4/28/2023 0 Comments Ad infinitum game 2019![]() ![]() I approach this cultural chronotope from the perspective of a surprising yet integral aspect of informatization: Korea’s world-renowned digital gaming culture, including the world’s first national professional electronic sports (e-sports) scene and the rise of online computer gaming as a wildly popular leisure activity located in the country’s tens of thousands of online gaming cafés ( PC bang). Building upon the so-called catch-up strategies of economic development during the Miracle on the Han River (Lee and Lim 2001), political and business leaders envisioned informatization as a means of turning Korea into a global leader in information and communications technologies by building the world’s most advanced information society. In the following, I examine what Asif Agha has called a “cultural chronotope,” a “ of place-time-and-personhood to which social interactants orient” ( 2007, 320), which appears in Korean popular culture products like I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and is organized around Korea’s period of “informatization” ( chŏngbohwa) beginning in the mid-1990s. Both K’s reverence for the “dizzying” yet “not entirely unpleasant” experience of acceleration and C’s increasing sense of being withdrawn from the social world are part and parcel of representations of Korea at the turn of the century as a society that was moving quickly and in which social ties were becoming increasingly atomized. ![]() C is a video artist who watches “the world … going about its business as usual” (79) as he becomes progressively isolated. The epigraphs above concern two of the novel’s main characters, “K” and his older brother “C.” K, a taxi driver, “revere velocity as his god” (Kim 2007, 103) and is compelled to race his cab on the highways around Seoul. In this historical context, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and its themes of social disconnection amidst rapid, bewildering societal changes may be read as expressions of more general anxieties and uncertainties in Korea at that time that persist to this day. When it was first published in 1996, South Korea was less than ten years removed from nearly three decades of authoritarian military rule and at the tail end of the “Miracle on the Han River” ( Han’gang ŭi kijŏk), a period beginning in the early 1960s during which the Korean economy grew from one of the world’s poorest to its eleventh largest (Moon and Rhyu 2000, 77). Kim Young-ha’s I Have the Right to Destroy Myself ( 2007), the novel from which they are taken, presents a morbid portrait of deeply unhappy people living in late twentieth-century Seoul and an anonymous narrator who assists them in committing suicide. Even though my analysis does not focus on literature, the two text-artifacts above feel like appropriate places to begin. This article deals with chronotopes, a concept most readily associated with Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on literary genres. … For a split second, C wanted to stay in his world, the world he knew, one he’d reflected on, created, and captured. … The video camera was his shield, a small but safe refuge from the vast unknown. He was too used to looking at the world through a lens. Thinking through these orientations and their spatial, temporal, and social qualities is critical to understanding chronotopic representations of contemporary Korea. I argue that through their performances in digital games’ virtual and actual-world participation frameworks, gamers orient to these social types in ways that differentially construe their relationships to semiotic depictions of places, times, and personhoods. My analysis centers on two of Korean digital gaming culture’s recognizable social types and the spatiotemporal qualities of their play: professional gamers and the quickness embodied in their e-sports performances and a specific kind of amateur PC bang gamer who is more socially isolated and whose engagement with games is slow and repetitive. This article examines a South Korean cultural chronotope from the perspective of Korea’s world-renowned digital gaming culture, including its professional electronic sports (e-sports) scene and the experiences of amateur gamers in online gaming cafés ( PC bang).
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