Column: 'A Journalistic Bent - The Spacewar Test'

Jim Rossignol's new column, 'A Journalistic Bent', takes a hard look at all the issues of gaming, games development, and the games themselves, and the inaugural issue discusses why games are increasingly important to culture itself. In this extract, Rossignol takes a more detailed look at how a trip to South Korea made him understand the true worldwide importance of video games: "Electronic games permeate far more of the world than we care to consider. All gamers are aware of the massive importance of Japan to our gaming culture, but the sheer enormity of what needs to be said by gamers was brought home to me personally last year, when I found myself visiting Seoul in South Korea, in order to document some of their game culture. It's a city that seems anomalous in the gaming world. Millions of gamers play a range of PC games that are barely heard of in the West, often doing so as part of a bustling nightlife culture of game clubs and internet cafes. Switch on the TV in Korea and you'll flick through half a dozen channels that only display videogames, played for big money in fiercely competitive tournaments across the city. Standing at the back of a TV studio in which ranks of teenage girls keenly watched the tactical moves of intense young Starcraft players, I realised that perhaps I'd been born in the wrong country. We might be crazy about games in the West, but this was a whole new frontier of gaming interests." You can now read the full Gamasutra column on the subject for more of Rossignol's insight (no registration required, please feel free to link to this article from external websites).