Electronic Sport

From The StarCraft 2 Wiki

Electronic Sports or E-sport is the definition of professional gamers, their tournaments and leagues. When tournaments are of the level that a player can get serious amounts of money out of winning games (as opposed to a free hot dog or the like), that is e-sport. Also referred to as Professional Gaming (progaming).

[edit] Korea and the World

Pro-gaming is most common in Korea, where StarCraft became a popular pastime about the same time as they had economical problems, and the IT sector was growing. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans played (and play) StarCraft and other games in (gaming cafes).

As a joke, a match was broadcasted on TV, and has since became very popular. Today, professional gamers spend all day training, have hired coaches and are treated like athletes or pop stars. Professional gaming is seen as very profitable recently. The culture for video games, and Star Craft in particular is similar basket ball or gold in the USA.

[edit] Measure Skills

Besides wins and losses of a player, it's also common to measure APM, which is a form of universal "handicap" for StarCraft players. APM is an acronym for "Actions Per Minute", and is an indicator of how much a player can do in the game within a minute. In most cases the player that has trained his skills to be as fast as possible while maintaining precision have better odds at winning a SC match, but it's not a given rule.

[edit] Further reading

• RockPaperShotgun on Korea's culture and electronic sport among other things
• Team Liquid's Article on Progaming (Team Liquid is a famous progaming team)
• Starfeeder's Article on History of Progaming