If you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of in to League of Legends.
And as much as I’m typically opposed to doing stuff like playing the same game I could play back at home, there was a part of me that was really curious to find out what League would be like in Korea, the region of the world in which the talent is undisputedly the greatest and where the competitive scene is respected and regarded as a legitimate, money-making spectator sport.
I wanted to try playing League of Legends on the Korean server and see what the differences were. And surely, in the part of the world where League is so highly regarded, I should be able to find some cool League merch, or some professional League gaming team swag, right?
It started out pretty amusingly, when I got to Korea. Through international roaming, my phone piggybacked onto whatever provider would allow it, and in the case of being in Korea, my phone immediately latched onto an SK Telecom signal. Now this might seem like no big deal to the vast majority of people, since SK is one of South Korea’s corporate giants that have their fingers in just about every possible business venture from petroleum to telecommunications, but to a League fan, SK is primarily known as the company that owns SKT T1, basically the Chicago Bulls or New York Yankees of the League competitive scene. SKT has won two of the five world championships (and Korea didn’t play at all in year 1) and are in position to compete for a third, but they are undoubtedly the most prominent team in the entire world, when it comes to League.
Yeah, just connecting to SK Telecom cellular service elicits that much of a response.
Anyway, not long after settling in in Seoul, it wasn’t long before I had a lull and realized that I should get on the interwebs and begin exploring the notion of launching League of Legends in Korea. I opened up the client, and typically changing regions is as simple as a drop-down menu, and selecting between North America, Europe, but in the case of the Korean server, it’s apparently not quite so easy.
I knew that I would have to set up a new account to play on the Korean server, but I didn’t realize that I would have to download an entirely new client in order to play. Regardless, since I can read Korean and recognize equivalent buttons on the Riot Games Korea website, I was able to navigate my way into downloading the Korean client.
So all I need to do is set up my account, and then I’m all ready to step onto the Rift, right? Not quite so fast.
In North America, to sign up for an account, you need an email address. Full stop, period. That’s all. You sign up, receive an email to confirm, and then you’re free to go feed, smurf, or smurf and feed.
To sign up for an account in Korea, you need to either prove your identity via an internal, Korean-nationals only PIN identification, or through a Korean cell phone provider who has presumably done all the identification check already. Although I was disheartened to see such security in place, I can’t really say that I was surprised by it, since I remember running into such stonewalls when trying to sign each of my parents up with accounts on particular popular Korean websites that also require such verification.
Seeing as how I am an American citizen, with no way to prove Korean citizenship, this proved to be problematic. But, much like my parents’ way of getting around their obstacles signing up for Korean websites, I got around it the same way: by using their friends.
By the good graces of a friend of my mom letting me sign up with his cell phone, I was able to verify a Korean citizenship requisite for an account. It’s crazy too, because once the request is submitted, Riot Korea literally puts a 3-minute timer on the screen in which you should receive a text verification code onto your mobile device which then needs to be entered immediately. Needless to say, it was a little nerve-wracking when you’re not fluent in text reading proficiency, and there’s a very big brother-y clock putting on the full court press.
But everything seemed to check out, and within minutes, I was logged onto the South Korea League server, and ready to play.
Except I was starting at the bottom of the barrel all over again, needing to do the tutorials, bots by level 2, PVP by level 5, and the greatest game mode of all time ARAM, unlockable at level 6.
It’s fine though, whenever I couldn’t sleep on account of jetlag, or was waking up too early before the rest of Seoul would wake up, I was playing a bunch of bot games with Annie, practicing last-hitting and experimenting with items I don’t typically use, like the Protobelt.
Whenever I ventured off on my own throughout Seoul, I was always hoping to come across a store or an area that was overtly nerdy, or where I had the possibility of finding some unique Korean League merchandise, or perhaps some Korean LCK team gear. I visited several malls and shopping centers throughout my numerous days of exploring Seoul, hoping for just this, because nothing would be more hipster to demonstrating my League fandom, than having like an official SKT shirt, or some piece of League paraphernalia that was exclusive to Korea.
Yeah, well that didn’t happen. Apparently, Seoul and the rest of South Korea aren’t really big on overt nerd culture, at least not remotely close to how accepted it is in America and other parts of the world. You can find a UNIQLO store in just about every shopping center, an H&M in about every other one, and there’s not a shopping district in Seoul that doesn’t at least claim to sell Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Burburry or any other exorbitantly expensive name brand that Asian people go nuts over.
But League stuff? Not going to happen. Unless you count the Coca-Cola product cans that are still in circulation that happen to have Yasuo, Zed, Ezreal and Lee Sin on them. Honestly, it’s not just League stuff either; Korea has plenty of professional sports outside of gaming, most notably soccer and baseball, with prevalent leagues for both, much like America has a litany of MLB, NBA, NFL and NHL franchises among many other niche organizations that merchandize.
The difference is, finding anything that’s team/organization-related in Korea was clearly an equation that I couldn’t solve. Seoul sells, things, in odd clumps based on location, and I’m pretty sure I walked through what might have been a sporting goods neighborhood, but from the windows I was peering in, I surely wasn’t seeing any individualized apparel. Lots of ski, golf and hiking equipment, but nothing related to sports fandom. No soccer, no baseball, and especially no esports merch anywhere. Even the stores that had gigantic murals of Ryu Hyun-Jin (baseball pitcher for LA Dodgers) weren’t selling any baseball apparel.
The whole time I was in Korea, was the opening week of Worlds, the League of Legends world championship tournament. Korea had three representatives in the tournament, and in the duration in which I was there, all three of them advanced past the first round, and with little difficulty, as was expected. However, I was astutely aware of all this, because I’m a fan, and I was actively seeking out news and updates throughout the days in which matches were played.
Korea itself, was surprisingly silent about Worlds outright, and nowhere did I see any sort of mention about Korean teams dominating their way into the quarterfinals. I made sure to check sports pages in the newspapers, thinking I’d see some esports coverage, but was literally seeing nothing but baseball coverage, and South Korea’s upcoming match against Qatar. Meanwhile, three Korean teams stomp the competition in a tournament in which the winning team walks away with a million dollars, big deal.
At one point, I kind of hit a moment of defeat, that I probably wasn’t going to really satisfy the notion that League is actually acknowledged in Korea. But then I noticed something in the actual League client, which to be honest, I tend to ignore 90% of the time, since I usually log on, an muscle memory press the buttons necessary to queue up in ARAM.
It was an advertisement for a League pop-up store-slash-art gallery, located in a mall in Busan. Riot had done a pop-up store in Seoul two weeks before I had arrived, that had apparently done so well, they decided to do it again, but in Busan. And Busan was on the tour that my mom and I were going to go on, within the month-long tenure in which they would be there. It was like a goddamn sign from the heavens of something that I had to do.
Long story short, when we got to Busan, I ditched the tour group and put myself in a position of risking solo travel in a country I had never been to before, so I could go to the mall. I actually did question my decision-making process and had to remind myself that this wasn’t ditching something to go fart around in an arcade, this was ditching something for an extremely limited and exclusive pop-up store from a property that’s pretty engrained in my life now.
And honestly, the pop-up store/art gallery in Busan was worth the trouble. It was an extremely well-presented art gallery with some genuinely unique Korean-styled League of Legends artwork, which I bought several prints of for myself and friends. The store was way nicer than any of the clusterfuck merch booths from any Riot event I’d been to in the past, and it had a lot of exclusive merchandise that I can hope to take solace in the fact that few outside of Korea will be able to get their hands on, any time soon.
It was just a whole chunk of a floor in a mall, dedicated to League of Legends, which was ultimately what I was hoping to come across while in Korea. I mumbled my best with those that worked there in broken Korean, about how I was on vacation, and how fortunate it was that I could get to see this exhibit/store, I bought myself a mystery box, and spent a nice chunk of my Korean won on League crap for myself and friends. I didn’t really want to leave, but when I realized that I had exhausted seeing everything 3-4 times over, I felt sad when I did.
Overall, I have to say that although the Busan League store was a true saving grace highlight of my trip, I was surprised at just how non-existent League was in Korea otherwise. It’s a massively popular video game all throughout the country, and it’s respected and regarded enough to be considered a professional spectator sport, so I guess it was naïve of me to assume that it might actually have a larger presence than it actually did in the country. Such is an underlying matter to the overarching lack of nerd culture and fandom outright in Korea, but that’s a different story for a different day.
In the end, I got to sign up for League account on the Korean server, as I had hoped. I played with a Yasuo who dove like an idiot and died to a turret and did the Korean equivalent of “lol” afterward. I got aggressively-pinged at by a Korean Vayne who told me to get out of mid, and then proceeded to play way worse than I could have. But most importantly, when I hit level 6, I immediately queued up for ARAM, rolled Ashe, and won the only PVP match I played while in Korea. 1-0 on the Korean server!
And thanks to the pop-up store in Busan, I got to indulge my League itch, and actually leave the country with some sweet exclusive swag.
In the end, League in Korea was a successful endeavor for me this time, but I also understand that I might not be so lucky in a future visit.
