Daniel Beckwith Kyle Young CS 3043 Project 3 Introduction Asian Culture and E Sports Giving their son or daughter a good education has always been considered of great importance by many parents because they want the best for their child s future. This is especially true for Asian cultures. In fact, although Asian Americans make up only 4% of the United States population, there is a very high percentage of them at top universities around the nation:... 24% at Stanford, 18% at Harvard, and 25% at both Columbia and Cornell [1]. One reason that Asian Americans on average are more successful in their education is that they many of them were not treated as non Asian Americans were upon leaving school for the day. They would go home and their parents would not only make sure they did their homework, but they would often times give them even more. Additionally, many non Asian American students participate in co curricular activities, whereas the majority of Asian Americans use that time to focus even more on their studies [1]. However, has that time changed a little bit? Has the idea of focusing on that one activity, education, spread to focusing on a few activities and excelling at those, or maybe one other activity and excelling at that? It definitely seems that way, but we hope to determine whether or not this has happened by analyzing data on the performance of countries in Asia in online gaming, also known as e sports, and the Olympics and comparing them to that of the United States, who do not share the same type of focused culture. Methodology Firstly, we needed to find information on the top competitors in the most popular e sports. Very quickly, we found e Sports Earnings [2], a database which has all of the tournament earnings of e sports players from every single country in the world. From this database, we chose 5 of the most popular e sports games to analyze DOTA 2, League of Legends, Starcraft II, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and Smite. For each of these 5 games we collected data on the top 10 countries, ranked by total tournament earnings in that game of players from that country. In addition, we recorded the number of players who had earning for each of the countries in each of the games so that comparisons to other countries and the money they earned would be made easier later. We also categorized the countries into Asian and non Asian countries. The countries classified as Asian were China, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Following this data acquisition, we searched for data on past Olympic Games and found a complete chart of all of the countries who have participated and the number of each medals they have won on Wikipedia [3]. After all of the information was collected, we created a number of charts which provide multiple ways of viewing the data. All of these charts can be found in Appendix A.
Assumptions We made a few assumptions in regard to our collecting and analyzing of the data. The first was that we assumed that the e sport players who had the greatest earnings were the best. This is not always true, but statistically, if you are the best at the sport and you are playing the game, you will always win the tournaments, therefore having the most amount of earnings. Another assumption we made was that the top 5 games we chose were a good representation of the countries. There is always the possibility that the other games, although they did not give out as many earnings, could show a radically different spread of countries in the top tier. Lastly, we assumed that countries had an equal opportunity to win the games. In other words, we are disregarding that fact that countries are of different sizes and have either a greater or lesser number of people to pick their olympians from. Results & Discussion For each e sport, we collected the total amount of tournament winnings and players participating in those tournaments for each country. See Figure 1 for an example of the data we collected on a single e sports game. This data was then aggregated across all of the 5 top e sports to get the total over all 5 games. We used these totals to rank the countries as shown in Figures 2 through 5. As you can see from Figure 3, Asian countries made up more than half (55.9%) of the tournament winnings. However, Asian countries made up only 28.4% of the number of players participating in these tournaments. This suggests that on average Asian players made more money overall than non Asian players. To compare, the United States made up 12.4% of the total winnings of tournaments, but 17.9% of the total number of players. This indicates that U.S. players on average make less than other players. For each country that has ever participated in the Olympics, we collected the number of games each team has participated in and the number of Bronze, Silver, and Gold medals that each team has won (totaled across Summer and Winter games). We then calculated a medal score for each team. This score takes into account the weights of different medals as well as the number of games each team participated in. The score is calculated with the following formula: 5 G+3 S+1 B s core = N Where G is the number of gold medals, S is the number of silver medals, B is the number of bronze medals, and N is the number of games participated in. The scores of each olympic team are shown in Figure 6. We then separated the countries into Asian and non Asian and looked at the share of Asian countries score vs. number of countries. We found that Asian countries made up 5.48% of the countries that have participated in the Olympics, but have earned 6.93% of the total score as calculated with the formula above. This indicates that Asian countries have performed slightly better than the average country. To compare, the United States made up 0.68% of the total number of participating countries, but has earned 8.36% of the total score as calculated with the formula above. This suggests that the United States performs significantly better in the Olympics than other countries per game.
Conclusion Traditional Asian culture is said to be one that is highly focused on that of learning and education in order to secure a brighter future, however, has that culture evolved into one which has lead them to bringing their focus onto other goals and excelling at those as well? Based on our analysis of the data that we found on the Olympics and e sports, it can be determined that the Asian culture does greatly excel at other activities, especially those of the more recent times, in comparison to the United States. The modern Olympics have been run for over a century, and therefore shows more of the history of Asian culture. In the past, the Asian countries were not as prevalent in the Olympics, however, as times have changed, an increase in competitiveness and success has been shown by them. For example, China s gymnastics team came out of nowhere. They only recently started competing in the Olympics, and their performance at first was not all that great, but in only a decade or so, they excelled to the top, winning the gold medal. The Chinese people accepted their goal of bettering their team and then quickly focused on achieving that. The data gathered on the Olympics does not greatly display the recent improvement in Asian countries performance in the games, as the average is over a greater span of time, a time where they were not focusing as much on it. In fact, if one removes China from the score of all of the Asian countries, that leaves them at 4.8% of the total countries with a total score of only 2.73%. This does not look very bright for our hypothesis, however, looking at the data from e sports will change the outlook. E sports began far more recently than the Olympic games, and therefore show a better perspective of how the Asian culture is today. It must be said that e sports have no relation to education like the traditional Asian culture pushed people to focus on. Yet, as previously mentioned, they still make up 28.4% of the population of gamers, and this 28.4% earns 55.9% of the winnings. Those numbers make it quite easy to conclude that Asian culture has become more accepting of those who focus on things other than education, as people do not get so good at games without dedicating an immense amount of time to practicing, time which could be given up to possibly, what some might have considered, better things. As times have progressed, so has their culture, which has led the way to their rise in the online gaming world, and to their improvement in their performance at the Olympic Games.
Appendix A (Figures) DOTA 2 Country Name Prize Money Players China $22,226,053.65 153 United States $6,792,869.40 72 Sweden $3,922,192.13 97 Canada $3,560,817.09 23 Ukraine $3,346,695.38 47 Russian Federation $2,003,327.31 148 Pakistan $1,721,269.74 2 Malaysia $1,547,186.31 48 Singapore $1,232,321.26 32 Germany $1,218,210.70 37 Figure 1 : Data table for DOTA 2, prize money and players per country. Figure 2 : Total prize money earned by top players of different countries in the top 5 e sports.
Figure 3 : Total prize money earned by top players of Asian versus non Asian countries in the top 5 e sports. Figure 4 : Total number of top players of different countries in the top 5 e sports.
Figure 5 : Total number of top players of Asian versus non Asian countries in the top 5 e sports. Figure 6 : Medal score for each country that has participated in the Summer or Winter Olympics.
Works Cited 1. GreatSchools Staff. "How Do Asian Students Get to the Top of the Class?" GreatKids. GreatSchools, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2015. <http://www.greatschools.org/gk/articles/parenting students to the top/>. 2. "E Sports Earnings :: ESports History & Statistics." E Sports Earnings. E Sports Earnings, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2015. <http://www.esportsearnings.com/>. 3. "All time Olympic Games Medal Table." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2015. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/all time_olympic_games_medal_table>.