So I Wrote an e-Sports Paper

The newly-emerged world of “e-sports,” or professional video gaming, is exploding with popularity in Seoul, South Korea. Every year the scene grows, as new and innovative competitive video games are released that could potentially harbor a broad following. However, not all video game companies are releasing this type of video game, for various reasons, including the fact that making a video game that is meant to be played professionally is extremely hard to do, takes a long time, and requires a lot of resources. The Japanese company Nintendo, in particular, seems to be releasing game after imbalanced game recently, marketed toward everybody in the world – except video-gamers. This trend has only recently developed, and has mirrored the rise of the professional scene in South Korea. The fact that cultural biases between Japan and South Korea have existed for centuries is not mere coincidence, and I believe there is a direct relationship between those prejudices and the fact that Nintendo is moving in a new, possibly disastrous direction.

If video games are the modern version of throwing a javelin, running around a track, or wrestling, then Seoul would be the new Athens in regards to being the competition capitol of the world. The first World Cyber Games, the self-proclaimed Olympics of video game competition, was held there in 2000. Statistics show that nearly a third of South Koreas population of 50 million play video games regularly, or follow professional gaming competitions in much the same way that Americans follow sports. 1 The professionals themselves also earn similar salaries to professional sportsmen of American or Europe, ranging from a solid $20,000 all the way up to $250,000, and harbor extreme celebrity status, due to the fact that many tournaments are broadcast live on one of South Korea’s multiple professional video gaming TV stations. 2 Nothing is more important to the survival of this industry than the games themselves. This particular facet of e-sports is one of the most extraordinary examples of the differences between professional video gaming and traditional sports. A new soccer or baseball isn’t created every year, and there are no sequels.

The survival of this multi-billion dollar industry in South Korea rests solely on the shoulders of video game developers. There are many, many factors that go into making a game competitive. A few of the most important include: balance, elimination of randomness, precision of control, and a high learning-curve. One of the most popular video games in South Korea is Starcraft, released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998. It’s now eleven years later, and this game is more popular than ever. Without going into much description of the game, it’s a real-time strategy game where players gather resources, build armies with those resources, and try to eliminate their opponent. There are three completely distinct races a player can choose from, and yet they are all completely balanced against each other. Each player starts with one main building and four worker units, and the maps are sanctioned by KeSPA, the Korean e-Sports Player’s Association, to ensure elimination of one player being in an advantageous situation due to starting in a better location (elimination of randomness). The keyboard-and-mouse interface ensure that the actions players make are extremely precise, and the fact that professionals can average upwards of 300 actions-per-minute while still thinking about strategy are indicative of a game with a high learning curve. Furthermore, professional Starcraft players practice ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, making it nearly impossible for people with less training to be competitive against them, much like professional athletes. This is also the product of a high learning curve. Blizzard is currently working on the sequel to this game, which has been six years in the making so far and the game hasn’t even reached its beta-testing phase yet.3 Clearly Blizzard knows how important it is to make games with utmost integrity and respect for the community, as releasing a bad sequel to this game would surely destroy the competitive scene. Not all companies put that much effort into creating solid, competitive games, including Nintendo, one of the oldest video game companies still alive today.

Nintendo has released some of the most amazing single-player games of all time. However, single-player isn’t enough in this new era, when video games are becoming a social phenomenon, and everybody wants to play against their friends or opponents halfway across the world. In my opinion, the closest the company has ever come to making a video game truly professional came at a time before internet competition became the standard: Super Smash Brothers Melee (SSBM) released in spring 2001. SSBM is a fighting game, where players choose from 26 characters to battle against each other. This game had most of the aspects introduced in the previous discussion, although balancing all characters of a fighting game is impossible. The slight lack of balance, however, was made up for by the learning-curve. Advanced players with high precision can control their character in ways that novice players usually don’t even understand. These high-precision maneuvers generally require lots of practice, but can give you an edge by reducing your character’s down-time, that is, the time it takes to recover after attacking or dodging, when your character is vulnerable. Nintendo released the sequel to this game in 2008, and although it was well received with high-acclaim, the advanced community rejected the game as a whole, for reasons which I will briefly describe. First of all, Nintendo took out all the high-precision maneuvers, resulting in a low learning curve, where players can “max-out” their skill rather easily. Second, for some reason the developers thought it would be a good idea to add a random element to the game: tripping. Occasionally, while running around the stage, your character will randomly fall over. This results in a less competitive game, for obvious reasons. And, lastly, the balance issues that accompany the release of any game were not countered by a high learning curve, because there is none, resulting in some characters just being flat out better than others, with a low chance of one ever beating the other.

So why did Nintendo back away from creating a game with a high skill ceiling, and opt for a more accessible game? Clearly they wanted to eliminate the competitive scene and open up the game to casual players, because there are many, many more casual players than there are advanced players. They simply do not care about the competitive gamer. This is not a bad business model, it’s not necessarily a bad way to go about making games, but it definitely does show a lack of integrity, and a lack of respect for the competitive community that puts so much effort into figuring games out, and finding ways to win that the casuals are just too lazy to find for themselves. Blizzard, by contrast, only listens to the competitive community. But the question is still unanswered: why not cater to the competitive scene? I believe the answer to this lies in the explosion of e-sports in South Korea, and the general mutual dislike between the Japanese and Korean cultures.

In entering this discussion I’d like to say that I’m not trying to use blanket statements, and I do not mean any disrespect to the Japanese or the Koreans, but instead I’m merely pointing out a series of historical events that could lead anyone to believe that there is good reason for this mutual dislike. The two cultures have shared trade and culture for thousands of years, as well as a fair share of disputes. In 1592 Japan launched a series of two invasions into Korea, sparking a war that lasted seven years and ended all trade between the two nations.4 Since then their respective cultures have generally been on mutually bad terms. In 1895 the Japanese assassinated the empress of Korea, and in 1910 the Japanese empire annexed Korea.5 This annexation was only lifted in the culmination of World War Two, when Japan was defeated. There is still an embargo in place today banning the import of Korean and Japanese goods into the two countries, although it was partially lifted in 1998. The nature of the disputes runs deep in cultural history. Those differences are not lifted overnight, and could be contributing to the reason why Nintendo seems to be so openly opposing the competitive e-sports scene that may rise to unprecedented levels of popularity in the coming decades, both inside and outside of Korea.

1- http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1002692/video_gaming_in_south_korea_a_national_pg3.html?cat=19
2- http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/18/GAMERS.TMP
3- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_II
4- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea
5- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean-Japanese_disputes

The newly-emerged world of “e-sports,” or professional video gaming, is exploding with popularity in Seoul, South Korea. Every year the scene grows, as new and innovative competitive video games are released that could potentially harbor a broad following. However, not all video game companies are releasing this type of video game, for various reasons, including the fact that making a video game that is meant to be played professionally is extremely hard to do, takes a long time, and requires a lot of resources. The Japanese company Nintendo, in particular, seems to be releasing game after imbalanced game recently, marketed toward everybody in the world – except video-gamers. This trend has only recently developed, and has mirrored the rise of the professional scene in South Korea. The fact that cultural biases between Japan and South Korea have existed for centuries is not mere coincidence, and I believe there is a direct relationship between those prejudices and the fact that Nintendo is moving in a new direction.

If video games are the modern version of throwing a javelin, running around a track, or wrestling, then Seoul would be the new Athens in regards to being the competition capital of the world. The first World Cyber Games, the self-proclaimed Olympics of video game competition, was held there in 2000. Statistics show that nearly a third of South Koreas population of 50 million play video games regularly, or follow professional gaming competitions in much the same way that Americans follow sports. 1 The professionals themselves also earn similar salaries to professional sportsmen of American or Europe, ranging from a solid $20,000 all the way up to $250,000, and harbor extreme celebrity status, due to the fact that many tournaments are broadcast live on one of South Korea’s multiple professional video gaming TV stations. 2 Nothing is more important to the survival of this industry than the games themselves. This particular facet of e-sports is one of the most extraordinary examples of the differences between professional video gaming and traditional sports. A new soccer or baseball isn’t created every year, and there are no sequels.

The survival of this multi-billion dollar industry in South Korea rests solely on the shoulders of video game developers. There are many, many factors that go into making a game competitive. A few of the most important include: balance, elimination of randomness, precision of control, and a high learning-curve. One of the most popular video games in South Korea is Starcraft, released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998. It’s now eleven years later, and this game is more popular than ever. Without going into much description of the game, it’s a real-time strategy game where players gather resources, build armies with those resources, and try to eliminate their opponent. There are three completely distinct races a player can choose from, and yet they are all completely balanced against each other. Each player starts with one main building and four worker units, and the maps are sanctioned by KeSPA, the Korean e-Sports Player’s Association, to ensure elimination of one player being in an advantageous situation due to starting in a better location (elimination of randomness). The keyboard-and-mouse interface ensure that the actions players make are extremely precise, and the fact that professionals can average upwards of 300 actions-per-minute while still thinking about strategy are indicative of a game with a high learning curve. Furthermore, professional Starcraft players practice ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, making it nearly impossible for people with less training to be competitive against them, much like professional athletes. This is also the product of a high learning curve. Blizzard is currently working on the sequel to this game, which has been six years in the making so far and the game hasn’t even reached its beta-testing phase yet.3 Clearly Blizzard knows how important it is to make games with utmost integrity and respect for the community, as releasing a bad sequel to this game would surely destroy the competitive scene. Not all companies put that much effort into creating solid, competitive games, including Nintendo, one of the oldest video game companies still alive today.

Nintendo has released some of the most amazing single-player games of all time. However, single-player isn’t enough in this new era, when video games are becoming a social phenomenon, and everybody wants to play against their friends or opponents halfway across the world. In my opinion, the closest the company has ever come to making a video game truly professional came at a time before internet competition became the standard: Super Smash Brothers Melee (SSBM) released in spring 2001. SSBM is a fighting game, where players choose from 26 characters to battle against each other. This game had most of the aspects introduced in the previous discussion, although balancing all characters of a fighting game is impossible. The slight lack of balance, however, was made up for by the learning-curve. Advanced players with high precision can control their character in ways that novice players usually don’t even understand. These high-precision maneuvers generally require lots of practice, but can give you an edge by reducing your character’s down-time, that is, the time it takes to recover after attacking or dodging, when your character is vulnerable. Nintendo released the sequel to this game in 2008, Super Smash Brothers Brawl (SSBB). Although it was well received with high acclaim, the advanced community rejected the game as a whole, for reasons which I will briefly describe. First of all, Nintendo took out all the high-precision maneuvers, resulting in a low learning curve, where players can “max-out” their skill rather easily. Second, for some reason the developers thought it would be a good idea to add a random element to the game: tripping. Occasionally, while running around the stage, your character will randomly fall over. This results in a less competitive game, for obvious reasons. And, lastly, the balance issues that accompany the release of any game were not countered by a high learning curve, because there is none, resulting in some characters just being flat out better than others, with a low chance of one ever beating the other.

In an interview, the president of Nintendo Satoru Iwata said, about competitive internet competition, “…if you make an environment where everyone is trying to climb their way to the top of a single tall mountain, it’s clear that the people having fun would be limited to a small number of individuals.”4 What Iwata fails to realize is that the only way for someone to get better at a game is to play people who are better than you, and lose, repeatedly. Whether or not this is “fun” is up to the individual, but I personally feel like there is great satisfaction in failing over and over again, getting better and better, and finally a day comes when you achieve a winning record. Throughout the course of this entire interview, Iwata repeatedly mentions how he wanted the game to be accessible for beginners, while making it clear that the competitive gamer was not in mind. “Fundamentally, Smash Bros. is designed to make different things happen simply by pressing random buttons, so some amazing things can happen without even trying. This makes it easy for beginners to get involved.”4 Statements like this, while true, make competitive gamers shudder. Of course things will happen when you mash buttons, but even more amazing things happen when advanced players precisely maneuver themselves into advantageous situations, precisely counter those situations, and so on. Furthermore, in the same interview, Iwata goes on to say “I truly believe that Smash Bros. was made with less talented gamers in mind, and the idea that stronger players shouldn’t dominate game play is prevalent throughout the game.”4 This statement just doesn’t make sense. Why on earth wouldn’t a gaming company reward the players who spend time getting good at their game? In every sophisticated online ladder system, novices with low ranks are paired up with other novices, and advanced players are paired up with other advanced players. This way, everybody will win sometimes, and all of the competitive aspects of the original game could have been left in, and yet for some reason Nintendo chose to simply throw out all the competitive aspects of the game to solve this “problem” of novices losing all the time.

Another example of Nintendo’s backing away from competitiveness in their games comes in the form of the controller they released for their newest console, the Wii. This controller, while revolutionary, lacks the precision needed for games to be played competitively. It uses infra-red sensors to allow motion detection, and most of the games rely on this motion detection as input. The problem is that there’s no way to get the kind of precision out of this multi-directional motion that you’d get from a traditional controller, with multiple buttons and joysticks. Even Iwata noted that in the development of SSBB, “The Nunchuk controller can be used to play the retail version of Smash Bros. Brawl, but it’s not highlighted as the main controller.”4 Even he knew that a game like SSBB would be too hard to play with such an imprecise controller.

So why did Nintendo back away from creating a game with a high skill ceiling, and opt for a more accessible game? There is no reason why they had to take away the competitive aspects of the game, while keeping the simple controls, like in the original game. This way it would appeal to both the advanced player and still be accessible to beginners. For some reason, however, they decided to add tripping, take out the high-precision maneuvers, and ship the product without these things that made the original game competitive. Making games exclusively for the casual player is not a bad business model, it’s not necessarily a bad way to go about making games, but it definitely does show a lack of integrity, and a lack of respect for the competitive community that puts so much effort into figuring games out, and finding ways to win that the casuals are just too lazy to find for themselves. Blizzard, by contrast, listens to the competitive community, but still manages to retain the accessibility of their games to beginners that is so essential to sales. But the question is still unanswered: why not just keep the competitive aspects of your game in, when creating its successor? I believe the answer to this lies in the explosion of e-sports in South Korea, and the general mutual dislike between the Japanese and Korean cultures.
In entering this discussion I’d like to say that I’m not trying to use blanket statements, and I do not mean any disrespect to the Japanese or the Koreans, but instead I’m merely pointing out a series of historical events that could lead anyone to believe that there is good reason for this mutual dislike. The two cultures have shared trade and culture for thousands of years, as well as a fair share of disputes. In 1592 Japan launched a series of two invasions into Korea, sparking a war that lasted seven years and ended all trade between the two nations.5 Since then their respective cultures have generally been on mutually bad terms. In 1895 the Japanese assassinated the empress of Korea, and in 1910 the Japanese empire annexed Korea.6 This annexation was only lifted in the culmination of World War Two, when Japan was defeated. There is still an embargo in place today banning the import of Korean and Japanese goods into the two countries, although it was partially lifted in 1998. The nature of the disputes runs deep in cultural history. Those differences are not lifted overnight, and could be a small contributing factor as to the reason why Nintendo seems to be in such opposition the competitive e-sports scene that may rise to unprecedented levels of popularity in the coming decades, both inside and outside of Korea.

1- http://www.associatedcontent.com/arti...outh_korea_a_national_pg3.html?cat=19
2- http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/18/GAMERS.TMP
3- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_II
4- http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/ssbb/vol1_page1.jsp
5- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasions_of_Korea
6- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean-Japanese_disputes