Hey, not going to disgrace the actual forums with this

But essentially, wanting to do a academic paper on SC2 e-sports, and was wondering how I could approach it?

A few brainstorming sessions later, haven't really come up with much, so wondering if anyone out there has a cool way of applying economics to sc2 that could have enough substance for an academic paper?

:D

sc4k

United Kingdom5454 Posts

April 23 2013 14:14 GMT

Surely there's some complicated maths/economics formulae for dictating when exactly it is best to make base expansions? Might that be of use?

Arachne

South Africa426 Posts

April 23 2013 14:33 GMT

To be honest, i'm not sure if something like that has a lot of substance at the end of the day. It almost feels like it would be a series of mini-studies as opposed to one big one.
Thanks for the idea tho.

cravin74

Malaysia1088 Posts

April 23 2013 14:41 GMT

Are you looking at the game per se or the industry surrounding the game? I remember reading a thread about someone calling for collaborators on a starcraft related paper 2-3 weeks back.

Edit: Found it. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=407821. I would be keen on this if I wasn't about to start my own dissertation in the next few months.

HeeroFX

United States2704 Posts

April 23 2013 14:46 GMT

What I would do is look at SC II esports as a Market and focus on on either a league or maybe a team. It would require some research on your part and maybe even contacting the league for numbers and stuff and pray they want to share. But what I would do for example is look at maybe MLG and be like how much growth have they had. What models fit them for growth. Are they making a profit or are they at the point MC=MR. THings like that.

chimpandfrog

United States45 Posts

April 23 2013 14:56 GMT

Do something else, this wont pan out. Look at the poster above, imagine writing about mc=mr and never come back to this idea again

HeeroFX

United States2704 Posts

April 23 2013 14:59 GMT

It is a very complex thing to look at and information is hard to get. I thought about this topic before a an econ major. It is an interesting market to look at because it hasn't really been studied.

lantz

United States762 Posts

April 23 2013 14:59 GMT

Are you sure you want to combine starcraft 2 and academics? I guess I don't know how serious this paper is and the context so take my advice with a grain of salt.

One of the easiest ways to impress for your internship or job interview is to talk about your academic paper.
The problem with writing about E-sports is the lack of academic papers and solid data sources already out there to direct you. A strong paper cites or bases itself on other authors/papers to strengthen your point (at least at the HS/College level).

However, if you are certain you want to write about SC2 e-sports, I would look for some trustworthy data sources then make some connections. Although this seems more statistics than economics.

Thought of an idea (Labor Economics): You could write about about the Job Market in E-sports. How fast is the turnover between teams for pro players (probably can just use the wiki as a data source) ? How many players are teamless/unemployed? You could talk about frictions in the labor market ( where do progamers have to consider moving to before joining a team (West Coast US, places in Europe, Korea, etc.) . and much more you can talk about haha.

ScrubS

Netherlands436 Posts

April 23 2013 15:02 GMT

Yeah I think HeeroFX hit the nail. You gotta do something with the esports market. For example how effective commercials are, as the commercials can be targeted to a very specific group of people (young males)

AnythingThenDelete

381 Posts

April 23 2013 15:10 GMT

#10

Hello,
I think you could first describe the state of the scene when SC2 comes out ( bw, korea , wcg, no korea) and then try to find a way to describe how the scene has been evolving and why ( I 'm thinking about the expansion of e-sport in global especially with LoL and the first internationnal of Valve [ it seems to me that since then every big company wants to show that hey too have 1M 1.6M 2M dollars to spend in e-sport)

ESL and MLG seems to me to be the biggest contributor , but there is also dreamhack ipl and everything, it might be hard to find all the "fans " like M.Arbalet and others guys that put money in e-sport)

Then you could be more specific on who sonpsonrize what( team , individual player , tournaments) , and talk also about the streams/youtube channels/ vods system of many tournaments

and maybe little other things like little tournament that require a fee first

WalkinDead

88 Posts

April 23 2013 15:29 GMT

#11

talk about how sc2 is a main contributing game to the developing market of esports

iamho

United States3347 Posts

April 23 2013 17:09 GMT

#12

Sounds like a terrible idea, to be honest. There's no way you could write an essay in-depth about Starcraft economics. The only thing I can think of is using simultaneous game analysis to dissect the metagame, but I doubt you could get enough information to be worthy of an economics paper. Not to mention, you won't be able to find any empirical studies on Starcraft. Or you could do some general analysis of the esports "market" and pull up some crap about d=s, but I don't think that would be worthy of an undergrad-level econ paper.

ieatkids5

United States4628 Posts

April 23 2013 17:24 GMT

#13

this is soooo broad, you can write just about anything... here are some ideas to get you started on some more specific areas:

macro - take a look at the industry as a whole and see what cool analysis/trends/conclusions you can come up with by looking at data (if you can find any)

micro - see if you can find company or team-specific data that you can analyze, with a focus on how they operate

financial - maybe you can look at blizzard financial data, and look at their investments, assets, how they support SC2 and the gaming industry, the competition/tournaments

game theory - take a specific matchup and analyze it. or analyze how a team puts together a line-up in the korean leagues or something of the sort.

really, econ is such a broad topic... is this high school level? or university? what class? (micro, macro....) does your teacher/prof want a paper with lots of quantitative analysis, or qualitative (for example, take some econ theory and apply it to SC2 to explain something)?
-

Nymphaceae

United States350 Posts

April 23 2013 19:07 GMT

#14

This seems like a really bad idea. IMO, the best idea would be to talk about balancing the game. There are lots of numbers in that.

dongmydrum

United States139 Posts

April 23 2013 20:07 GMT

#15

influence of caster, team, player, tournament on viewership. This is something I'd like to know. you can just change one variable while holding all other variables constant to see how much influence each variable has on viewship

HeeroFX

United States2704 Posts

April 23 2013 20:31 GMT

#16

It's not a terrible topic at all esports market is very unique. Because the game being played actually affects who's gonna watch. Example LoL huge numbers Huge viewers. Sc2 also reflects that. CoD is different why? Huge player base lack of viewers for it. Could be cool to look at.

Arachne

South Africa426 Posts

April 24 2013 15:43 GMT

#17

I understand the topic is really broad, and at the same time new and unexplored. I am looking forward to something that actually interests me, as opposed to the topic I did my master's on.

Thank you everyone for replying.

@ieatkids5: afaik, your macro example is just a broad micro example still (at least in my opinion. Always felt Macro starts when you compare country indicators

, Maybe Meso-economics (comparing micro across countries ?

Your game theory example is one I had thought of as well, and its sort of covered in my 1st reply.

It would end up as a series of mini-projects more than a paper of decent length

Your financial idea is cool, tho I must admit I would think LoL would have an easier path to track, although one could look at how SC2 is starting off doing it, and LoL and Dota are estabilished with it.

@dongmydrum: that is a cool idea. Not sure how easy it is to hold all things equal though, could be fun

@Nymph: Lots of numbers lots of data too

@WalkinDead: I disagree

@Gurderroy: Hmmm maybe.

If I missed anyone, sorry. Thanks again.

ETisME

12698 Posts

April 24 2013 16:06 GMT

#18

depends how official the article is gonna be. if you are doing something at 2nd or 3rd uni year, then you obviously can't do anything too broad. you need one or two very specific theories and see how SC2 can be applied to them.

needcomputer definitly has the most solid post in here, you should listen to him.

another topic I would recommend is the micro econs: competition between each tournaments (you can compare the amount of veiwership number, hours broadcasted, tournament prize pool, amount of games etc) and analysis which is at a more competitive state. what is the effect of blizzard's decision of the WCS event and the potential impact onto these competitions.