Sophomore year was beginning, and the troubles of being a freshman were over, or so I thought. I decided early on it the year that I wanted to stop playing lacrosse due to the experience that I had during the first year of junior varsity. All of my friends that I usually hang out with are still playing and that left me with nothing to do. I knew I wasn’t the greatest lacrosse player in the school, and that my skill was reaching the best it could be, so that also drove me away from continuing to play. While everyone was at fall practice, I had to find something to do.

It seems like there is nothing to do in Auburn if you don't play sports. So I was pretty much forced to stay inside and just sit on the computer all day, which wasn’t to much of a problem, since I was already interested in computers. So while everyone was outside during the fall, I was inside. My parents started to get angry at me for spending so much time in my room alone. “Go outside and so something” they would say to me as a I would sit there. Now many people would say that I was wasting my time and that I should go do something productive with my life. What they didn’t know was that, I had started to play an old game of mine that I used to love, Starcraft Broodwar. When I was 6, it came out and I was intrigued in the complexity and skill needed to play successfully. Being 6 at the time, I was never very good at the game. But with being older, I had more patience and was able to understand the mechanics behind playing.

During the summer of Sophomore year, the sequel came out, StarCraft II. I instantly bought the game, I even went to the midnight release. I could already tell that no one played the game around Auburn since I was the only one there to buy it. None the less, I still bought it. Now this is where my mom would yell at me, saying how I was wasting my time and how I should get a job, which I did, but what she didn’t know was that this game, was the gateway connection to my culture of Korea. The game in Korea is like what football is here in America. The game itself, opened up so many doors for me. While playing I met a lot of Koreans, and started to talk to them on a regular basis.

The discussions would range between daily life, to music styles, and fashion. The differences are amazing and drastic. With Korea being twelve hours ahead of us, I would often stay up till 2 in the morning talking to them. I was soon learning the language of Hangul. This community of people who play this game are in my eyes, some of the most friendly and intelligent people I have met. The friends that I hang out with are great, and I could never replace them, but the community of StarCraft are on another scale.

Isolation from people can be a terrible thing, but it was one of the best things that happened to me. Without it, I would have never gotten into my culture or have met the fantastic people who live over 2,000 miles away. So my parents have stopped bugging me about being alone in my room all day, since they know that I'm not really alone.