Gaming In Sweden Bigger Than Football and Hockey 252
An anonymous reader writes "SIFO (a major Swedish survey company) has conducted a gaming survey right before the launch of Dreamhack Winter. One of the results is that gaming is bigger than football and hockey combined."
Surveys, surveys, surveys (Score:1, Interesting)
Gamers more likely to answer surverys than sports aficionados.
On some of these (yes, I get telephone surveys about once a month that I HANG UP ON) I have to think the results would be:
x% of people stupid enough to answer a survey think y.
25% of my society is sweedish (Score:3, Interesting)
About 25% of my online society (Hunters-unlimited.com) is sweedish and uses those funny little dots in their words. Plus one or the games we play (entropiauniverse.com) is also sweedish, They are a pleasure to play with, speaking multiple languages (for the most part). With all that extra night time in the winter they keep our soc warm.
Re:Nerdcore uprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it was just my school, but the line between "jock" and "nerd" blurred a lot. At least so much as "nerd" is defined as the smarter kids who typically do well as far as grades. Most of the top athletes at my school were actually in the top of their class (and that wasn't any fudging going on - most of them I'd known since grade school and they'd always made good grades even before athletics came into play). I myself played offensive line (Guard, though I'll admit despite being 1st string I wasn't really considered a "star player") and graduated second in my class. At least one of the guys who was a few years ahead of me graduated with honors AND had the unique distinction of never missing a single day of school from grade K through 12. Absolutely perfect attendance. He later played for both the Cleavland Browns and the Denver Broncos.
We just didn't have that TV drama "guys with letterman jackets picking on the smart kids" thing going on. I've often wondered if that we were just an exception or if that situation plays out less often in real life than on TV.
There was CERTAINLY a division between the athletes and the "kinda goth" (I say kinda goth because these guys were not quite as white makeup and weird as TV goths - rather some Southern goth variant), but that was pretty much separate from grades. It also was mostly just a situation where the two groups didn't associate rather than actively persecuting each other. Both groups had their smart and dumb people with about equal frequency.
Re:Nerdcore uprising (Score:5, Interesting)
It's funny how so many people seem to have gone to school on a different planet than I did ...
I guess maybe it's how you look at things. Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your permission." I'd put it differently: whether you are an insider and outsider is a matter of perspective. If you aspire to be something you aren't cut out to be, then you're an outsider.
Re:On the other hand... (Score:1, Interesting)
Odd how China is the only country with a higher female suicide rate.
Re:Nerdcore uprising (Score:3, Interesting)
This was true in my high school as well. A large portion of the football team went to ivy leauge schools (we're in Texas). The ones that didn't however either made it into 2nd or 3rd tier state colleges in a highschool with an 80% "goes on to college" rate, where most of the students head off to 1st or 2nd tier state colleges.
Re:They're catching up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Computer games are an indoor sport. That it would be popular in areas that get mightily cold in winter is no surprise.
Re:Seen it coming (Score:4, Interesting)
And yes, I am American, I played actual football, aka soccer. It has just as much physical contact, significantly more demanding on the body, and requires a huge amount of stamina. Do me a favor, go run for 45 minutes, take a 10 minute, and run for another 45 minutes. I'd love to see those NFL athletes have heart attacks over that one...
Re:Nerdcore uprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the top athletes at my school were actually in the top of their class (and that wasn't any fudging going on - most of them I'd known since grade school and they'd always made good grades even before athletics came into play). I myself played offensive line
Many people on the football team thought the same thing about the team captains. I heard people saying that one of the captains should have been valedictorian because he was the smartest person they knew.
In actuality, they didn't know the smartest kids in the school because they didn't take the same classes as those kids (myself included). If they had paid attention, they would have known that the valedictorian had done research that was being published in journals and that there were more than a dozen students (out of 200 or so) who were ahead of him academically. He obviously wasn't dumb, and he did well in school and will likely do well in life, but he wasn't at the top of the class. Like your school, there wasn't any animosity, just a lack of socialization between the groups.
Why is this surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
Museums, it turns out, have much higher attendance in aggregate than professional sports. They have a much greater net economic impact than professional sports as well. A single headliner museum in a city can bring in a quarter of a billion dollars annually; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (an absolutely amazing place) was shown to bring in 369 million annually to the Boston area in a recent study. This is actually comparable to the annual revenue of the Red Sox; the net impact of the Red Sox on regional economy might be somewhat more, but there are a lot more comparable cultural institutions in Boston than there are comparable sports teams. You can walk across the street from the MFA to the Gardner, a smaller but equally culturally significant art museum. Boston is a famous sports town, but it is stuffed to the gills with cultural institutions that have heavy attendance every day (except possibly Mondays) year round.
I think one of the reasons for the outsize impact of cultural institutions is that they have a mission to have an impact. They're supposed to maximize bodies in the doors, eyeballs on the exhibits. Sports franchises aren't run that way. They're run to maximize profit.
Gaming's higher impact is likewise related to the fact you can do it every day. However it isn't going to have the same economic impact as having strong cultural institutions.
Re:Nerdcore uprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry but I'm fairly certain I didn't imagine getting my glasses stolen (hidden in the teachers' desk). Or sand dumped on my head. Or my gymbag thrown into the girls' locker room.
This isn't just a matter of "attitude" but repeated hazing. If American teachers were doing a proper job, they wouldn't turn a blind eye to this stuff, but instead intercede and punish the instigators. But because the instigators are usually "cool" jocks, they don't do a thing.
Re:Nerdcore uprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Naah. Hench nerds still don't have the social skills, but they aren't beat up on as much by the jock types.
It's still a broad generalization... I'm very much a nerd, but still have decent social skills. I can pretend to be mostly normal if I have to ;) But many nerds don't realize that social skills are still a skill that requires effort and time and practice to develop, just like athleticism, or video game playing, chess club, whatever.
Re:Seen it coming (Score:5, Interesting)
IAAARP (I am a American Rugby Player)
Rugby tackles can be just as hard however they typically aren't, why?
1) After a rugby tackle there isn't a whistle. There isn't a TV Time Out or a play clock. You either have to pick, ruck, or roll
2) There is no padding. NFL Players constantly use their padding as armor or a weapon. It's like saying I can hit people harder with a baseball bat than with my fist. No shit, there's less possibility of self damage with the baseball bat.
And your argument of "tactical contest between coaches" makes it sound more like a mindless game of chess. (Which I'm not arguing that it's not). Every single rugby player has to be able to make split second decisions and see the entire field.
Third, the type of game that Rugby is would leave most NFL players on the sidelines gasping for air.
1) NFL games are split up between 2 teams (Offense and Defense) that rotate out roughly every 4 plays. Rugby usually has 1-2 subs at most. Meaning all 15 players per team are on the field during the entire match.
2) NFL regulation matches are 4 quarters-15 minutes long. However this is usually spread out over 3ish hours. Rugby is 80 minutes spread out over roughly 90 minutes. (10 minute halftime).
Finally, I suggest you watch some stuff on youtube. There are plays and combinations that make the NFL look like tic-tac-toe.
You'll teach a bunch of Rugby players to play American Football much easier than vice versa.
Re:Seen it coming (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Seen it coming (Score:4, Interesting)
How many American Football players would be in the same position without their armour?
Re:On the other hand... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, with a population of ca. 157,000 [wikipedia.org] (in 2005) and the fact that the suicides are listed by "suicides per 100,000 people per year", I think the fact that there is 0.0 male and 1.8 female suicides in 1987(!) [wikipedia.org] - which basically means there was probably only one suicide in that year and it happened to be a woman - we can safely say: the data is insufficient to make a valid statement about the distribution.
Re:They're catching up. (Score:3, Interesting)
It gets cold in Korea.
Some of the best software has been developed in cold climates, like this Finnish kid that re-wrote Minix. Torvalds....
This is not to slime the Aussies, or anyone else. Computing is an indoor port, and so is gaming-- until a practical outdoor display works.
Re:Seen it coming (Score:5, Interesting)