By following a link from the Hungarian SC2 fansite, I read an interesting article at a well known Hungarian news portal about Starcraft progaming in Korea. Since I found the article a very good read and hopefully I’ll be doing translation and interpretation as a career, I decided to translate it in order to share the article with you as well as practice translation. I’d like to note here that I don’t necessarily agree with the points raised in this article, nor do I know where the author got the figures from or what she/he bases her/his claims on. Also note that I translated sentence by sentence to preserve the original coherence and style, and I have kept the format as identical as possible to avoid any misunderstandings of me claiming authorship. ---- Video gaming is the national sport in Korea originally posted by hancu in Hungarian at http://index.hu, translated to English by kuvasz for starcraft2forum.org Starcraft on a worldwide level is just a computer game where three races (us Terran, the alien Zerg, and the psionic Protoss) duke it out in a sci-fi setting. It was released more than ten years ago, won a truckload of Game of the Year awards, everyone loved it, then put it up on the shelf and played with it later only for old times’ sake. This very same game in Korea is worshipped with religious zeal, and modest approximations put numbers over ten million who still play the game on a daily basis. The finals for large tournaments are held in stadiums where fifty to sixty thousand fans follow the event on big screens (the record being the Sky Proleague tournament held in 2005, where 120,000 people cheered in person for contestants). Two television channels broadcast Starcraft matches exclusively, with Ongamenet peaking at three to four million, and MBC gaming reaching up to two million viewers in the busiest hours. The best players are treated in a similar fashion as rockstars are, and in the teams that are sponsored by the largest Korean companies (the prestige of companies is influenced by whether it has an e-sport team or not), players earn several hundred thousand dollars annually, plus tournament prizes, plus advertisement contracts. And for all this they do nothing else but play Starcraft. It’s true though, that they do it like no one else does. Practice makes gosu Professional players (in Korean, gosu) play the game on CRT displays to this day; players’ speed can only be handled by old systems – the trails on an LCD display would hinder progamers’ performance. In Starcraft, the unit for measuring speed is the APM: actions per minute, which determine how many commands are given by players per minute. Select a unit – one action. Order that unit to fight the enemy – two actions. At first sight, people get used to the controls, finish a few levels, and settle at about 20 APM. By playing multiplayer, with some practice this number can be upped to 80-100. Korean professionals play at 300-350 APM, but legend has it that they have measured 500 on occasions. Gladiators of the new age In practice, it works like this: the left hand bashes keys at an incredible speed, while the right hand yanks the mouse in a seemingly random pattern – the latter selects units and moves the camera, the former gives the orders. Speed is not everything though, because the art of Starcraft is to be able to pay attention to your hinterland and pop home for a fraction of a second to keep up production, expansion, and recon – all in the midst of a fierce battle. Ironically it is not strategy and tactics that make a player a good player (beyond a certain level strategy and tactics only convey the ability to catch the enemy’s spy, and execute a suicidal attack in order to damage the enemy’s base), but it is the ability to mechanically pay attention to several things simultaneously, all at an extraordinary speed. The majority of tactics (80-90%) involve predefined, tested, and optimised moves by heart, much like how chess players do openings and defences. Rockstars The best Starcraft players are truly stars in Korea. Lim-Yo-Hwan, also known as Boxer, also known as the emperor, is one of the best known players, and has half a million registered fans at his website. His joining the army (this kind of thing is taken very seriously in Korea, not even a star his calibre can evade this) was comparable to when Elvis did the same thing. At the age of 25 he composed his autobiography, which became a bestseller with millions of copies sold. Among Korean youngsters, Starcraft is part of common culture, similar to pop music or films. If you are not familiar with the Starcraft scene, you cannot talk about it, hence you cannot socialise and be part of the community. Watching the finals of a Starcraft tournament on a Saturday night is the equivalent of going to a concert or a sports event (such as basketball) in the West. Starcraft competition in Seoul Surprisingly, more than half of the fans and spectators consists of teenage girls (there are only very few female professional players), thus the stars automatically turn into sex symbols. Professional players are treated like sports players in every aspect, and only miniscule things hint at the fact that the games are played on computers: the sponsor of one of the largest leagues, the MBC StarLeague, does not only produce beverages, but it also happens to produce contact lenses. Why Starcraft? At the right place at the right time – this sums up the reasons for the success of the game in Korea. The Korean government in the late nineties saw the possibilities the internet provided, and covered almost the whole country with cheap, broadband connection that is envied worldwide to this day. Only in Seoul there is 22,000 kilometres of fibreglass serving broadband connection for people. This resulted in a local small scale economic crisis when thousands of people decided to utilise the cheap internet connection by opening internet cafés; these places are referred to as PC Baangs, and there are approximately 30,000 such places throughout the country, and they have established the role of primary choice for venues. They are arcades that at the same time serve as discos, bars, and clubs. All this was reinforced by the fact that the console craze that originated from Japan eluded Korea. Koreans simply don’t like the Japanese and everything that may come from there – this mostly has historical reasons: the Japanese regularly ravaged the Korean peninsula from the 16th century, and in the first half of the 20th century they occupied the country for decades. Starcraft crisps in Korea Given were cheap internet and the success of PC Baangs, as well as the lack of competition, when during the spring of 1998, Starcraft was released, and conquered Korea. The game has sold more than ten million copies worldwide, of which four and a half million copies were sold in Korea – a remarkable figure, especially considering its humble population of fifty million. Only the sequel has a chance Lots of games have tried to topple Starcraft from its throne in the past ten years, to no avail. Shooters and action games are traditionally unpopular in the East, and although massively multiplayer online role playing games are popular, matches are not suited for tournaments or broadcast. Single player games are as good as dead – in a country where 90% of the population is behind a 100mbit line, it has become a requirement to utilise the capacity of the network. Only one game has a chance of beating the achievements of Starcraft, and that is Starcraft 2, which will probably be released next year and which is designed specifically to become a form of e-sports. The game was introduced in Korea, and is admittedly aiming to meet Korean demand. http://files.indavideo.hu/player/vc_o.swf?vID=e8b115bf60 In China, coke is advertised with Warcraft Next up, China What happened in Korea in the nineties is happening at a larger scale in China nowadays: cheap broadband is mushrooming, millions get hooked onto the internet and internet cafés, and onto online gaming. It is already a profitable business to run online games (of the eleven million World Of Warcraft subscribers, over five million people play on Chinese servers), and due to the huge market for it, these figures are sure to grow. It has to be noted though that the government is doing everything to obstruct game developers. The Chinese version of online games has to have a feature installed that drastically weakens the player’s character after three hours of continuous play (to avoid addiction); they also have complete games redesigned if the original shows something inappropriate in the Chinese culture (for example skeletons). ---- Source and original: http://index.hu/tech/szoftver/sc220808/
That was a great read. I knew that Korea was huge on E-Sports, but dear god...those numbers are pretty staggering!
Indeed.. I've heard the numbers many times but it still amazes me that a game (Much less an RTS.) could ever be that popular.. StarCraft is my favorite game of all time, and I've been playing it since day one, and never stopped.. But.. Wow.. Their dedication is beyond anything I've ever known.. It's almost like "real" sports here..
I used to live in Korea for a few years and the article's pretty much spot on. Starcraft isn't "like" a real sport there, it is a real sport. Here if you were a progamer you'd get laughed at, there you get chicks for it.
East: Progamer runs away from chicks (OMG TO MANY) West: Chicks run away from Progamers (its a pity...)
Not at all. @Wlck: I'm surprised to see your response, because I thought the numbers were a bit exaggerated, along with the whole "not being able to be part of the community" thing. This is why I introduced the thread the way I did, but it seems I needn't have done so. Thanks for confirming how hardcore Korea is
I have a Korean eFriend which I talk to a lot and he will verify that StarCraft is THAT huge over there.. Even though he doesn't play the game
doesnt play the game? thats blasphemy! the numbers are huge! but i am not surprised, i have been watching SC2 closely ever since the trailer came out and also the current starcraft tournaments in Korea, those things are sold out in like 3 seconds! a great find on your part kuvasz -Zerks
Yeah.. He only plays JRPGs and Japanese Strategy RPGS .. Not to be confused with anything relating to an RTS
I'd want Starcraft chips just for collecting sake. I wish E-Sports would be larger over here, but....eh, oh well.
Good luck with that. When I went over there this summer I didn't see much of those anywhere. But then again, I mostly went to the mall for shopping. But really, Starcraft isn't as popular in Korea as it was two years ago, because of the rise of MMO's. Tons of people play it, but tons of people 'moved on' to MMO's or shooters.
This thread made me realize something. A lot of people are complaining about stuff they don't like in SC2, and are trying to get blizzard to change stuff, but as stated, blizzard is making this game for koreans, so, I think that instead of harrasing blizzard to hear us, we should be harrasing koreans to believe in our claims and since blizzard listen to them they will listen to your claims as well. take this post as jokingly truth...
If SC2 were to surpass SC1, will the Korean progamers quit playing SC1 and move over to SC2 even if it meant practically starting over again?
It's hardly starting over, but I'm sure they'd be pretty angry. I've already herd many progamers voicing their concerns and a few do seem to be upset by this. Who knows.. Maybe StarCraft: Brood War will be the RTS equivalent to Quake 3 Arena.
