[...] There are countries, however, where this is not the case. I certainly hope that I’m not the first to tell you that South Korea is the promised land for the benighted gamer. A country where StarCraft is a national passtime, pro gamers make millions just from product endorsements, and people are willing to die for their hobby is a lot closer to mainstream MMOGdom than these United States. South Korea is perhaps the culture where this is most prominent, though other Asian nations have similar proclivities. Japan passed a law in 1991 prohibiting games in the Dragon Quest series from being released on a day that wasn’t a holiday or weekend. The Chinese gaming market will quickly overtake the U.S., and is projected to be larger than some nation’s GDP by 2010. [...]

In Asia, as the Olympics is a key centerstage for national pride a lot of government money are funneled toward these sports. Thus, more physical grounds are allocated for these sports.

Also, another good way to compare the important of particular sports in each country is to look at the programming on their TV channels. Badminton, squash, go, or chess may be prime programming, but so can starcraft matches.

Frank

Over the summer, I was learning how to play Rise of Legends better without actually having the game to play it with (my laptop is too weak to support the graphics; go figure). I scanned forums and studied tutorials, but one day I discovered what looked like a streaming news channel for games.

I’d have to search for it now, since it’s been a few months since I last paid attention to my own games (I’ve been busy =P) and I didn’t bookmark it, but it shouldn’t be hard to find. Oddly enough, I don’t remember Starcraft being on the list.

What I was annoyed with was that the commentators logged into the game as observers and thus it was impossible to see the entire map at once. Naturally, this is a “flaw” with the game itself, but I feel it would have been more enlightening to be able to study the entire map and zoom in selectively on particular areas for detail.

*long pause* Found the link! In a chat log. =P

http://www.tsncentral.com/

I think a stronger factor is the lack of the variety of physical sport traditions beyond soccer and the olympic tradition.

I think that’s hard to believe. Physical sport is something I would expect every society to come in pre-built. I looked up the history of soccer in Wikipedia and was treated to a list of First Empires: Mesopotamia and China. Any look at history suggests that physical sport arose as a function of practicing hunting skills; martial arts, which also exist in just about every civilization, undoubtedly arose similarly.

The article also makes mention that physical health is important; in fact, it states that mental health is just as important as physical health. Physical health comes first, as an assumption, and I’d imagine they have ways of releasing physical stress as well as mental stress.

Besides, the Olympic tradition is an international one, regardless of Greek inspiration. Entry into this tradition is entry into international community. When you build facilities for Olympic training, it’s the recognition of your participation in international sport, as China is showing most grandiosely now with its energetic bid.

Another factor is that governments support technology as a way for their countries to jumpstart their transition toward being a developed nation.

This is probably highly significant. It’s noted that countries that are not strongly videogame-centric developed significantly behind those that do not. Perhaps, if they had developed a decade or two faster, this phenomenon would not have appeared.

Another factor is that governments support technology as a way for their countries to jumpstart their transition toward being a developed nation. Mobile phones, broadband, online gaming, and other social technologies are supported by the government early on whether or not there is a commerical market for them.

For example, city-wide wi-fi network is the new technological wave that city governments are latching onto. Taipei, Seoul, Beijing and other key cities have announced plans to build these networks.

As for the sportbar as the locus of spectator and interactive entertainment, the big box cars/vans/SUVs are the locus for the kids where there is probably an Playstation or Xbox installed in the back seats

Frank

In regards to public gaming in America, I’ve got this wonderful image in my head now of sportbar where everyone’s crowded around constestants in video game tournaments on big screen TVs. It reminds me and a friend drinking while competing at NASCAR on his Playstation years ago. Beer and video games go together as well as beer and sports, when the game is right.

- Korea: heavily into PvP, particularly group PvP. Demands difficult games.

- China: heavily into PvP. Games where you have to save — RPGs for example — barely exist.

- Japan: heavily into story-based games of many sorts.

For example, the ability to watch other players’ races in realtime in PGR (I think that’s the one) on XBOX Live.

Actually the people who would know for sure would probably be the publishers themselves – how did sales of, say, Starcraft do in the US vs in Korea? That would be the telling number.

My thought (having no insight into the Korean gaming scene) is that the Korean game market may be dominated by “head-to-head” games (fighting games and so forth). I think for the sake of spectating that an audience would be drawn more towards two players duking it out head-to-head rather than a level-20 whatever grinding it out to level-21.

In other words, perhaps the Koreans tend to play competitive games socially while U.S. gamers tend to play social games competitively.