EPT![[image loading]](http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/1878/societyandstarcraft.jpg)
An article series on Starcraft and the humanities.
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As a college student with an interest in the humanities, studying Government, English, and Philosophy, it's always great to reach across everything learned to link it all together and see the things we do in life in new ways. Since I’m such a fan of SC2, it was inevitable that my random musings would turn to this game. As Johan Huizinga writes in Homo Ludens, humanity is a species of play: "culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning." And Starcraft, as play, has much to show us.
Why Europe is Better than America at SC2
A familiar story: Korea
![[image loading]](http://www.airbornegamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/south_korea-flag-300x199.png)
The tale of Korean dominance is a story that has become the norm for Starcraft esports. Korean-dominated tournament standings are more predictable than Idra leaving without gg, and liquipedians have more often than not found their jobs massively eased by the automated task of filling in brackets with korean flags. While the gap is certainly not as large as it was in Brood War, and much debate can certainly be made about how far the gap is and how much it may be closing/distancing, it cannot be denied that a gap simply exists, proven by the team Korea's repeat victory over Team World at IPL5, and the top 12 finishers at IPL5 all being Korean.
Given the longstanding nature of this korean dominance, the starcraft community has a general idea for why this has been the case. Historically, the arrival of Starcraft and its expansion coincided with the rise of pc cafes (pc bangs) in Korea and their development of their still dominant internet infrastructure (Jin 2010). While a few notable non-Koreans scored big wins (Grrr...), this soon was overshot by Korean dominance. This, along with their high population density over a relatively smaller geographic region provided the seeds for a gaming culture that celebrated pc gaming, Starcraft being a star itself among all of them. Once the ball got rolling, we see the typical cycle of competitive dominance - once a region becomes the best at a certain competition, new competitors likewise are better due to their exposure to better competition. Hence, the need to go to the EPL to play among some of the best in soccer, the need to go to the NBA to play among some of the best in basketball, or the need to go to Korea to play among some of the best in Starcraft.
Additionally, Koreans have become famous for thier highly disciplined training house structure and practice regimen (for example: photos of the CJ gaming house). Not only do such places guaranteed consistent and unfettered commitment to starcraft gaming (with needs like food and laundry met by those running the house), they allow gamers to easily have direct access when it comes to finding practice partners or theorycrafting. Not only do practice houses provide a greater quantity of training, they allow greater quality of training. FXO Unstable's blog on the FXO training house and their regimen reveals a bit of how this environment can produce a highly specialized form of meta-gaming and preparation.
Further Down the Food-Chain: Europe and America
While the Korea-foreigner gap is quite obvious, another de facto skill-gap exists in the Starcraft 2 esports scene: the gap between Europeans and North Americans. In almost every single ranking system or criteria, North Americans fall behind when it comes to Europeans. Even in the early days of the beta, Europeans triumphed over America in the Europe vs. America showmatch.
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/y3IxZ.jpg)
Remember this old thing? Ah, the memories...speaking of which, it would be cool to see another one of these showmatch series ^.^
According to Aligulac's database, there are about 56 Europeans in the top 270, while there are only about 9 North Americans. According to the TLPD, there are about 17 Europeans in the first two pages of rankings, and only 2 North Americans, Suppy and Idra (and at the bottom end of the second page, at ELO rankings 72 and 74). In terms of earnings, 14 Europeans occupy the top 50 compared to 3 North Americans, with the top 5 foreigner earnings coming from Europe (sc2earnings.com). And it has pretty much become general consensus, especially among pro-gamers, that the NA server is weaker than the European or Korean ones. Needless to say, any glimpse of the American flag on the main stage of a premier SC2 tournament is a moment of celebration.
Why the Gap?
Unlike the Korean-foreigner gap, there have been relatively few explanations for the European-American skill gap. The gap certainly does not correspond to what we would expect off of base measurements of GDP, GDP per Capita, or population.
The combined GDP of the European Union is $15.48 trillion, compared to $15.09 trillion in the United States, a difference of less than 4%. In GDP per capita, the EU's is approximately $34,100, while the United States' is about $48,100, about a third higher than that of the EU (CIA World Factbook). In short, economic measurements fail to explain the European advantage.
For population, the United States is at approximately 310 million, while the combined EU has a population 490 million. While certainly an advantage, this 1.6 : 1 ratio is a far cry from the 56 : 9 ratio we see in Europe to American skill/performance rankings (which is a ratio that also counts Canadians and Mexicans [ie Major] in the American count). And population is most certainly not everything. Korea's population is dwarfed by the rest of the world - of course, that didn't stop them from knocking Team World down on their asses.
So, it must be something else. Here, I offer several explanations of what that "something else" is that separates America from Europe.
1. Internet Infrastructure.
Following the same line of thought behind Korean dominance with the rise of their internet telecommunications industry, a similar explanation can apply to the gap between Europe and the United States. This was actually the subject of one of my government class papers: the United States has actually fallen quite behind, especially compared to Europe, when it comes to high-speed/broadband internet. We are lacking on almost all measures: internet broadband penetration (percentage of population with access to broadband), internet speed, and price per internet package.
In broadband penetration, the US ranked 15th out of 30 nations ranked, with about a third of its population lacking access to broadband internet. In internet speed, the US is 33rd in the world, and the US also pays more for its slower internet (OECD). In a ranking of the major cities of the world, US cities all ranked as the 27 most expensive internet packages out of the 57 cities examined - internet packages often with download speeds two to twenty times slower than the European ones (Hussain et al.).
Why is the US behind in this category? While it's a whole other topic (I actually wrote a policy brief paper on this for a government class), a lot of it has to do with the lack of competition among broadband telecom companies and a lack of "open access" regulation that allows new competitors to mitigate the steep investment costs that act as a barrier to entry in such a market (Karr). This also explains why Mexico's internet lags behind, too, since it, like the US, lacks open access regulation, and has the lowest internet penetration among all countries in the OECD (although there are certainly a number of other economic and political factors in Mexico's case, too). While Canada might not have such deficiencies in open access policies or internet infrastructure, with only a population only a fraction of the size of the US, it can only contribute so much to the entire NA server (and arguably, Canada is competitive with the US SC2 player base).
Given these facts: a comparatively smaller percent of its population having access to high-speed internet, Americans having slower internet, and having more expensive internet, it would follow that a competitive venue dependent on the internet (especially with the lack of LAN) would correspondingly have less SC2 strength than regions with stronger internet infrastructure.
2. Transportation and Distance
Another one of Korea's advantages is its large population density. This allows players easier access to centralized Leagues/LAN tournaments, while also facilitating the use of training houses by lowering the costs of having to relocate (whereas, in the United States or Europe, moving from, say, France to the Ministry of Win house in Poland would be a big change in terms of changing countries and traveling far from the home country and community you have become so familiar with). In larger areas like North America with such greater distances to cover, players have a much more difficult time congregating on LAN tournaments, meaning that LANs more often are restricted to localized player pools and not a broader national level of competition, preventing the best of the entire sever's communtiies from really engaging as frequently and developing as much. Most of us have heard Day9's Daily #100, where he explains how he and his brother had to go on huge road trips just to compete in WCG. Of course, in BW, WCG made things better by providing more localized competitions to reach out to diverse regions and pockets of talent, bringing them into the larger competition. While WCS has recently tried to do more of the same, the first year and a half of SC2 had a lackluster WCG and lack of WCS that really limited the options of players who needed to travel to tournaments to compete and make it big.
In this area (pun not intended), Europe again retains a significant advantage. The land area of North America is over twice that of Europe (Europe versus North America).
Not only that, Europe has a significant advantage when it comes to its transportation infrastructure, which mitigates the issue of distance. The last major infrastructure overhaul in the United States came with Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s (and that was a system modeled after the German Autobahn, which impressed Eisenhower so much that he had to replicate it). Europe, meanwhile, has increasingly expanded and invested in transportation infrastructure with the formation of the European Union. The original EU mantra, of "an ever closer union," is one pursued literally in the physical realm, with massive subsidies and investment in roads, rail lines, bridges, tunnels, airports, highways, trains, and harbors(Reid, T. R. The United States of Europe).
![[image loading]](http://www.jbtranswave.com/20%20euro%20back.jpg)
There's good reason why the images on every euro note contain either a bridge or an open archway, to signify connectivity and openness.
Famous and intercontinental roads and bridges abound in Europe, such as the Europabrücke, or "Bridge of Europe," the Channel Tunnel between Britain and the European mainland, or the Øresund bridge connecting Sweden and Denmark. Additionally, Europe has some of the fastest trains in the world, such as the French TGV that runs at 186 miles an hour (300 kilometers an hour). Alongside this speed is the potential for low cost - European airlines have pricing systems that can offer flights for 10 to 30 euros. And with the rise of the EU, the Schengen agreement has almost all countries (with the exception of Ireland and the UK) keeping open borders without need for passport/checkpoint hassle when crossing state lines (Reid, T. R. The United States of Europe).
Because of this, European players can much more easily travel to various LAN tournaments with dreams of making it big, perhaps turning those dreams into reality. This may explain why we tend to see a lot more European newcomers or rising stars with easier transportation to various open tournaments like Dreamhack and its BYOC competitions.
3. Job-Training and Social Buffering - Liberal versus Coordinated Market Economies
Then, on a more macro-scale (no, not that kind of macro), economy type has a large role to play. One of the major differences between the United States and Europe is the political and economic attitude towards social welfare spending. While there is a largely negative attitude in the United States towards the "welfare state," many Europeans support the social model as a necessary and basic guarantee, and this division in perspective is often a defining characteristic used by Europeans and Americans to differentiate themselves from each other.
As a result of their social spending, European states have much a much beefier social safety net to support players contemplating or pursuing a career in professional gaming. In fact, their more generous unemployment assistance creates a much stronger replacement ratio (how much a worker's former income is replaced through benefits) than that of the United States. For a couple with two children and an income a little below average, the replacement ratio is about 50% in the US, compared to 85% in France, 83% in Britain, and 90% in Sweden and the Netherlands (Reid, T. R. The United States of Europe). With such a system, there is much less pressure to monetize pro-gaming as a career, and much less pressure for players to instantly make it big or retire/pursue another line of work that is more financially stable.
In fact, this difference is one that helps distinguish liberal market economies (USA) from coordinated market economies (EU), where EU countries and their coordinated market economies have governments playing a much more active role facilitating agreements between corporations, unions and workers, as opposed to the laissez-faire approach of liberal market economies. One result of this social spending is its impact on the type of worker that thrives. For the liberal market economy, capital is impatient and a lot more fluid - this, combined with a lack of social protection, results in workers that try to cultivate more general skills so that they can more easily shift with the flow of the economy or find another job if they end up unemployed. Specializing becomes a risk if those skills are non-fungible/non-transferable to other jobs and you end up unable to find employment in that particular market. In the end, states with social spending are able to cultivate a larger presence of specialized workers because the risk of specializing in work skills is offset by social protections, wage protections, and unemployment/employment protections offered by the government (Estevez-Abe, Iverson, and Soskice).
And becoming a starcraft 2 pro is a heavily specialized job. As much as we'd like to talk about how SC2 improves our multitasking, decision-making, etc., a huge bulk of SC2 knowledge and expertise is useless in every other job. Knowing the proper counter to the Parting soul-all-in won't help you anywhere outside of esports (nevermind the fact that you can never defeat soul, anyways
). Ending Thoughts
Now, I didn't include "culture" as a factor for good reason. Hopefully we're beyond the point of believing that things are the way they are because of some vague wave towards "culture," which really just masks the presupposition that things are the way they are "just because they are." And the primordialist perspective, which argues for an inherent cause latent within a group of people, seems overly deterministic and overly simplistic. If anyone examines history or society, they should be able to see that culture and history are shaped through the larger scheme of things, and don't always end up in one uniform, predetermined path.
After all, another major issue is the diversity of individuals and sub-societies in the aforementioned regions. I initially approached this blog with the idea of comparing the EU and NA servers, but North America is obviously composed of more than the United States. Still, a lot of my analysis focused on the United States because North America is still pretty divided, so there's a definite lack of aggregate facts concerning the area as a whole, and the United States as the richest and most populous in the area was a good subject for examination.
Please also keep in mind that this was meant to simply examine general factors. The existence of these factors certainly won't prevent an American player from beating Europeans or becoming a top-tier player, and individuals always have their own unique paths driving them forward. Don't worry guys, I'm sure that IdrA, Suppy, and others will do well in the new year of SC2
. But understanding these factors might help us understand how Starcraft 2, and even esports as a whole, functions in the context of a broader world, and how patterns in esports might interact or reveal other underlying patterns throughout the rest of society.
I thought of writing this up some time ago when it was more timely/people were talking about the whole European versus NA stuff, but I was too busy and only had the time now for Christmas vacation. Might be a little untimely now/out of nowhere, but I decided I'd just blog my thoughts on the matter. And of course, discussion is welcome!
Cheers everyone, and have a happy 2013. :D
