Mobile Games: Endless Immersion with Young Gamers

I wasn't fully aware of the extent to which mobile games had been seeking to monopolize the free time of children until I was standing in the lobby of a Korean academy ready to start my first shift as an ESL instructor. Jet-lagged and beginning my first adventure abroad,  I was a bystander as my new students entered the academy. Each one entered with the same composure: smartphone held in both hands horizontally, head down and incredibly focused on the screen. If the academy owners were lucky, they'd get a bow and a greeting from these students. There would be a degree of interaction between students, but it all seemed secondary to the main task at hand; whatever was on those screens. 

"Smartphones" by Alberto Mari is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Naturally, I assumed they were glued to YouTube - it's what I would do.

Cut to my first few classes. I'm shadowing two American women who've been doing this for 12 months. The first thing I notice with both teachers is the immediate confiscation of the student's phones. I ask them, why not make rules to have them kept in student's pockets? I was met with a look of almost dread that screamed "you have no idea what you are dealing with, do you?" So be it. The phones stay at the front of the classroom.

As my jet lag wears off and I become familiar with everything new, I observe what my students are really doing on their phones. Yes, I was right in assuming YouTube. Some were really watching videos. However, the vast majority of these students were playing video games. 

I check to see what kind of games they are playing. I'm a "gamer" after all, I can relate. I'm hip!

The only game I recognized was Minecraft. Fair enough. The rest are playing Korean versions of mobile games I have never seen in my life. The more I saw, the more I realized....

These games won't end... they CAN'T end.

There is no reason to stop playing these games. At no point would a student put the game down in frustration, or "rage quit". Their eyes stay on the screen.

The desire to keep playing was ever present in the minutes leading up to the buzzers marking breaks and the end of class. In these minutes, my students became hyper aware of the passage of time, looking at their watches, counting down the seconds until they got their phones back and booted up these never ending, low challenge, flashy reward based games. 

It was at this point that I realized where I stood in the world of gaming. The video games I've played have endings. They have learning curves. If they're good enough, I'll rage quit until I figure out how to solve the challenge at a later time. 

It was there in rural Korea, where goats roam the rice paddies and roosters call outside my office. There I learned that while I might be a gamer, I knew nothing about this world of mobile games.