Ladder fear and The Korean Enigma explained. - Page 4

On September 07 2011 10:28 bryanftw wrote:
Some of these starts are misleading, how can you prove that players lost is directly caused by ladder fear? Maybe they just did not enjoy the game.

On September 07 2011 10:25 Nagano wrote:
@OP

Very interesting timing for you to bring up the fixed vs. growth mindset. I just finished reading that book, literally 3 days ago. Upon reading it I thought of making a thread on TL but just never had the time. SO WEIRD.

Where do you go to school btw? I'm thinking this is not just some weird coincidence.

On September 07 2011 09:56 mizU wrote:
Interesting perspective, but I think it's a little too specific to be applied to such a variety of types of gamers.

On September 07 2011 10:33 skatbone wrote:


I have to agree with this. While the OP is well-written, the division of the gaming world into two types of people simplifies the equation too much for my taste.

Given that the OP notes, intelligently, the influence of culture toward the end of his post, I'd like to weigh in that another factor in this discussion might be related to video games and social stigma. How do social pressures in NA differ from those in Korea and Scandinavia relative to video games?

In other words, I think that the psychological analysis threatens to reduce the situation to a question of what type of individual one is. What about the broader social circumstances that encourage or discourage us to be one thing or another?

tl;dr While the OP is smart to acknowledge culture, the emphasis on psychology tends to reduce problems to differences in the motivations of individual types. I find such explanations to be oversimplified to the extent that they ignore a host of other socio-cultural factors--the stigma against professional gaming, for instance--that influence the differences in performance between players in NA, Korean, and Scandinavia.

On September 07 2011 10:33 skatbone wrote:


I have to agree with this. While the OP is well-written, the division of the gaming world into two types of people simplifies the equation too much for my taste.

Given that the OP notes, intelligently, the influence of culture toward the end of his post, I'd like to weigh in that another factor in this discussion might be related to video games and social stigma. How do social pressures in NA differ from those in Korea and Scandinavia relative to video games?

In other words, I think that the psychological analysis threatens to reduce the situation to a question of what type of individual one is. What about the broader social circumstances that encourage or discourage us to be one thing or another?

tl;dr While the OP is smart to acknowledge culture, the emphasis on psychology tends to reduce problems to differences in the motivations of individual types. I find such explanations to be oversimplified to the extent that they ignore a host of other socio-cultural factors--the stigma against professional gaming, for instance--that influence the differences in performance between players in NA, Korean, and Scandinavia.

On September 07 2011 11:30 Binky1842 wrote:
i had no problem in BW doing 1v1, but now in sc2 i can't seem to play at all.
thx for this post, RedDragon57. now i can rationalize this "fear" and can work to fix it

On September 07 2011 10:47 lunchrush wrote:
This mindset thing is definitely a valid psychological construct; I'm working in a metacognition lab at a pretty damn good university, and one survey we give to every subject asks them how they feel about it. In general, people who have what the OP calls 'fixed mindset' are worse at knowing how much they know, and perform worse than those with a 'growth mindset' on many psychological tasks, especially metacognitive judgments. If you think you can't change, you never will. I have a friend who started in Bronze and now he's high Diamond, playing Masters players pretty regularly on ladder. When a friend of mine started lifting, he couldn't bench the bar ten times, now he's repping 135.

It's also definitely true that in Asian cultures, the growth mindset is much more prevalent. I firmly believe that this is the cause of Asian-American students dominating most American universities. The Western world has been fed the 'genetics is destiny' lie so much that we just use it as an excuse to not try to improve, because we never will, right?



Right?

On September 07 2011 11:54 Relickey wrote:
It's a pretty big leap to say that because less games were played from season 1 to 2 to 3 because of ladder fear and not because of a combination of things like quitting the game, losing interest, etc. Also I feel like this write up is just a really big pitch to sell that self-help book. Were you paid for this viral advertisement?

On September 07 2011 11:59 AtlasGrip wrote:
OP, I agree that culture is the key factor towards ladder play and level of skill between Koreans and everyone else. You discuss how culture of the individual affects these things.

However, I think the culture of the *society* is even more important than the culture of the individual! The Korean culture, that is of this "mindset", draws a high interest into a game with a lot of growth like Starcraft. As a result, Korea supports professional, quality Starcraft play. This allows for two things:

1. Due to the high interest in the culture, a higher percentage of people will try to go pro, allowing for talent to emerge from that population. (ie there's a Boxer lurking in every country, just needs to be enough interest and opportunity in that game to lure him and people like him in)

2. The high cultural interest in SC creates more tournaments, show matches, etc., thus creating a higher degree of competition than in less culturally interested society. Competition breeds skill. And it also requires you to practice hard and long (ie 12 hour days of the Korean pro gamers) to meet that tough competition. Both these things increase skill in the players.

In summary (TLDR) - when there's a lot of cultural interest in a sport, more sportsman will be drawn in from that population, and more tournaments allow for more competition and demands practice, both of which improve the quality of those players.