Those who follow competitive gaming might not be shocked to find out that, more often than not, the highest level of competitors tends to come out of the east…ern hemisphere. Asia. Specifically, depending on the game, between Korea, China or Japan. This isn’t to say there aren’t talented gamers in Europe, other parts of Asia, South America or North America, but it is safe to say that the upper echelon of gaming typically exists in southeast Asia, and this is punctuated by just how often times gamers or teams of gamers from this region win global tournaments and international competitions.
Although I’ll ultimately get back to primarily talking about League, this doesn’t apply to just League. Overwatch, Counterstrike, Street Fighter; anything that is played competitively, for legitimate prize money, notoriety and business advancement, usually the best players of these properties are coming out of Asian countries. Sure, there will occasionally be upstarts from different regions from time to time, but on the wider scale of the small competitive gaming history, it’s typically been some Asian guys hoisting trophies the vast majority of competitions.
One cliché that’s come into very popular fashion in the competitive gaming scene these days are the wide number of professional gamers from North America and/or Europe that flock to South Korea for weeks at a time to play the same game they play at home, but on the Korean servers, against Korean competition. The logic behind this stems from the notion that you’ll only be as good as the strength of your competition, and if Korea is where the strongest competition exists, then Korea is the place pro gamers need to go play.
The best part about it is that all these non-Asian professionals call these Korean excursions “bootcamping.”
There’s obviously tremendous levels of irony in calling it such, especially when these guys are plopped down in chairs staring at screens and playing video games for hours on end, while all across the globe, there are legitimate soldiers doing countless hours of strenuous physical activities in endless repetitions so they can defend their countries.
But what’s entertaining to me is that professional gamers go to such lengths with the aspiration of improvement and call trips to Korea “bootcamp,” while for those that live in Korea, it’s simply called “every day.” Seriously, numerous professional League players go to Korea and play solo queue for two weeks and pray that they improve; this is exactly what they do to practice in whatever region they’re from, except that they’re playing on the Korean servers against local Koreans. And to the local Koreans, this level of play is simply everyday life for them, except every now and then they have to pwn some foreign tourists from time to time.
It makes me wonder what would happen if the roles were reversed, and a game or some other competitive entity caught on in Korea, but they were the on the bottom echelon looking up, at other countries in the world being the best at it. What could other countries have that Koreans would want to improve at so badly that they’d travel internationally to get better at?
My first thought was maybe MMA, but Korea’s already got stars like The Korean Zombie that prove that they’re fine on their own. I’d say baseball, but their dominance on the global little league scene shows that they’ve got the early fundamentals down pat. Fuck, I was going to take the low road and suggest that maybe Koreans would want to get into competitive eating or something, but Sonya Thomas has already proven that they have the capability to dominate in that arena as well.
Okay, maybe Koreans are a bad example since they’re so good at everything anyway including math, so what would like, the Chinese want to travel internationally to bootcamp in? Probably in like, humor, or personality coaching. Sure, those aren’t things that necessarily translate to a profession, but damn could they use some overseas bootcamping in those characteristics. Listening to Chinese pro gamers speak on a microphone is like if dry white unbuttered toast could speak.
The bottom line is, it’s ironically absurd that traveling to Korea to play video games is called bootcamp. It’s kind of an insult to those who actually go any sort of physical bootcamp, and unless the pro players are going under the training of Korean coaches and doing the same sort of practice and treating gaming as seriously as the Koreans do, they’re basically just playing video games in another country. And the proof is in the pudding as far as the League scene is concerned; no amount of Korean bootcamp trips taken by numerous North American and European teams has changed their positions in the global standings.
