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PC Gamer
PC Gamer
Joshua Wolens

North Korea's only Steam user disappeared yesterday, but not to worry: They're back and gaming harder than ever

This undated picture, released from Korean Central News Agency on January 6, 2008 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Il (C) inspects the newly built Wonsan Youth Power Station in Kangwon province in North Korea. AFP PHOTO / KCNA via KNS.

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.

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