Gaming In Sweden Bigger Than Football and Hockey

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."

Re:On the other hand...

[unixcrab]

An urban legend my good man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate [wikipedia.org]

Good

[BigJClark]

Maybe in 10 years the game of hockey will return to normal, and we won't have to worry about the prancing-through-the-daffodil-swedes wrecking our game with their pseudo-soccer-take-the-fall style of game.

I kid, I kid ;)

Re:By football here, the ofc mean soccer;)

[Endo13]

You play the ball with the foot, all the time.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with why it's called football.

What about the asians?

[Zathain Sicarius]

Haven't they been following this same trend for a while? Heck, Star Craft is essentially a sport over in Korea.

Re:Seen it coming

[xorsyst]

Try playing both Rugby and American football and then comment. They are both physically tough, but in different ways. As for the padding, that is mostly aggressive. It allows you to hit (and be hit) harder. To say one is a wimpy form of the other is, well, flamebait.

Re:25% of my society is sweedish

[somersault]

It's 'Swedish' by the way. At least in English it is.

Re:25% of my society is sweedish

[SkyratesPlayer]

Actually, we don't think of it as having dots in the words. We simply have 3 more letters in the alphabet (and on the keyboard).

Re:Seen it coming

[VJ42]

If you want to talk about a slow national sport, look at baseball. The sport has immense history in the US, but it is painfully slow.

Here we invented a sport that lasts five days [wikipedia.org], and usually lose to the Australians at it.

Re:Seen it coming

[Skye16]

False.

There are three commercial breaks per period, for 30 seconds. 30 seconds. They are not taken while play is ongoing. They only occur after play stops due to a puck leaving the playing surface or a penalty (though not for icing). If no one is penalized (including offsides, puck leaving the playing surface / touching the netting), then it is very possible that the commercial break won't even be taken. They do not whistle play dead in the middle of it just to get a commercial in.

My guess is you just weren't paying very much attention.

Re:Seen it coming

[Al Al Cool J]

That is a more or less accurate, but rather misleading summary. What you call "real" football was unruly mayhem. It wasn't an organised or codified sport. And the idea that it was called "football" because it was played on foot is plausible, but as far as I know is only a theory.

The first codified form of football was association football, which later was informally called "soccer" by the English upper-class college crowd (the term soccer was hated by the English lower-class because they thought it was a snobbish upper-class word; now they hate it because they think it is an American word).

From association football evolved rugby football (invented at Rugby University), which spread and evolved into American/Canadian/Australian football. Being a newer form of football, the rules for rugby weren't as well known or adhered to by the sailors who spread it, so local variations arose.

Association football was popular in the US, but the Americans then learnt the rugby style game from Canadian college students. The US Big Five ivy league colleges then voted on which form of the game to officially adopt, and it was 3-2 in favour of the rugby style. From there, American football grew to become the dominant form in the States, and soccer has been playing catch-up there ever since.

Man, this is like the old days in rec.sport.soccer, so I might as well dust off the old sig...

Alan Douglas
Soccer Guy/

Re:Seen it coming

[gstoddart]

My guess is you just weren't paying very much attention.

While I can't definitely tell you what initiated the TV timeout, when I turned to my co-workers for an explanation they said it was a TV timeout. (Me, I am not a hockey fan and the tickets were free -- I just turned and said "WTF are they doing now??")

I'm sure there is some measurable rule which defines how it's done, it just wasn't obvious to me and I didn't know such a thing existed.

According to wiki [wikipedia.org]:

Television timeouts are taken at the first stoppage of play after 6, 10, and 14 minutes of elapsed time unless there is a power play or the first stoppage is the result of a goal. In these cases, the timeout will occur at the first stoppage after the penalty expires or the next stoppage after the goal, respectively. A new rule was introduced for the 2007-08 season that if the first stoppage of play is an icing, the TV timeout does not occur.

Which, to me, reads kinda like the rules for Fizzbin [wikipedia.org]. ;-)

All I'm saying is there are TV timeout in the game, likely even the three you detailed. Maybe not for every commercial break, but they do halt game play specifically for commercials at some points in the game.

Cheers