Looking Back on State of Play

Relapse: State of Play is a documentary featured in Korea that looks into the E-sports genre of professional gaming but looks into the background of the lives of the gamers as well as the growth of the Star Craft area. State of Play is focused on three boy/men that are wanting to become professional gamers but are all at different stages of the ladder known as the beginners, watchers and pros. The documentary will go through their travels to show both the good and the bad sides to each boy/man story.

‘Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience.’ – Ellis. (2011, pt.1)

Back to the present. We were asked to analyse the documentary through Autoethnography from Ellis reading and former research that has been under taken to understand the other sides behind the documentary. My last blog looked into the sides of Health factors and women playing games.

‘When researchers do ethnography, they study a culture’s relational practices, common values and beliefs, and shared experiences for the purpose of helping insiders (cultural members) and outsiders (cultural strangers) better understand the culture.’- Ellis. (2011, pt.1)

Health Factors: Business Insiders evaluated the views between US Professional Gamers to Korea. Within Korea the sport is shown on Television, team sponsoring while gaining a celebrity presence. The fact that gaming houses were built confined the men into one area for long periods of a day or even for weeks to just simple train. This can be up to 25 hours a day with no sunlight or other fitness activities that can be strained on the men later on in life.

“If someone [in the US] plays 30 games a week — that’s just a random number — a Korean would play 70-80 games.” – Chae told Business Insider.

Women in Gaming: The clear thought behind this is by the value of a ‘man sport.’ In Korea men take a lot of pride and honour in what they do and with their gaming culture it thrives because of it. Evidence of a 17 year old Korean girl came to light about her becoming very good at the recent game known as Overwatch. She was accused of cheating but followed her career into professional gaming where she was abused and had to hide her face. She became so good that she made two professional gamer men quit due to the shame it would bring upon them.

Most of the women shown within the documentary are those who were the crowd and cheering on their favourite gamers. This can be another reason that leads to stress within the players causing further problems upon them besides just the game.

To finalize my findings, I believe the Korean culture is an interesting aspect of their life and how they treat things like the gaming culture there is very fascinating to look into. It is a very different perspective on life there.