Ready Player Won: A study of e-sports' compatibility with South Korean nation-branding and development of national star power

Abstract

Over the last decade viewership trends for e-sports (competitive videogaming) have been outstripping once-sacred physical sports events like the Superbowl. E-sports management companies' valuations have soared to hundreds of millions of US dollars, while tournaments and athletes have been sponsored by some of the most prestigious luxury brands on the market. E-sports has even become a medalled event in the quadrennial Asian Games, and continues to be actively considered for inclusion in the biggest multinational competitive event in the world: the Summer Olympics. Yet it continues to be conspicuously absent from formal nation-branding contexts in lieu of music, film, and physical sports, even by famed e-sports pioneers like South Korea.

This dissertation takes e-sports as a primary case study to assess ways that different entertainment industries can be used in nation-branding, and the functional utility that they have in different foreign and domestic policy contexts. It asks which specific aspects of e-sports help or hinder its use in nation-branding campaigns, particularly through the lens of national "star power": a concept describing the image-based charm and "likeability" of a country, such that target audiences become predisposed to liking and supporting the wielding country itself rather than simply acceding to its forceful or transactionally persuasive demands in a discrete situation. Employing a multidisciplinary method, the dissertation specifically examines entertainment industry-oriented influence campaigns from the perspective of South Korea. These are juxtaposed with shortform studies of the United States to further map the applications of e-sports in (inter)national fora.

The dissertation finds that e-sports functions as a powerful catalyst for individual and industrial star power, including by dint of its global audience diversity, promotional viability across platforms, athletes' personal renown, and transcendence of linguistic and geographic divides. These have been successfully leveraged to overcome operational challenges to e-sports' deployment by governments, including intellectual property rights, multinational compositions of professional teams, and limited visibility of governments' in-person e-sports promotions to foreign audiences in South Korea. E-sports' near-invisibility in South Korea's leader-level nation-branding campaigns is found to be a matter of government convenience (prioritising industries that achieve a "mainstream moment" in target countries' media landscapes), rather than any fundamental incompatibility between e-sports and nation-branding.

This research provides significant contributions in three areas. It addresses major gaps in academic-practitioner conceptual frameworks of influence in international relations, particularly with respect to national "attractiveness", national "personalities", and curation of mimetic desire. From a cultural studies perspective, it also serves as one of the first comprehensive academic investigations into the global e-sports industry, providing insights into its internal operations and external applications from the perspectives of three major stakeholder groups: governments, athletes, and fans. Finally, it maps these findings in relation to K-pop, K-cinema, and physical sports, deepening understandings of entertainment industries' idiosyncrasies and their ability to generate substantial international star power.