The Cultural Ontology of Games: Lowborn, Technology's Darling, Participatory Culture

Some ten-odd years ago, I had occasion to deliver a new-business pitch built around the keyword "metaverse" before the chairman of a major conglomerate—the kind of name you would recognize. It was the era when Second Life, the virtual world built by Linden Lab, was drawing attention under that very banner. The general manager from the conglomerate who was preparing the proposal alongside us kept giving our team the same warning:

"The chairman truly detests games. He won't even let his own children play them. So our proposal for this new venture must never, under any circumstances, look like a game. In the presentation, we can't write so much as the 'g' in 'game.'"

And yet—of all things—our concept was a fusion of a metaverse authoring tool in the vein of Second Life with an MMORPG along the lines of World of Warcraft, then at the height of its popularity. Because the chairman so disliked games, the core elements—the game mechanics and the like—were first swapped out for the phrase "fun factor," then for the English word "funness," and in the final version dropped altogether. The package was dressed up as a metaverse, of course, but here was software that plainly contained game-like elements designed to draw users in, and the fact that it could not be called a game was deeply ironic—and, at the same time, revealing of a double standard toward games.

* Second Life.

The mindset that wants to build a new platform like the metaverse and amass wealth from it, yet insists the platform's service must never be a game, belongs to the same logic that judges games and the act of playing them to be, by ordinary social standards, worthless and of no use. Latent in this aversion to games is the perception that games are culturally without value. Studies have shown that the more ignorant of games a person is, the more negatively they tend to regard them; yet this game phobia, crossing every generation and age group, has treated games as a fundamentally lowborn culture. Watching a film or listening to music counts as rest and as an investment toward the labor to come, while playing a game is dismissed as a waste of time.

The many game regulations spearheaded over the years by politicians, the media, women's organizations, and religious groups—the Shutdown Law (a nighttime gaming curfew for minors), the cooling-off system, the proposed game-addiction bill, the move to register gaming addiction as a disease code—have done much to cast the game, as a new medium, as something at odds with established social values. Beneath the surface lies a mainstream society—politicians and media included—that is, in part, afraid of the younger generation who play these games. Korean society has long held up, as its ideology, an obsessive valuation of education and labor above all else.[1] It has therefore always made scapegoats of the various forms of popular culture that pull one's children and family away from the arena of study and work. If comics and animation were the scapegoats of the 1970s and '80s, then from the 1990s on—once games had settled in as a common form of popular culture among teenagers and twenty-somethings—national regulation and media criticism of games followed.

Looking at what underlies this backlash, one can surmise that the reaction was so strong precisely because games had been more widely loved than other media. According to the 2020 White Paper on Korean Games, the game participation rate across the population reaches 70.5 percent.[2] Among them the rate for teenagers reaches 91.5 percent, with those in their twenties at 85.1, thirties at 74.0, forties at 76.6, and fifties at 56.8—showing that games are enjoyed across nearly every age bracket. The industrial growth and sheer scale Korean games have achieved since the 2000s have come to overwhelm every other category of cultural content. And yet the pride felt by those who work in the industry appears remarkably small.

In May 2019, when the World Health Organization (WHO) unanimously approved registering gaming disorder as a disease code, a range of opposing movements arose in Korea as well, led by the game industry, academia, and trade associations. One campaign raised at the time, unfolding mainly on social media, hoisted the slogan: "Games are not a disease. Games are culture." A pastime played by more than 70 percent of the population could hardly fail to be a form of popular culture—yet the campaign drew no broad support from game users online. This was because most of the industrial contribution of a sector with annual revenues exceeding 15 trillion won had been built on probability-based items (loot boxes) and enhancement systems. As the so-called "pay-to-win" system—where whoever pays more secures a more advantageous position—became the mainstream of the domestic market, the very users who had always sided with the industry over the Shutdown Law, the cooling-off system, and the game-addiction bill now turned their support into petitions demanding that the industry be regulated.

Underlying this "games are culture" movement, led by industry, academia, and trade bodies, was a sense of grievance at having long been treated by society as a fundamentally lowborn culture. For in declaring "games are culture," the makers of games effectively conceded that, by common consensus, games had until then amounted to a culturally deficient form. Perhaps this inferiority complex surfaced because of the domestic industry's original sin: probability-based items and enhancement systems. But because most of the affirmative cases one could cite for games-as-culture were drawn from abroad, the claim won little echo even among game users, and ended as a movement internal to the industry. Still, I find myself wondering how things might have gone had the industry, instead of merely projecting resolve, responded with a little more composure. Had it acknowledged that outside perceptions of games were poor while also showing some willingness to reflect on the very things—probability-based items and the like—that keep games from being seen simply as culture, users would have regarded it far more favorably than they do now. Instead, two contradictory desires—to make money as money, and to be recognized as culture—became entangled, giving rise to the question: "Games are obviously culture, so why should we have to be recognized as culture by anyone?"

That games became such a contentious medium owes, as Miguel Sicart has pointed out, to the fact that games carry rules that prompt action.[3] This prompting of action is at once the decisive difference that sets games apart from other media and the mechanism that, having induced an action, compels the player to fix attention on the next situation in the chain. Unlike other media, the game carves out—for the player—a gap of time and space for the player to enter, and has the player fill that gap. From the player's side, the time and space within the game become a stage one must step into, fill, and act upon. In this way games have created an environment that offers users a space to participate while drawing them into sustained immersion.

* A scene from This War of Mine.

The actions that occur within a game, moreover, are necessarily bound up with the appraisal of value. Because a game can induce its users to perform particular actions, it functions as a powerful persuasive medium, one that urges specific conduct. It is no accident that the past decade has seen a rapid rise in social impact games, which call on players to attend to a range of social problems. As is always noted in discussions of the genre, the examples are not only foreign ones like This War of Mine or Missing. At home, too, social impact games have been actively produced and have taken prizes at major indie game contests: the Unfolded series, which centers on the tragedy of the Jeju April 3 incident (the 1948 suppression and massacre on Jeju Island); 21 Days, a simulation of Syrian refugees trying to settle in Germany; and Pechka, which traces the life of Choi Jae-hyung, who led the independence movement in Russia's Maritime Province. As games' expressive power grows more refined, and as techniques for systemically persuading the player circulate among developers, the game is being reborn as the most effective medium for communicating with—and persuading—a new generation.

To probe the question "Are games culture?" more closely, then, we first need to distinguish between "games" and "gaming." "Gaming" is the act of actually playing a game, but it is also a concept that encompasses the many activities appropriated around play—watching game streams on YouTube or Twitch, sharing information and impressions on game webzines, and so on. In other words, a game is in itself a cultural product carrying a certain value, and it is only through the process of gaming that it becomes a cultural mode of conduct. Before gaming became a universal cultural mode, it existed as an alternative to mainstream culture, within the bounds of a subculture epitomized by the otaku; but now, when more than 70 percent of the population takes part in playing, the game has become the single most representative popular medium of our time. In that process, to be sure, the tightly belonging subcultural identity once embodied by the otaku has loosened and weakened somewhat.

With the arrival of online networked environments in video games, users became able to form communities within games and to sustain social activity, exchanging views in real time. Since the advent of the smartphone, such game-borne social activity has overrun the limits of time and space and is dissolving the boundary between work and play. Every day, tens of millions gather on YouTube, Twitch, and Discord to watch and debate one another's play and to produce entertainment of their own. Sandbox and metaverse platforms like Minecraft and Roblox teem with countless sub-games and missions made by users themselves. Recent gaming culture has steadily evolved away from the solitary, stand-alone game toward forms that draw out the user's active participation.

As the recent metaverse boom flared up again, it brought to mind a Japanese animation I personally enjoyed, Den-noh Coil. Set around 2025–26 in the fictional Japanese town of Daikoku, the work follows the entangled fates of two schoolgirls who transfer there—Okonogi Yuko and Amasawa Yuko. Though made in 2007, it features, as if foreseeing the future, AR glasses that connect to the internet at any moment as a central motif. The story arrives at catastrophe: the games and pranks carried out through the glasses move beyond the characters' romantic entanglements to generate trauma and, in the process, to threaten the lives of those who use them. The parents try to confiscate the glasses, and at this point the protagonist Yuko and her friends offer a message of their own—that, having once dwelt in that world and come to know it, they cannot go back to how things were. Is our own life not much the same? Having already experienced the world of games, we can no longer return to the age before them. What remains, then, is only the task of enduring and accepting both the sweetness and the pain that games have wrought.

* A scene from Den-noh Coil. Having stepped inside the game, can we ever step back out?

[1] Lee Dong-yeon, "Who's Afraid of Games?," in Game Phobia (Seoul: Communication Books, 2021), 78.

[2] Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, 2020 White Paper on Korean Games (Korea Creative Content Agency, 2020), 495–496.

[3] Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games, trans. Kim Gyeom-seop (Seoul: Communication Books, 2014), 6.