Korean Couples Court Through Gaming

I finally had a chance to read Florence Chee's paper on korean gamers this morning on the train, after it sat in my "To Read" folder for over a year. This section caught my eye - it was something I saw repeatedly in Korea:

Finding the courtship and PC bang link interesting, I later interviewed a couple in their early twenties who played Lineage together almost 40 hours per week. Stating that they now help each other cut down their hours online, their story included both of them arriving at an offline Lineage meet. The male saw the female, and it was “love at first sight.” The female, however, did not notice him and ignored his advances. After the meet, the two would see one another online in Lineage, where the male would then try to protect the female from harm against attacks. After a while, this impressed the female enough so that she consented to having a date with him.Their relationship slowly evolved and as of the time of this paper being written they are still very happy, very much in love, and going to PC bangs together.

I suppose I would have tried the same technique as a teenager, but alas the only MMOGs back then were Star Trek-style space colonization games on dial-up BBSes that I mainly played against middle-age HAM radio geeks.

Comments

[Richard Smith]

You can find Florence's blog here: http://florencechee.blogspot.com/. It is a great starting place for people interested in the social (and everyday) side of games.