From Kim Kaphwan to DokeV: Who Has Been Writing the Codes of Korea in Games?

In 2020, the Inven reporter Jung Jae-hoon wrote a column titled “We Want to See ‘Korea’ in Games.” The column asks, in a marketing register, what might become possible if Korean elements were put to use in games. Its core question is this:

“And before all of that, we do not know. We know nothing of which parts of Korean culture and Korean history the world likes, or which parts it will find attractive. The ninja sells; the samurai works too. The Three Kingdoms is consumed massively across East Asia.

But has even one Korean element ever traveled the world like that?”

Answering his own question, Jung names the necessary conditions: “code and finish.” Finish — build quality — may strictly speaking be beside the point: even a sharply chosen cultural code will gain no purchase if it is rendered without appeal, or attached to a badly designed game. The heart of it, then, is the code — the question of the representative image assigned to a national culture, like China’s kung fu or Japan’s ninja and samurai.

Jung’s conclusion is that since no one can know what will hit and be hailed as the representative code, one must keep trying this and that. If well-made realizations of codes are attempted in variety, a few among them will settle into representative images of Korea. This thought, hardly limited to games, is not the first-person thinking of “we will show you Korea” but the other-centered thinking of “as what is Korea seen?” Since the right to define oneself belongs to others too — and since in marketing that other must stand at the center — it is the right direction. Not “Do you know…?” but “How about this?”: a posture that departs from the receiver’s interpretation, and so begins by affirming, for a start, even misunderstanding and misreading.

What must be borne in mind in weighing this posture is that games have developed chiefly around the United States and Japan. Korea in games, then — unless Korea made it herself — is mostly Korea as seen through American and Japanese eyes. The other factor is change over time. In the West, the United States included, it was before the 2010s that information about faraway Korea was scarce, and the need for historical accuracy slight.

Historical games, for which research is mandatory, show strictly speaking not Korea but a past Korea — so this essay has chosen, as far as possible, to leave them aside.

Korea was used as an expression of the exotic, or rendered clumsily by makers who did not quite know how to render it — until, around 2010, description slowly began to gain concreteness. The turning point was the spread of K-culture touched off in 2012, when Psy’s “Gangnam Style” rode a global craze of syndrome proportions.

Japan needed no such inflection point. Misunderstandings and distortions born of language and culture there may have been, but a long-accumulated history of exchange kept them fewer than in other cultural spheres. And the representative code that Japan — of all foreign countries the one that finds Korea most familiar — chose in handling Korea in games was taekwondo.

Taekwondo

With the arcade fighting-game boom of the nineties, Japanese fighting games carried Korean characters, partly with an eye on the Korean market. There came Lee Hae-gwon of Aggressors of Dark Kombat (1994), Kim Sue Il of Kizuna Encounter: Super Tag Battle (1996), and Seong Mi-na and Hwang Seong-gyeong of Soulcalibur (1998). The Soulcalibur characters — premised on a Tang-dynasty art of the great blade carried on in Joseon — led on to derived characters like Hong Yun-seong; but the greatest success was Kim Kaphwan of Fatal Fury 2 (1992), who appeared as a taekwondo master.

Kim Kaphwan, symbol of taekwondo Korea

And Kim Kaphwan expanded, spawning a host of derived characters. The later Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters series brought in his sons Kim Dong Hwan and Kim Jae Hoon, his master Gang-Il, and fellow students Jhun Hoon and May Lee — all results of extending Kim Kaphwan’s taekwondo code. Chang Koehan and Choi Bounge, present in The King of Fighters from the start as Kim’s sub-characters, are likewise joined to him by lore as his taekwondo pupils — and even Kim Sue Il of Kizuna Encounter was absorbed into this lineage.

The taekwondo code was realized as well in Tekken’s two characters Baek Doo San and Hwoarang, and carried on to Juri Han of Super Street Fighter IV. In Juri’s case, though, taekwondo is her only point in common with the others; everything else about her is a villain’s design, steering hard clear of the Korean taekwondo-character cliché, so the typicality is thin.

Baek Doo San and Hwoarang, who belong by genre to Kim Kaphwan’s lineage

Juri Han — at the stage when only “Korean woman” had been decided, a Yuna Kim image was considered, before the concept settled on a spider-themed taekwondo villainess

But the stages where Kim Kaphwan, Hwoarang, and Juri Han fight afford a glimpse of what Japanese makers took to be Korea’s representative spaces. Games set in the historical past, like Soulcalibur, use premodern spaces such as temples for their stages — and this architectural code was carried into games set in the present as well.

Seong Mi-na’s stage in Soulcalibur II

Kim Kaphwan’s and the Korea team’s stage in The King of Fighters ’96. In Fatal Fury, Kim’s stages included Sungnyemun Gate and his own dojang.

Hwoarang’s stage in Tekken 3. Baek Doo San and Hwoarang mostly fought on stages of premodern buildings like this.

Juri Han’s stage in Super Street Fighter IV: a marketplace near a temple.

For a Japanese studio, the antique air of premodern architecture would have felt familiar yet slightly other — a measure of closeness. Within Northeast Asia, or East Asia more broadly, it reads that way; outside East Asia it is received as deeply exotic — and that case can be seen in how World of Warcraft put it to use.

To realize the many cultures raised by the races of Azeroth, Blizzard drew designs from the civilizations of the real world, and Korean architecture was among the references for the culture of the night elves. The gate leading from the starting zone into the capital Darnassus takes Namdaemun as it stands; among the night elves’ structures is one identical in form to the Seokgatap pagoda; and several buildings adopted Korean-style eaves even at the cost of departing slightly from their designs in Warcraft III.

The gates of Darnassus

The Military

An image of taekwondo practiced against antique buildings does not, by itself, compose Korea as seen from outside. Among the elements of present-day Korea are the armistice state, and conscription — elements that seem to have worked on Japanese game makers as a kind of fantasy. In the Tekken series, Hwoarang received his draft notice after the third installment and enlisted, then deserted just before the fourth. Yet the illustrations carrying this story show an enlisted soldier wielding a pistol, deployed on live armed operations, with fully armed troops sent in to capture the deserter — depictions at a vast remove from reality.

Special forces are mostly career NCOs, ordinary conscripts do not serve there, and what is that uniform, anyway — the doubts pile up.

Nor is Japan alone in misreading the Korean military. In 2014, Kim Sang-min’s study “The Image of Korea in American Culture: Film, Drama, Animation, and Digital Games” examined the Korean-military elements appearing in a range of American war games. After the Soviet Union vanished, North Korea was among the several states chosen for the seat of principal enemy, and so the South Korean military — or elements tied to it — came to be depicted. In most cases it functions less as an object of real understanding than as a species of unit.

Kim Sang-min, “The Image of Korea in American Culture: Film, Drama, Animation, and Digital Games,” The Journal of Humanities 35, Institute of Humanities, 2014.

The principal enemy of Ghost Recon 2 (2004) is a hard-line North Korean military faction that has staged a coup, which US forces infiltrate to remove. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) treats the same war — a second Korean War. Cities of the peninsula, Seoul and Pyongyang among them, serve as its stages; yet its depiction of North Korea and its army feels heavily Chinese, and the plot — in which a Japanese far-right official fomented the inter-Korean war as a wedge — if anything drops the two Koreas from the center of the story. The awkward Korean on its banners and signboards is notorious. Rogue Warrior (2007) forced the Vietnam of its source novel into North Korea, and Homefront (2011), on a North Korean invasion of America, displayed a misunderstanding further evolved.

In Homefront, North Korea plays the role of the Cold War Soviet Union, and South Korea — cast as the victim of the North’s expansion — does not even appear.

Homefront’s original plan had China taking North Korea, then the South, pressing past Japan and Australia to reach America — hence a defense of the homefront. But at the publisher’s worry this was changed to North Korea, and the game ended up without a shred of verisimilitude. Forcing China into North Korea’s place left gaping holes of detail: the enemy’s weapons systems went unresearched, and even the formal name of a North Korea that had achieved unification and set out on wars of conquest was left unclear.

Among the reasons for the incomprehension may be the flat perception that Korea makes a convenient hypothetical battlefield and need serve no further. And on the reverse of that incomprehension lies, conversely, an overestimation of the South Korean military’s fighting power — much like the contents of Hwoarang’s military service. SOCOM 4 (2011) features operators of the ROK 707th Special Mission Group as main characters.

Park Yoon-hee of the 707th Special Mission Group in SOCOM 4. In a Korea that has since lived through an insurrection, the 707th lands somewhat differently — but the character shows the unit’s standing as the Korean military’s foremost special force.

The image of the Korean soldier as capable professional appears in the 707th operators present in nearly every Rainbow Six title, and in the ROK Navy UDT operable in Medal of Honor: Warfighter (2012). The Call of Duty series had quietly left the Korean military out — Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014) featured the North Korean army as a principal enemy, and that was about it — until Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, slated for October 2026, takes up a second Korean War, presenting the Korean military, and the streets of Korean cities, at a considerable standard of accuracy. Beyond being the first Korean-military war game in a long while, its character modeling reflects ethnic features closely enough that Korean figures are clearly distinguishable from non-Korean ones — a real step past the earlier appearances, grounded in incomprehension or bearing its traces, that treated Korea as so much board and pieces.

The signboards, of considerable verisimilitude, catch the eye.

Perhaps Overwatch’s D.Va, Hana Song, can also be counted a character of the Korean-military line. A mech unit is founded; talent best able to wield mech equipment in combat is needed; so a pro gamer who excelled at a mech-combat game is conscripted into the army — the lore bears those traces plainly. And at the same time the character shows another Korean code: high technology, led by games and IT.

Hana Song, D.Va: the military element in her soldier status, the high-tech element in her pro-gamer origin and mech-pilot billet. The lore that she moves through society like a celebrity carries a whiff of the idol industry as well.

The High-Tech City

That the Korea of the Civilization series comes attached mostly to science-and-technology traits is not down to King Sejong’s historical record alone. A country of trimly kept cities, of early and universal internet, of machines at work across the urban fabric, where the apartment block is the most efficient and safest form of housing — a condition possible only when administration and public order combine with technology — plus the Korean players sweeping the top ranks of the newest medium, and the PC bang culture that raised them: these built the image. The picture that packs all of it into one, as much as the character of Hana Song does, is the night street of a great city — towers dense, every surface crammed with signboards and passersby. It became an image beloved of cyberpunk, used, for instance, in the Korean signage on the streets of Cyberpunk 2077. Compressed to a word, it is Seoul — above all, Gangnam.

Seoul came to resemble its fellow megalopolis New York by a different route. A city half New York’s size with six times its density, Seoul chose to multiply its floor-area ratio. The overwhelming foot traffic bought by that density and volume makes advertising to the passerby an absolute necessity for businesses in Seoul and cities like it. Countless businesses in need of signage fill the high-density volume, so the faces of buildings sprout signboards beyond counting, with advertising boards added on. Rows of buildings large and small, plastered in signs — that is the landscape of capitalist Seoul. A city that never sleeps, lit through all twenty-four hours.

Which is why Agents of Mayhem (2017), a game that made the triple jump its basic verb of action, chose near-future Seoul for its space. The action performed most often is vaulting over, and scaling, buildings hung with signboards. Though the limits of the studio’s technology and planning left its Seoul an empty city, drained of foot traffic, the act of running and leaping through such a city is in essence the same experience as web-swinging through New York in a Spider-Man game: a sprint through the city that never sleeps.

A compressed yet megalopolitan cyberpunk city that still holds premodern architecture — the trait, one suspects, that whetted developers’ appetites. Scott Phillips, design director of Saints Row: The Third, remarked that the “Gangnam Style” video was close to the tone his series pursued.

The neon image of the high-tech city — capitalism presupposed — is therefore not confined to Overwatch and Agents of Mayhem. The form of Korean signboards packed edge to edge can be found in the backdrop of the 1997 shooter Einhänder, and appears in GTA IV (2008) as well.

Already in 1997, Korean signage was in use for a cyberpunk-flavored night backdrop. (source)

Attempts from Our Side

The three codes listed so far are probably the largest masses of Korea’s image realized in games — and the three look valid in other artistic media as well. But here let us summon the first question again — Jung Jae-hoon’s “don’t we still not know?” — and slot it back in. The questions that follow are these. Are those three really all there is? Or: can we be satisfied with those three alone?

How do Korea’s own games want to hold Korea? The desire observed most often is to use Korean space itself, as it stands, for game space. The racing games City Racer (2003) and RayCity (2006) built the Seoul of their day into their tracks. Closers (2014) likewise rendered streets across Korea, Seoul included, down to the signboards, as backdrop. The games now in development attempt Korean space more boldly still.

One user has even catalogued the real streets used as Closers’s backgrounds.

Of the three spaces so far revealed for the metaverse simulation inZOI, Dowon is modeled on Seoul’s Gangnam district — in effect a faithful rendering of the geography of Samseong-dong. Nakwon: Last Paradise has announced its ruined Yeouido and Jongno, with Tapgol Park and the Nakwon Arcade visible as game space. DokeV, in development at Pearl Abyss, likewise means to carry the Korea of the present into the game: the White Whale Village of its trailer is built on Busan’s Huinnyeoul Culture Village. An open-world RPG project attempting the same, Project Ryu, exists as well.

Beyond the present Korea, there are attempts on the Korea of the past. The Netflix drama Kingdom’s global hit — zombies set loose in a fictional Joseon — and the craze for its “cool hats” (the gat, the jeonrip, and the rest) offered an important hint: the historical, too, can appeal. Perhaps the seonbi is a code convertible into a stereotype, like China’s wandering swordsman or Japan’s samurai.

For reflecting Korea’s past codes in games that are not history titles, the genre of choice is, after all, fantasy.

So Black Desert, in its 2023 “Land of the Morning Light” update, brought Korean traditional elements wholesale into its design and play — and with them, Hanyang’s Yukjo Street and a royal palace entered the game. The recent challengers in this line are two games in development: Woochi the Wayfarer and Project Windless.

Woochi the Wayfarer, with Jeon Woo-chi as its hero — easily confused with the indie game Jeon Woochi, now in early access, but far larger in scale — will, to judge from its trailer, put the old Korea’s Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and shamanism at the center through its Taoist-adept protagonist. Project Windless is being built on the world of the novelist Lee Yeongdo’s The Bird That Drinks Tears, a setting dense with elements drawn from Korean tradition: a race called the dokkaebi, the sport of ssireum, Korean archery, and more. The genres for realizing the past are history — or fantasy. The next hints in this line will come from what these two games show, each at its different point. By Jung Jae-hoon’s measure their finish will decide their success; but their function as hints will operate regardless of finish.

Woochi the Wayfarer centers on traditional occult elements — Taoist adepts, shamans.

How the dokkaebi and the other elements of Lee Yeongdo’s “Bird” series world will be explained to, and understood by, global players is the point to watch.

The right to define oneself belongs to others — but it belongs, of course, to oneself as well. Korea’s game creators are unearthing this and that from Korea’s present and past. What matters is what understandings and misunderstandings people beyond Korea will form through the games, once these elements have been rearranged as games. That is itself the hint — and at the same time, the Korea perceived outside through those understandings and misunderstandings will be poured back into their games in turn. Someday their perception will reach parts of us other than Kim Kaphwan, a war with the North, and the towers of Gangnam. And that will let us experience, through games, yet another us.