Yoon Hyung-seop

Yoon Hyung-seop has become the first in Korea to gain a PhD in gaming with a dissertation on massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPG). Although other academics have written theses on gaming, they were in other disciplines like engineering or the humanities.

The 42-year old graduate student in the Computer Science Department of Sangmyung University selected 20 essential elements that make the multi-player online games interesting and applied them to popular games including AION, Lineage II and World of Warcraft. "I tried to draw up systematic indicators that can be used in developing games, such as sense indexes for graphics and sound and interaction indexes for community activities and others," he said.

Yoon has over 10 years of experience in the field. In his four years at the National Information Society Agency under the then Ministry of Information and Communication, he initiated the nation's first game exhibition. In 1999, he became one of the founding members of a center to promote the domestic game industry.