enough tickets to cover the operational expenses, thus the facility becomes a local budget item and a burden. Now imagine that City “Y” built not just one theatre but they have FOUR or FIVE ; two 1,200 seat theaters, a 1,400 seater and even a nice, new 1,800 seat facility. Next, consider that this scenario occurs *throughout* Korea, at any given time. Though the local city can always let the local adjumas put on charity shows and kid shows, these places will always lose money to operate, thus are a burden on the taxpayer and this collective burden could easily be in the trillions of won.
Though the local performance markets are slowly growing (people in smaller cities than Seoul do like entertainment), there is never any professional market research performed to determine what the local needs are for such performance space. Oddly enough, most local, professional promoters probably would have a fair idea if a certain geographic area could support the building of performance space but no one seems to ever ask if it is really needed or operationally feasible. Obviously better planning and research is needed to help prevent such waste and maybe some programs could actually be created to help develop and the local entertainment markets and guide arts planning by local cities but just who would have national oversight or control over such? Maybe no one?
Of course, I do know that, grasshopper. I phrased it the way I did to forestall comments from the pollyannas who comment here to the effect that making it illegal will solve (rather than compound) the problem.