The Bandwidth Capital of the World

"At first glance, Seoul seems like just another sprawling metropolis: Its buildings, hastily constructed with dubious financing in the months leading up to South Korea's 1997 economic crisis, are the sort of blocky, concrete-and-glass high-rises that give many modern cities the air of prefab homogeneity. Wide boulevards are choked with the oppressive traffic common in East Asia or, for that matter, Silicon Valley. Megamalls and underground shopping centers filled with Body Shops and Burger Kings cater to teens and young professionals. There's none of the high tech visual overload you see in Tokyo, or the clean-scrubbed, old-meets-new urbanism of Scandinavia — nothing to indicate that Seoul is the most wired city on the planet.

Burrow a bit, though, down the alleys, up flights of stairs, or into the corners of malls, and you find something that sets Seoul apart and fosters its passion for broadband: online game rooms, or PC baangs, as they are called here. There are 26,000 of them, tucked into every spare sliver of real estate. Filled with late-model PCs packed tightly into rows, these rabbit warrens of high-bandwidth connectivity are where young adults gather to play games, video-chat, hang out, and hook up.

They are known as "third places" — not home, not work — where teens and twentysomethings go to socialize, to be part of a group in a culture where group interaction is overwhelmingly important....

And the numbers are impressive — South Korea has the highest per capita broadband penetration in the world. Slightly more than half of its households have high-bandwidth connections, compared to less than 10 percent in the US. The growth in broadband has surged in the last three years from a few hundred thousand subscribers to 8.5 million....

The government has even set up a certification program to rate buildings based on the quality of their data lines. Developers who install fatter pipes take the opportunity to bump up their prices - not an insignificant policy in a country where 50 percent of the population lives in large apartment complexes. Fast connections are even getting bundled into the rent, as construction companies repackage minuscule high-rise people-boxes as cyber-apartments. (A typical four-bedroom is 1,150 square feet and costs $2,000 a month, not counting utilities, cyber or otherwise). Built by conglomerates like Daelim Industrial and Samsung in partnership with broadband carriers and content providers, the sales pitch is oddly reminiscent of 1950s American suburbia - except that instead of lawns and trees, developers promise an endless expanse of bandwidth allowing residents to buy flowers, chat with neighbors, and search for the perfect kimchi recipe on the local Ethernet. It's all very Epcot.

Despite this utopian vision of e-domesticity, the real allure of high-rise broadband is escape from the constraints of real estate. Escape into the wide horizons of a computer game, or into the welcoming company of other micro-apartment dwellers — preferably at the same time. Not only is South Korea a more wired country than the US, it is also a more gregarious one. Even if most Koreans had an American-style mega home-theater cocoon, they would still go out. These people do not bowl alone, particularly if they're single (most don't move out of their parents' place until they get married). They want to be with their friends....

South Korea's broadband commons challenges North American assumptions about what bandwidth is for and why it's relevant. In the US, cable, telephone, and media companies spin visions of set-top boxes and online jukeboxes, trying to "leverage content" and turn old archives into new media streams. There is a profound fear of empowering consumers to share media in a self-organizing way on a mass scale. Yet this is precisely what makes South Korea the broadband capital of the world. It's not a futuristic fantasy that caters to alienated couch potatoes; it's a present-day reality that meets the needs of a culture of joiners — a place where physical and virtual are not mutually exclusive categories....

So what about those of us in channel-surfing American cocoon-land? The vision of streaming media piped into the home, video-on-demand 24/7, and needle-narrow target markets is heralded as the way forward. Yet it is possible that this vision is holding us back. Perhaps the real market opportunities have nothing to do with connecting people to the Universal back catalog and everything to do with connecting people to each other. If Seoul is any kind of signpost, the way forward does not lie in the single servings of media we consume but in the playgrounds we share — no matter who's manning the turrets and storming the castles." [Wired]

I could have quoted this entire article because it's so fascinating, so make sure you read the whole thing for yourself. Suffice it to say that South Koreans aren't playing The Sims Online, they're living it.

Be afraid, entertainment industry. Be very afraid.

Showdown in Cyberspace: Star Wars vs. The Sims

"Are too many game companies chasing too few hardcore gamers? If so, we could be set for a disastrous year of reckoning, as the game industry's fixation on its own cultural inclinations sends it into a downward spiral of failure. With so many entrants fighting for air, companies will fold, game worlds will evaporate, investments of time and capital will dissolve into ether -- all lost in a narrowness of imagination and an unwillingness to build a space that accommodates the rest of the world. In the short term, the real battle for an online audience will most likely come down to two games in a clash of true titans: Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online.

But there's some hope. Because while Star Wars Galaxies may seem at first glance an exclusively geek nirvana, the developers have taken an effort to make it something more. Even more intriguingly, The Sims Online hints at a different future and could promise a true breakthrough: a world of online role-playing where everyone feels at home -- and everyone has a home....

A networked variation of Wright's game, The Sims Online arrives at a time when the original title is still a bestseller (two years after its release), joined by numerous expansion packs -- 6 million and 8 million sold so far, respectively, easily making it the most popular game of all time....

What you do there is entirely at your discretion. 'Naked-clown beauty pageants, superhero cowboy bars, and exclusive mountain hideaways are just a few of the many strange possibilities this game offers,' says Computer Gaming World's Robert Coffey. This is because the game comes with no overarching theme. Wright's idea is to provide tools that are robust enough for players to shape their own world, at their own leisure. 'We're trying to make [success] more correlated to your creativity than your time investment. What I want is a game where people play three, four, maybe five hours a week, and feel like they're getting a lot out of it....'

There will be no segregation between hardcore and casual players; rather, Wright is working to make their differing preferences complement each other. "If you have everybody in one area, and they're all trying to do the exact same thing, that's when it starts feeling kind of repetitive. But when you have people all mixed in pursuing different goals entirely, then it starts feeling like, you know, the real world." He guesses that the more dedicated gamers will devote their time to creating fictional businesses or pursuing other economic goals. But doing this creates, in his words, a 'pyramid of dependency.' A group of hardcore gamers can unite their properties to create a grand theme park with rides and entertainment, for example -- then sell tickets to casual gamers. 'I'd like to keep the game structured so that the hardcore people are continually interacting with the casual people.'

The user objects are designed so that players can even create their own games within the larger game. 'You could easily build a treasure hunt with this one object that we're making,' says Wright, 'and strew clues all over the world, and you kind of have to search the world and find the clues. Or play a game like Assassin, where everybody has an envelope and a name in it, and you have to go find that person ... We want to have a lot of activities that kind of span the world.' " [Salon.com]

While I look forward to playing Star Wars Galaxies, it's The Sims Online that's really going to be the 800-pound gorilla. Why? Because Brent (currently six-years old) will be all over Star Wars, but Kailee (currently eight-years old) will gravitate towards The Sims, and there are more of her type than there are of his.

For Kailee and her friends, it will be like playing virtual Barbies. Plus, it will be able to accommodate different levels of players - kids playing Barbies, adults creating neighborhoods, teens creating their own communities, and they all get to customize the game to make it what they want to play.

I call dibs on the public library - I finally get to be a director!