::A Geek in Korea::

I was participating in a thread about multiplayer games as a spectator sport. I happen to know a lot about quality game broadcasts considering I’ve been watching Starcraft on television for six years (!). Lots of gamers were interested in watching other professional gamers play games. Gamers develop an appreciation of games and their players, the same as any sport. Luckily for me, in Korea, watching pro gaming is as easy as tuning into any one of several channels dedicated to gaming at any time of the day. For people living outside of Korea that have never experienced what two teenagers wearing silly costumes battling in an arena filled with thousands of people playing a game for thousands of dollars is like, I will show you what you need to do to witness such a spectacle:

First, download the GOM player. There are two versions. The excellent English version, and the Korean version. While the English version is my  freeware media player of choice (really, it plays anything AND has a great user interface) , the Korean version has the features we need. Download the Korean version of the GOM player and install it. We want GOM TV.

Expand the interface on the right hand side so you see a menu filled with Korean, which I have translated below.

Now, click on the "Games" section of the menu highlighted above to bring up the menu screen below:

In this section, click on the "Starcraft" section. The green box lists all the current Starcraft tournaments in Korea at the moment. There are 5 individual leagues with teams, games, ladders, and different players on two different television channels. If you didn’t want to watch Starcraft, go to the "Online Games" menu. This has other online games of note in Korea, such as Warcraft III and Counter-Strike.

To start a video click one of the matches listed in the lower right hand menu. The button next to the screen shot will start loading the video. There are television commercials before the match starts, but not during the actual game. The announcers are Korean, and while most people can’t understand them, following a Real Time Strategy game while not understanding the commentary is actually fairly easily. The announcers also get very animated when something important happens, so even if you don’t know what’s going on, you can judge its importance by their shouting.

All of this is free, and updated daily. I’ve heard it’s rather bandwidth intensive, but it loads quickly (well, for me it does) and is of respectable quality for the time it takes and the effort to find the matches. Totally beats Youtube or other embedded players for quality game viewing.