Not buying it without actual proof.
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Why is the US so bad at video games?
- Thread starter Opiate
- Start date
Not buying it without actual proof.
Read the post above the one you just quoted. I would genuinely be interested in your answer to the question.
I completely agree that subjectively, one game is given more respect than the other in the US. This does not change the fact that both are, ultimately, just games. Games of skill, of course.
TheContact
Member
Europeans have a more relaxed work schedule, more free time
Lizzie McGuire
Neo Member
This thread gave me AIDS.
Well I'm not sure how you're classifying these things. Are you talking about fighting games or Street Fighter? Are you talking about RTSs or Starcraft? Are you talking about FPSs or CounterStrike?
The US never comes out on top in those respective games, but I have no idea about the data for those respective genres. I know that nobody comes close to the US in Marvel/MK so I would need to see some data before I can really discuss the issue.
I think it's due to the direction each culture takes in how it games. In America we tried to expand the consumer base and did away with extremely complex or difficult games, leading to the popularization of games such as Madden, Just Dance, Guitar Hero and the like. It's not the challenge per-say, but the entertainment experience you get out of them. The East enjoys far more challenging games and sees stressful situations as fun and spend much more time on those stressful situations than we do on our entertainment. No sane American consumer would ever grind to max level in Dragon Quest, Disgaea, Maple Story or Ragnarok Online. Similarly I doubt you'd ever find them playing a game as difficult as a Touhou game or some other bullet hell game.
Vespasianus
Banned
I think what he's referring to is the fact that you don't seem to grasp the orders of magnitude we're discussing here. Basketball pros are heroes in the United States. Fan cults, people wanting their picture taken with them,etc. Starcraft II players are complete unknowns. If they tried to brag about their prowess in SCII tournaments on a resume they'd probably get about the same level of respect as a gas station superintendent.
The highest paid SC2 player thus far made something like 350k. The highest paid NBA player made $27 million.
http://www.sc2earnings.com/
That is the gulf we are talking about here. They are comparable, but only in the broadest sense imaginable. They're comparable in the same way that the President of the United States and a high school grad class' Valedictorian are comparable as authority figures.
After reading your posts throughout this thread, I think I've come to understand why your perspective on this matter seems so skewed.
I'd argue SF2, the golden era was a much different time.
I'm not sure why you keep talking about respect when quoting me, considering I've been talking mostly about pay and the difference between sports and video games, but ehhh. I don't really feel like this will turn into discussion any time soon.
I cannot believe that people have created a pages-long discussion because you feel I should say "much more respected" rather than just "more respected."
Yes, they are much more respected. Just as Basketball players are also much more respected than Curling players, even though they are ultimately all just games (And the latter two are fully recognized olympic sports). Is this sufficient?
I very much feel that everyone else here is skewed, not I. It seems many people here do not view sports as games, when of course that is precisely what they are. Literally and factually.
Just as a slight correction, that is only prize winnings, those numbers don't include endorsements or salaries. But yes, the difference is dramatic.
I don't understand this argument. People in the U.S. don't pursue a career in competitive gaming because basketball pays better? Just like people in Europe don't pursue gaming careers because soccer pays better?
Because saying one merely garners more respect is downplaying the differences. Your main point has boiled down to the fact they're both "just games" in the dictionary. As I mentioned above one draws huge spectator interest in the USA while the other draws relatively zero. One has programs in schools across the nation, often at the expense of education, while the other has relatively zero. Bringing embarrassment, shame, even being the root of mass murders vs being the hometown hero. Being a loser versus being a millionaire celebrity. Scholarships. Sponsorships. The differences are much more than a matter of respect.
You also ignored my post about skill in competitive gaming having no correlation whatsoever with gaming revenue, since it requires very little financial investment in actual products. Competitive gaming is not about spending a lot on various games, but focusing on and pouring your time into one or very few over the course of years, so what the US spends on games tells us absolutely nothing about what should be.
Overall your tone in this thread, in my opinion, seems rather passive-aggressive and dismissive, so I am curious what your answer to your own question is beyond what you've expressed.
I don't understand how pay could possibly change the fundamental nature of something.
If I were paid four billion dollars to play hopscotch, it would still be hopscotch.
Yes, people who are paid more are more respected in the US generally, and basketball players are paid more than Starcraft players. Therefore, they are more respected. Completely agree with that.
Vespasianus
Banned
Well, we have two possibilities here. One is that your perspective is skewed, the other is that apparently most everyone else on the planet has a skewed perspective. I know which one I think is more likely.
The way you're dealing with this issue strikes me as if all of your knowledge on it came from reading wikipedia articles about sports rather than living in a world where elite athletes are idolized.
Oh, and check it out, "Huk" is the 27th highest paid Starcraft II pro ever and he's Canadian! The highest paid American one was 29th(Idra). Canadians: vastly superior to Americans at videogames.
Yeah, inclined to agree with you there.
Kudos for expressing my opinion more articulately and eloquently than I could.
Opiate in this entire thread seems to want to disregard any evidence that does not agree with his previously decided opinion on the subject.
No, this is simply wrong. All of the above distinctions are simply a consequence of respect; they do not respect any fundamental difference.
For example, if Curling were to become more popular and respected in the US, there would most certainly be scholarships for the game. All of this is simply a consequence of being more popular and more respected.
No, I did not and thought it was a very good point; as you can see, however, I'm already responding to quite a few posts already.
I definitely agree that it's possible US gamers simply prefer lower skill games. I'd then ask why that is.
I am definitely not being passive aggressive; I am sorry if that was your interpretation. I have already explicitly stated what my views are and, further, agreed with several people who have brought up good points.
I think it's largely in part of the idea alone is a little goofy. It's doubtful that your average person isn't going to think sitting down to, what in their mind is just watching someone play a video game like anyone else, is going to be all the entertaining. This is the source of a large misunderstanding IMO.
I have never been big into sports and don't know much about the rules to a lot of the popular ones (Hockey, Baseball, American Football). I understand some of the basics, but as far as penalties, specific rules, traditions, and so on though I really don't think I know a lot. I can however still sit down with my friends or parents and watch a game of baseball or hockey because I like the competitive nature of it. That's the important part, the competitive nature. It would be hard to appreciate that without a general idea of what's going on in a sport and the same applies to most competitive games as well, but in general, the "goal" of a sport or a game is pretty simple. I have never watched a game of Rugby in my life, and probably less than 5 games of soccer but I bet I could still sit down and enjoy them because of the competitive nature and a basic understanding of "Oh they need to get the ball down to one end of the field."
E-sports has been growing a lot lately in terms of how amount of attention it gets. It's not that it's brand new, but nobody payed nearly as much attention to it as they do now, so it's a new thing for a lot of people. If you've never watched a tournament for a video game you'd probably think it's a little odd to do so, especially if you're not even really into games in the first place. With that said, I think a lot of people might be surprised by how enjoyable watching a video game tournament can be. I'd recommend catching the EVO streams (huge fighting game tournament) coming up this summer if anyone around here has never watched a competitive game tournament before. Fighting games are some of the most entertaining shit to watch because they're relatively easy to follow even if there's a lot of shit going on at once. It's easy to get caught up in the hype of the crowd and the stream chat even if you don't know much about fighting games/completely suck at them (like I do).
Yeah, that's one of them. I do recall the other one being more violent. It might have involved a broken laptop!
Avinexus
Member
I'm sure its been pointed out but we are comparing a single country to two regions with much higher populations (and thus a likely larger pool of players). If it was split into countries the US would most likely be third overall behind China and South Korea. And even then it would depend on what games you pick.
Or maybe I'm missing something here.
Or maybe I'm missing something here.
Err... that's quite commonly accepted. In the MOBA scene: In the International 1, there was only 1 NA team in the final 8, in the International 2, there were no NA teams in the top 8. In League of Legends, NA won only 1 game in the Season 2 World Championships. At MLG Dallas, 8 teams were invited, 5 from NA, 2 from Korea, 1 from Europe. NA finished 4th-8th, with the foreign teams taking top 3. At IPL5, NA's best team finished 6th out of 16 teams.
As for SC2, I don't follow that as much, but I'm pretty sure there are no US/NA players that made it through to the WCS, even in the NA region.
I don't really think basketball and American football are lower skill than Street Fighter and Starcraft.
PreyingShark
Member
Well, what happened to get them "boned" was they have started making Japanese invites heavily reliant on online tournaments. They also drastically reduced the amount of Japanese entrants last year. The thing about the online tournaments is that until very recently disconnecting on purpose could get you a higher placing than you deserved. So combine the two factors and 2012 Worlds missed out on a lot of Japan's talent.
As far as the Japanese metagame goes, there are two main types of teams over there: standard teams, which are similar to ours, and crazy teams that make people go "WTF?" but work well. So if you faced a JPN player you'd either see familiar Pokemon used very well or you'd get a crazy team that still gave you a challenge - standard teams are more common, though. Regardless of their approach, though, both their teambuilding skills and actual playing are top-notch. To give you an idea, the results of April's International Challenge (Masters division) looked like this:
First page: Healthy mix of JPN and USA players
Second page: 6 JPN, 3 USA
Third page: 6 JPN, 2 USA
Fourth page: 5 JPN, 1 USA
Fifth page: 7 JPN, 0 USA
Sixth page: 9 JPN, 1 USA
Seventh page: 6 JPN, 2 USA
Eighth page: 5 JPN, 2 USA
Do note that from what I remember the online is a lot stricter on DCing now. So these aren't horribly rigged or anything. At the very least JPN has a much bigger scene when it comes to competent players in the VGC format. Essentially, outside of like two sites the USA's scene is pathetic. It doesn't help that Smogon has a large focus on 6v6 because that's not the focus for official tourneys.
So yeah, their VGC scene owns ours really hard overall. We have some top tier players like Ray Rizzo, of course, but if you take the USA and Japan as groups then Japan kicks the USA's ass really hard.
Why? The OP's MO for years now has been to hammer all available evidence to fit into a GOOD box ("competitive gaming", "PC gaming", "Nintendo gaming" (when they're doing well), "cellphone gaming") and a BAD box ("console gaming", "story-based gaming"), and to subsequently be baffled when the contents of those boxes are treated as pulverized and useless. Oh, what's this?
Opiate said:
So this thread is basically 400+ and counting posts of taking a "why do you keep beating your wife?" accusation seriously.
North America or the U.S. exclusively? Because the initial premise was only the United States.
Manmademan
Member
no, it's not.
when everyone else is telling you that you might be missing something in your argument, you may want to listen. There might be something there.
I said many posts ago that Americans do not view sports (basketball, football, hockey, even curling) as games- at least not in the same sense as "videogames", "checkers", "hopskotch", and "monopoly" are considered games.
at the most basic, literal level they are all just contests of skill. But the reasoning as to why "sport" and "Games" are different largely boils down to an emotional argument, not a literal one. If you ignore this entirely when making your argument, you miss the point by a mile. Baseball is viewed as one of the things that makes the country great. a cultural touchstone played by your father, and his father, and his before that. Those that excel at it are revered. Street Fighter 4 is a distraction, and those who spend too much time on it are maladjusted, and in need of help.
It's not that basketball is just "more respected" because it pays better. It's viewed as an entirely separate category. not comparable to videogames at all. The least respected sport of all time (let's call it curling) has legitimacy and cultural value that videogames do not. Even sports that are VERY new (like the X-games) or fallen out of favor (like boxing) are considered to be completely different than something like starcraft or hopskotch, which are viewed as wastes of time. If you want another comparison, look at ballet. It takes a LOT of skill and is very difficult, but men who practice ballet are not held in the same regard as even the worst professional athlete. (speaking traditionally. this may be changing of course).
again, on a literal level sure- there are some similarities, but if you are actually trying to discuss how a country views something on a cultural level, you cannot rely on the dictionary for your answers.
John Harker
Definitely doesn't make things up as he goes along.
Yea, you're touching on a lot of what I was getting it, the intrinsic appeal of the sports popular in America and where that lies differently in a fundamental level in gaming.
You see companies trying now to inject some of those ideals into their game design and tournament structure, making things simple to understand visually, fostering direct competition, building rivalries, giving teams actual names as faces with histories, creating and fostering statistics and making that easy for observers to follow and understand, getting very talented hosts to explain the action and add drama in the right moments... All of these things and more are important to grow the spectators base, and this, build a viable and sustainable market that encourages and builds a talent pool. People need to see gaming as a lucrative future before they dedicate their lives to fostering their own talent, and right now software development pays more haha
This is a really interesting way to further discussion. You state something, imply that I said it, and agree with me.
No offense, but you've brushed aside any and all reasons that they might be seen as different. People want money to live comfortably, not to command respect. If there was more money to be made in e sports, they may very well be seen as a viable career choice, regardless of how much respect they have.
RockTurtle
Member
in this thread we speak in absolutes
I'm sorry, but at this point, you're really saying things without knowing about them. We are not "just not the worst" at fighting games. We have a lock on a few and plenty of competitive top players in all the others. Thread title is "why are we so bad" and keeps changing from "we're the worst" to "we're just barely not the worst" to whatever. no, we represent very well in fighting games. I don't know about the rest of the genres and don't really care, anyway.
For sure. I don't ever expect competitive gaming culture/e-sports to catch on here in the US like they have elsewhere, but they're certainly getting a little more popular as time goes on.
It is not "simply wrong". The things I listed are fundamental differences when you're asking the question of why we are so bad at one and so good at another. Financial and social incentives. Free programs in essentially all places of public education that foster interest and skill. Everything in context, why might we be better in sports than video games, considering all the things I listed in my last post? All of these differences between the two that you chalk up to respect don't make one a more likely candidate for dedication than the other?
Vespasianus
Banned
I think I've finally figured out why Opiate's perspective on this matter seems so strange to me.
There are 200 odd countries on the planet.
One of them, Korea, cares about competitive Starcraft. The rest of them essentially don't. Look at the list of winners if you don't believe me: overwhelmingly Korean, with a scattering of non-Koreans.
http://www.sc2earnings.com/
I see Korea as the outlier for caring about competitive Starcraft when nobody else does.
Opiate seems to see Korea as the norm and the other 199 countries as the outliers.
To me that perspective is ridiculous, though I would be interested in why he has that perspective in the first place.
Exactly. North Americans and Europeans are only likely to invest in "competitive gaming" if they think that their investment of time and money will be rewarded with a viable career. Competitive gaming isn't a viable career at the moment, not even for Starcraft II. Unless you are literally one of the top 50 Starcraft II players in the world you will make next to no money from it, and even then nobody stays on top for longer than a year or two absolute maximum.
There are 200 odd countries on the planet.
One of them, Korea, cares about competitive Starcraft. The rest of them essentially don't. Look at the list of winners if you don't believe me: overwhelmingly Korean, with a scattering of non-Koreans.
http://www.sc2earnings.com/
I see Korea as the outlier for caring about competitive Starcraft when nobody else does.
Opiate seems to see Korea as the norm and the other 199 countries as the outliers.
To me that perspective is ridiculous, though I would be interested in why he has that perspective in the first place.
Exactly. North Americans and Europeans are only likely to invest in "competitive gaming" if they think that their investment of time and money will be rewarded with a viable career. Competitive gaming isn't a viable career at the moment, not even for Starcraft II. Unless you are literally one of the top 50 Starcraft II players in the world you will make next to no money from it, and even then nobody stays on top for longer than a year or two absolute maximum.
No, it's certainly more than just idle speculation. As you can see, quite a few people agree. I'm not sure which games you follow and compare; which genres/games do you feel the US is best at?
Not Spaceghost
Spaceghost
Because a non conventional means of making a living in the US isn't exactly seen as something to be reinforced.
You go to college and then you find a job or go to gradschool.
You go to college and then you find a job or go to gradschool.
RockTurtle
Member
opiate why is Africa so bad at videogames?
The salary of a professional entertainer or athlete or video game player is commensurate with the demand for those things. Highly skilled baseball players make LOTS of money because highly skilled baseball players draw lots of fans who spend lots of money. People, in general, want to make a lot of money so there are many out there who will pursue a career in sports. Professional video game players in the US draw, on a relative scale, no audience. No one is paying $300 for seats to watch a Starcraft match, never mind 40,000. With no audience, you can't draw talent.
That doesn't even touch on the cultural reasons. Many kids, perhaps most, play a sport when they're young. They play as children, they play in high school and then they play in college. Of course the number diminishes as you rise but the infrastructure is there to support this pursuit. No such thing exists for gaming.
In the end though the difference is popularity. Countries or regions that care about these games produce talent because there's incentive for them to do it. Why did it become popular? Who knows. Why does anything become popular in one place and not another? There's just as many answers to that question as subjects we could ask it about.
That doesn't even touch on the cultural reasons. Many kids, perhaps most, play a sport when they're young. They play as children, they play in high school and then they play in college. Of course the number diminishes as you rise but the infrastructure is there to support this pursuit. No such thing exists for gaming.
In the end though the difference is popularity. Countries or regions that care about these games produce talent because there's incentive for them to do it. Why did it become popular? Who knows. Why does anything become popular in one place and not another? There's just as many answers to that question as subjects we could ask it about.
NA is the region, but there aren't any Canadian teams. So yea, U.S. and NA are interchangable in regards to LOL at least.
R
Retro_
Unconfirmed Member
I feel this line of discussion has gotten besides the point
I don't think something being a "viable" career choice has much of an impact on things people do out of passion.
I mean there's not alot of money to be made being an artist or a musician or a chef and most people look down on those career choices, but we still have alot of people who choose to pursue those things as career options because they're passionate about them.
Games are the same way. Again fighting games/Street Fighter are probably the games the US are most competitive in with the rest of the world, and even at peak popularity they don't generate anywhere near as much money as starcraft or league for the players.
This thread isn't just about LoL.
Doing things purely out of passion produces players that lose to those motivated all or in part by making a living doing what they enjoy. That isn't romantic, but the practical implications of being paid to do something leads to increased competition and all kinds of support systems and infrastructure that in turn leads to better quality.
I think culturally and economically people tend to play a lot more competitive games in Asia/Europe. Especially in Asia/eastern Europe where going to an Internet cafe with friends and playing competitive games is a common social activity. It probably has to do with a lot of factors, but I think US gamers just play less competitively then a lot of other countries. There probably is a correlation between the amounts of Internet cafes and gaming skill.
It'a just a culture thing.
It's similar to how the USA can't beat the Netherlands at soccer, despite the USA having 20 times the population and lots of kids play soccer.
There just isn't much of a professional scene so even if there are talented people they never get the pro level training, practice and competition to compete at a worldwide level.
It's similar to how the USA can't beat the Netherlands at soccer, despite the USA having 20 times the population and lots of kids play soccer.
There just isn't much of a professional scene so even if there are talented people they never get the pro level training, practice and competition to compete at a worldwide level.
Wat. I've found the Brazil and European players to be the worst in MOBAs. Especially Brazil.