Uplink 6

“The MMO Issue”

October 2006

Contents:

• India's Media Culture

• Hello MMO

• Korea Media

• Paranoia Agent

• Tokyo Game Show

Introduction

In the days of yore, the summers before a major console upgrade cycle moved slower than 1970s magnetic tape media. Not anymore. Videogames generated major media splash this summer, partly because of a fresh wave of anti-game hysteria and censorship in the US (almost entirely shot down, thanks to effective lobbying by the IGDA and civil liberties advocates), but mostly because of the worldwide scale and scope of the game industry. Microsoft is finally churning out enough 360 consoles to meet demand, a raft of intriguing next-gen games are in the final stages of play-testing, the Nintendo DS continues to break sales records, while the first shipments of Nintendo’s Wii and Sony’s Playstation 3 are due to arrive this November.

This issue of Uplink examines three cultural spaces which have all become key nodes of the game culture: India’s media culture, massive multiplayer online (MMO) games, and Korea’s online games. We also have a review of Satoshi Kon’s dazzling Paranoia Agent (2004) TV series, unquestionably the greatest anime series since Hideaki Anno’s epochal Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995). Last but not least, we have a plethora of updates from the Tokyo Game Show.

India's Media Culture

Perhaps no nation has contributed more to the world media culture, while receiving less all-round credit, than India. Each year, India produces one quarter of all the films produced in the world. For decades, Indian films have been wildly popular in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, while directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen created some of the greatest films ever made. Yet the First World reception of India’s media culture has been blighted for decades by the most atrocious Orientalism.

As late as the mid-1990s, US networks routinely broadcast platitudes about “timeless, spiritual India,” replete with a couple shots of pilgrims bathing in the Benares, the invariable elephant in a flood plain, and the inevitable Gandhi. You will note the astounding divergence of this script from the US news coverage of China in the 1970s, when US networks broadcast platitudes about “timeless, Confucian China,” replete with a couple shots of party cadres marching in Tiananmen Square, the invariable water buffalo in a rice field, and the inevitable Chairman Mao.

Though telejournalism has much to answer for, US film and media critics were hardly better. As late as the 1970s, Hong Kong films, Japanese cinema and the Latin American telenovela were regarded by the latter as second-tier or regional phenomena, whose study was less important than decoding the great Western European auteur films or documenting the effects (noxious or benevolent) of Hollywood on US or overseas audiences. Part of the reason is what might be called the ironic provincialism of Empire: very few US scholars knew any South Asian languages or did the necessary research on the region’s history or culture. In fact, India has its own flourishing critical literature on the mass media, but many of these works aren’t available in English translation, because Indian universities don’t have the vast resources of their First World counterparts.

What ultimately demolished those Orientalist stereotypes of China were the twin hammer-blows of the Hong Kong film boom and mainland China’s meteoric economic ascent. Something similar is happening to the stereotypes of India, thanks to the latter’s fast-growing economy and mushrooming software and services sector.¹ That said, India’s path to mass mediatization has been both faster – and slower – than China’s.

The reason is that India had an enormous film industry as early as the 1930s. In the 1940s, the anti-colonial movements which eventually won India’s 1947 independence from Britain generated a wave of social realist films, heavily influenced by India’s underground Communist Party and the IPTA, the legendary left-leaning independent theater movement. During the 1950s, stars such as Raj Kapoor and directors such as Satyajit Ray and Bimal Roy embodied the progressive energy and possibilities of the early Nehruvian era.

One of the defining hallmarks of the Indian media is its tremendous linguistic diversity. This is due to the country’s complicated pre-capitalist history. Whereas China has one major language (albeit splintered into myriads of often mutually incomprehensible regional dialects) and a powerful sense of a unitary national identity, based on millenia-old centralized bureaucracies and feudal dynasties, India has dozens of languages and thousands of ethnic groups. Though the Mughal Empire formally unified much of what became contemporary India in the 1500s, its administrative reach was relatively weak. British colonialism began in 1600 and quickly displaced the Mughals, but did not subjugate the entire subcontinent until well into the 19^th century.

Today, India has 24 official languages, and there are hundreds more, spoken by smaller communities. (Out of India’s twenty-eight states, only ten use Hindi as their main official language.) The citizens of Kerala speak Malayalam, the residents of West Bengal speak Bengali, citizens of Maharashtra speak Marathi, and so forth. These linguistic regions have spawned vibrant media cultures, everywhere from the Tamil film industry of Tamil Nadu and the Telugu cinema of Andhra Pradesh to the Bengali cinema of West Bengal. In this respect, multilingual and multicultural India is probably closer to the European Union than to the US.

These local media cultures have powerfully influenced the development of India’s national media culture, which can be divided into three major periods:

1. The dominance of commercial Hindi films in the 1947-1960 period, or what can be referred to as the classic age of Bollywood (originally a pun on Bombay, where most of the Hindi film industry is located, though the city has since been renamed Mumbai). During this period, about half of all Indian films were in Hindi.

2. The rise of non-Hindi film cultures from 1960-1991 and the emergence of state-run TV broadcaster Doordarshan (the Indian equivalent of America’s PBS or Britain’s BBC). Since the 1980s, the market shares of films in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu have averaged around 20% each, while the share of Malayalam, Kannada and Bengali films hovered between 5-10%.

3. The rise of vernacular television cultures in local languages after 1991 (e.g. Tamil-language station SunTV and Hindi channel ZeeTV, as well as Murdoch’s heavily localized StarTV and Sony’s network). Some of India’s leading firms are beginning to bankroll ventures in animation and videogames. For example, Reliance Entertainment, part of the Ambani industrial empire, plans to invest €83 million over the next three years in Indian gaming cafes and game portals. The plan is to start with casual games first, supplement these with action games, and then move on to free-standing MMOs.²

India’s current game market is still fairly small, with revenues of somewhere between €50 and €70 million last year, whereas China’s game market hit €569 million, according to research group Niko Partners. But India’s installed based of game-capable cellphones, broadband connections, personal computers and handheld game devices is growing fast. Microsoft began selling its Xbox360 in the Indian market this August, while Sony has had wide success with its PS2. Nintendo’s handheld games are becoming especially popular in many Indian cities, and development kits for its new Wii system are already affordable for large numbers of Indian game developers.

Given India’s bourgeoning software industry, a film industry which sells a billion tickets every year, and a blossoming animation industry already racking up revenues of €150 to €200 million per annum, it’s only a matter of time before India becomes a powerhouse game producer.

– DRR

Endnotes

1. It should be emphasized that while India’s current economic boom is real enough, its social effects have been deeply polarizing. While the coastal east (West Bengal), the coastal west (Gujarat) and the southern states (Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu) have experienced rapid per capita growth, the Indian interior has grown much more slowly. Furthermore, India’s cities have boomed, as a rule, at the same time that large areas of the countryside are wracked with stagnation and poverty – a very different pattern from China, where a rural boom jump-started urban growth. When the Chinese take-off began to favor the coastal regions over the interior states in the early 1990s, its national government mobilized vast resources to help the interior catch up (this is particularly noticeable in the recent growth of interior cities such as Chengdu and Chonqing).

One of the most urgent political questions facing India today is whether it can pull off a similar feat. Despite India’s ideological shift towards neoliberalism in 1991, the state continues to own many key industries, and controls 70% of the assets of its banking system. The state has also played a crucial role in maintaining respectable levels of national saving (25% of GDP) and investment (26% of GDP, much higher than the US, though lower than China). Finally, decades of state industrial policies and educational investments were crucial in creating flourishing industries such as software and pharmaceuticals.

2. Accessed September 14, 2006. Web: http://www.exchange4media.com/e4m/news/newfullstory.asp?section_id=1&news_id=22395&tag=17122&pict=1

Hello MMO

As any gamer will tell you, MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) are either the world’s most enthralling genre, or the Web’s most colossal waste of time, depending on the viewpoint of the gamer in question. Though such schizophrenic reactions are hardly unusual in the game culture, which teems with dissent and nonconformity of all kinds (including monopoly-busting activities like modding and speed-run videos), the genre does have some specific features which seem to enhance the delight – or exacerbate the disgust – of players.

MMOs are not linear narratives, they end whenever players decide to stop playing, they tend to emphasize group interaction over single-player exploration, and they have complex, sophisticated game-worlds, which do require a fairly extensive investment of time and effort. If you enjoy repetitive questing, role-playing and task management, MMOs are for you. If you prefer opening up cans of Serious Sam-style whoopass on cyberdemons, or platform-jumping your way through Mario mayhem, then MMOs are unlikely to be your favorite cup of cappucino.

Whatever players may think of them, MMOs have become a major part of the contemporary gaming landscape.¹This wasn’t always the case, for good historical reasons. The MMO had its roots in the text-based adventure games and MUDs (multi-user dungeons) of the late 1970s and early 1980s personal computer culture. However, due to the limitations of early computer networks, which were usually limited to a single mainframe or server on a campus or research facility, character interactions were correspondingly simple – checking in, checking out, picking up items, chatting via text-messages, and so forth.

These early forms quickly evolved into 2D graphical games in the late 1980s, and eventually into Web-accessible 3D graphical worlds in the mid-1990s. This shift went hand in hand with a quantum leap in the genre’s fan-base, from a small group of like-minded professionals to a broad strata of US, Western European and Japanese consumers, and finally to the planetary commons of today’s Web-citizenry. This led to an equally dramatic expansion in the range of fan input and the types of fan participation, with consequences both good (increased multicultural and gender diversity) and ill (increased cheating, verbal abuse, and anti-social behavior).

Nowadays, MMOs are full-fledged worlds, replete with cinematic cut-scenes, orchestral sound-tracks and complex storylines. Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Sony’s Everquest are exercises in mythical fantasy, while NCSoft’s Lineage I and II and City of Heroes are more attuned to heroic action. Then there is Nexon’s smash 2D hit, MapleStory, which features an adorable range of characters engaged in Zelda-like action quests.

Whatever their other differences, MMOs do have one key similarity: they are based on accumulation. This is both more – and less – capitalist than it sounds. You and your online partners search primarily for skills and items, and only secondarily for currency units (in fact, the spawning of multiple characters or accounts just to accumulate currency is called “gold farming” and will get you kicked out of the game-world, if they catch you).

While most of the larger MMOs are commercial enterprises, they are not automatic monopolies shoving content down the throats of their consumers, but rather complex public-private partnerships, with strong elements of egalitarianism, non-profit and public service, democratic participation and community self-management.

Successful MMOs must have balanced skill sets, and a range of customizable items. They must have structures of interaction enabling players to converse, trade items, and exchange information. They must also be flexible enough to accommodate newcomers and bouts of frantic onscreen action, while being strategic enough to reward long-term cooperation.

There are striking parallels to professional sports leagues, which have never been just about money-grubbing owners (though these latter do exist). The sports industries are an exceedingly complex terrain, where political battles rage between greedy owners versus player unions and fan loyalty, multicultural inclusion versus xenophobic reaction, team spirit versus star egos, Olympic spirit versus crass consumerism. Similarly, MMOs are not just a mirror of the multinational capitalism which created them. They are also an emergent potential public space or commons, teeming with the (heavily mediated and coded) multinational subjectivities, cultural conflicts and political struggles of our era.

– DRR

Endnotes

1. The MMO audience has expanded into the tens of millions. Analyst Bruce Sterling Woodcock has comprehensive statistics here: http://www.mmogchart.com/

Media Korea

One of the most intriguing aspects of the MMO market is the rise of Korean and Chinese game firms from niche players to world-class producers. This extraordinary change is due partly to geopolitics and partly to state intervention, plus a healthy dose of sheer luck. Until quite recently, Korea and China banned the sales of Japanese videogame consoles and other mass media, due to grim memories of Imperial Japan’s brutal colonization of Korea and the murder of millions of Chinese in WW II. As a result, the Korean and Chinese videogame culture was mostly limited to pirated copies of personal computer software.

The key trigger of East Asia’s MMO boom, though, was the confluence of two crucial investment decisions. First, both China and South Korea invested heavily in national high-speed Internet networks at just the right time – the late 1990s, the moment the technology required for truly immersive 3D online games emerged. Second, Korea’s developmental state overhauled its cultural and media promotion strategy, jump-starting the development of Korean game firms in the mid-1990s.

Here’s how it happened: since the 1950s, Korea had strictly limited imports of foreign films and provided subsidies for its domestic film industry. Despite limited financing and rampant censorship by brutish, dictatorial governments, the system did allow a significant national film culture to emerge, which produced anywhere between 50-150 films a year. However, in the 1990s US neoliberals pressured Korea to deregulate its mass media – i.e. open the floodgates to US and European media firms, who had long salivated at the prospect of gobbling up Korea’s lucrative media market. Some deregulation did occur, and the result was that the Korean film industry went into crisis, partly due to its inability to compete head-on with foreign imports, and partly because of the rise of domestic television and cable TV.

Hollywood thought it could roll over its competitors like mediatic MacArthurs, just like Murdoch’s StarTV thought it could simply crush India’s domestic media culture in the 1990s. How wrong they were. In one of the greatest guerilla campaigns of media history, Korea responded with tactical flexibility and strategic innovation. Korean television not only created its own unique domestic programming, animation series and melodramas, but began to export them to other East Asian nations. The result was the so-called “Hallyu” or Korean Wave, where a raft of Korean media exports won critical and commercial success throughout East Asia, and especially in Japan.

The key moment for videogame industry came in Korea’s 1997-1998 economic crisis, which forced Korea to nationalize two-thirds of its banking system and scrap its neoliberal policies. Ironically, the crash did have the positive effect of helping to wean the Korean media industry from dependence on the chaebol, the large-scale Korean conglomerates responsible for much of Korea’s industrial boom.¹ While the chaebol were effective (albeit occasionally brutal) agents of industrialization, they never had a long-term strategy for investing in the mass media.

In response to the economic crisis, the Korean government set up a number of new initiatives in media and technology, targeting film, animation and especially gaming as potential growth markets for the future. Networks of training, education and development were created in universities, and game firms were given the sort of favorable tax breaks and start-up help once accorded only to heavy industry.²

Given the opportunity to shine, Korea’s gamers responded with skill and ingenuity. Firms such as NCSoft pioneered the creation of truly large-scale MMOs, accessible to millions of players instead of thousands, and quickly exported this model to other markets, especially China (in fact, China’s online culture deserves an article in its own right). Today, Korea has one of the most vibrant game cultures in the world, ranging from handheld and mobile games to professional leagues of videogame players. Interestingly, Korea’s online game culture has retained a plebian and collective social character not always apparent in its US counterpart. This is due partly to Korea’s egalitarian distribution of income, and partly to the fact that its game culture is tied to collective spaces such as PC baangs (the US market is deeply polarized between low-cost home consoles, and high-end PC games dominated by upper-class professionals).

Odd as it sounds, one of the South Korean media culture’s greatest long-term strengths may be the presence of its estranged sister-state, North Korea. The Kim Il-Sung regime is not without its faults, but it has world-class film, theater and cultural infrastructures.³ The result is a trained, disciplined workforce which could someday transform South Korea’s regional culture into a global cultural power-house. There is a model for this in the integration of East and West Germany in 1990: Leipzig, the capital of Saxony in eastern Germany, is the host of the Leipzig Games Conference, Europe’s premier annual gaming event, while Eastern Europe in general has become a significant seedbed of game production. Let’s hope Korea’s eventual reunification occurs by way of the videoscreen, and not by way of the battlefield.

– DRR

Endnotes

1. This is not to argue (as the neoliberals frequently do) that the chaebol held back or otherwise prevented Korea’s economy from flourishing. As Alice Amsden’s Asia’s Next Giant proves in copious detail, Korea’s family-run business empires or chaebol were hugely successful engines of industrialization and development. That development came at a terrible human and ecological cost – hideous labor exploitation, 14-hour days, toxic pollution, miserable living-standards, etc. But the chaebol also invested in technology and the real economy, and transformed a Third World country devastated by Japanese colonialism and Cold War civil war into a thriving Second World industrial power. Much of the best about capitalism is inextricably interwoven with its worst.

It should also be noted that today’s reengineered chaebol are shedding their status as family-owned businesses and becoming genuine corporate networks, similar to Japan’s keiretsu. China has keenly followed Korea’s development, and is creating its own variant of state-business networks to power the next leg of its development.

2. Here are some of the links detailing these networks:

GameStar Korea: http://www.korea-e3.com/
Korea Meets the West: http://www.e3korea2006.com/
KOTRA (Korean Trade-Investment Promotion Agency: http://english.kotra.or.kr
KGDI (Korea Game Development and Promotion Institute): http://www.gameinfinity.or.kr
Gstar (Korea’s annual game conference): www.gstar.or.kr

3. Timothy Savage has this to say on North Korea’s film culture: “In terms of production value, Hong Kil Dong is on par with most Hong Kong kung fu flicks. It's full of elaborate fight scenes, stunning period costumes, and the occasional gory bit of blood-letting. As with most such films, the acting tends toward the melodramatic, but does not cross the line into crassness. The director intersperses plenty of long shots of winding paths between mountain ridges, reflecting the natural aesthetic that is common to North Korean art – in contrast to the Socialist Realism that pervaded Eastern European regimes during the Cold War. Indeed, the casual observer shown this movie would likely not be able to tell that it was made in North, rather than South, Korea.” Accessed October 5, 2006: http://www.koreanfilm.org/nkcinema.html