North Korea's only Steam user disappeared yesterday, but not to worry: They're back and gaming harder than ever
You will not, as a rule, run across many players from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (the DPRK, or North Korea) in the Steam community. In place of the world wide web, most DPRK residents keep to the Kwangmyong—the country's nationwide intranet where you can find homegrown alternatives to Google (called Naenara, also the name of the country's web browser of choice, a Firefox derivative I spent a lot of time struggling with that time I tried to run videogames on the DPRK's Red Star operating system) and Facebook, a kind of Netflix-like, and plenty else besides.
The absence of North Korean users from Steam—hell, the internet in general—means a single resident (or perhaps household, office, something of the sort) of the country has become a kind of anonymous celebrity over the past several years. If you look at Steam's download stats page and flick over to Satellite View, you'll see that Steam puts a little green dot on every corner of the globe it's gotten traffic from in the last seven days.
The US, Europe, and huge swathes of Asia and South America are blankets of green. Africa and Australia's populated areas make a good showing. Siberia? Pretty sparse. And North Korea? Totally dead except for one, single green dot, smack-dab in Pyongyang. They've been there, at minimum, since Steam began surfacing the info in this way back in 2013.
The map doesn't let you get too granular, but this does seem to be the only instance of Steam use between the 38th parallel and the Yalu River, and has been for years. And then yesterday, users on Reddit noticed the dot had winked out. "After years and years, the only user on Steam in North Korea disconnected," alerted a poster in the Steam subreddit.
In the course of over a thousand replies, users wondered what the heck had happened to Pyongyang's most dedicated gamer, with the most popular theories falling somewhere between 'they've been arrested (for some reason),' 'it's a kid in an embassy who's finally learnt to touch grass,' and 'it's literally Kim Jong Un and he's offline while he upgrades his GPU.'
The last one is, of course, ridiculous. Kim Jong-un is an iMac user.
But fear not. First of all, at time of writing North Korea's only Steam user is happily back online, which suggests to me they experienced an internet outage or, well, just had something else to do away from their PC for a while.
Second, it's actually not too uncommon for Pyongyang's dot on the Steam map to disappear every so often. I checked the Wayback Machine and there have been several times in the last few months alone that the DPRK's dot went away for a while, only to return a day or two down the line. Unless I can convince my editors to embed me in Pyongyang for a while and secure the greatest interview of my career, your guess is as good as mine as to why. The likeliest option, to my mind, is either internet outages or, look, the fact that we all need to touch grass sometimes. It's just that when you or I do it, it doesn't result in the only dot on Steam's map of our entire country going out.
Either that, or the DPRK's cyberwarfare division at Bureau 121 has a Steam press account and a few thousand hours in Destiny 2. We're really not all that different, you know.
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