![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/koreanstars.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The guy on the left is Shin-Soo Choo.\u00a0 Shin-Soo Choo is a Major League Baseball player, and an extremely talented one at that.\u00a0 Aside from that, Shin-Soo Choo is something of an international hero, as he has been a chief member of the Korean National Baseball team that enjoyed moderate successes in tournaments such as the World Baseball Classic as well as the Asian Games.\u00a0 Shin-Soo Choo is considered a genuine five-tool player; he hits very well, he hits with power (read: home runs<\/em>), plays excellent defense, has a great throwing arm, and runs very effectively.\u00a0 It is safe to say that Shin-Soo Choo is the most talented and successful Korean-born Major League Baseball player in history.<\/span><\/p>\n The guy on the right is Dong-Hwan Kim.\u00a0 Dong-Hwan Kim plays\u00a0Starcraft<\/em>\u00a0for a living.\u00a0 He sits at a computer for a living, staring into a monitor, playing a video game.\u00a0 The only physical thing he really demonstrates is dexterity with his fingers, or as those in such a scene like to refer to as \u201cActions per minute (APM)\u201d which is basically just how good a guy is at repeatedly clicking a mouse and a few keys on the keyboard.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n South Korea has a nationwide law that states that every South Korean national-born male must serve a mandatory two-year stint in the Korean military before the age of 29.\u00a0 However, the motherland has in many instances, allowed for exemptions to the mandatory military service, typically going to individuals who, for lack of a better term, bring honor to the country, in varying ways.<\/span><\/p>\n The most known manner in which many have received exemptions has been through success in sport; the entire men\u2019s national team in the 2002 World Cup received exemptions for being the most successful South Korean futbol team in history, going all the way to the semi-finals.\u00a0 The 2006 national baseball squad received exemptions for putting Korean baseball on the map, when they ran roughshod through all competitors before ultimately being eliminated in a questionable tournament format.\u00a0 And just about every Korean male Olympian who managed to make it onto the medal podium received an exemption as well.<\/span><\/p>\n Throughout the last few years, and I ask for forgiveness from the motherland in advance if my understandings are incorrect, but South Korea\u2019s become vastly more stringent about issuing military exemptions over the last few years, this part I know.\u00a0 But the bottom line is that it\u2019s to my understanding that anything short of ultimate victory no longer received exemptions.\u00a0 The 2009 World Baseball Classic squad, which actually performed better than the 2006 squad did not receive military exemption, because they lost in the championship game.\u00a0 Olympic medalists still received exemption, such as the Gold medal 2008 baseball team, and the Bronze medal 2012 futbol team, but pretty much nobody short of national accolade would receive any further exemptions.<\/span><\/p>\n Shin-Soo Choo\u2019s early career was constantly mired with the hypothetical chance that he would have to leave Major League Baseball in order to fulfill his national military duty.\u00a0 Teams wanted to sign him to long-term contracts, but as long as two years of his career would be stripped away due to obligation, no team could ill-afford to take that chance.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not like Choo wasn\u2019t trying to get himself an exemption, as he was a member of the talented 2009 WBC squad that barely fell short, and his professional status made him ineligible for Olympic action in 2008.\u00a0 But in literally his last opportunity, as he was on the cusp of turning 27 and would have had to forfeit his MLB career and report for military duty, at the 2010 Asian Games,\u00a0Choo led the Korean National Team to a gold medal victory, and finally earned his hard-fought exemption<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n I don\u2019t hide the fact that I love to make fun of the notion that in some convoluted way, professional gamers have attained the ability to gain the same type of visa status that professional athletes do, because they\u2019re good at a particular video game, and there is a segment of people that really enjoy watching people good at a particular video game, play that video game.\u00a0 I\u2019ll admit it, I sometimes do too, and it\u2019s no secret that I\u2019m a fairly regular\u00a0League of Legends<\/em>\u00a0player in my own time.\u00a0 But when the day is over, it\u2019s still playing video games, and it\u2019s absolutely nothing at all like playing a sport.<\/span><\/p>\n I guess I\u2019m an old fart that simply remembers growing up with my mom breathing down my neck to deter me from playing video games and to go outside and do something physically active.\u00a0 It\u2019s absolutely the complete opposite of today\u2019s scene, where not only is video gaming becoming a legitimate occupation, you know there are parents out there that endorse and nurture their children into it if they think that\u2019s where they can achieve success.<\/span><\/p>\n That being said, I read\u00a0this story about Dong-Hwan Kim<\/a>, and how he hasn\u2019t exactly gotten full exemption from his mandatory Korean military service, but was capable of procuring the type of work visa typically reserved for international athletes and professional sport players.\u00a0 Basically, because he plays a video game at a very high level, he\u2019s allowed to come to the United States and play Starcraft as an occupation.\u00a0 Supposedly, the visa is good for up to five years, and guess what Dong-Hwan Kim is going to do when he\u2019s not playing Starcraft?\u00a0 That\u2019s right, try and become an American citizen.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m Korean by genetics, American by birth, and I think that this is a pretty absurd story as a whole. \u00a0I don\u2019t know Dong-Hwan Kim, but I basically think he\u2019s a gigantic pussy for attempting to dodge his national obligation so that he can play video games for a living, and it\u2019s even worse that modern society is accommodating it.\u00a0 I do believe that it\u2019s getting a little too far out of hand with this lazy association of video gaming as some kind of professional sport, and that the kids playing the games are some sort of professional athletes.<\/span><\/p>\n I think Shin-Soo Choo had a legitimate rationale to try and earn a military exemption; he\u2019s really good at baseball, and people who are really good at baseball have the potential to making\u00a0millions<\/em>\u00a0of dollars.\u00a0 I get why he wouldn\u2019t want to let that opportunity slip away, because the opportunity to financially secure not just his own life, but his family and his future family\u2019s livelihoods is within reasonable grasp.<\/span><\/p>\n Not everyone is as lucky as Choo; there was once a pitching prospect in the Braves minor league system a few years ago, and he was steadily moving up the ranks on a yearly basis.\u00a0 But he got his start in the United States a little late in life, and went back to Korea to serve his two years of mandatory service.\u00a0 He was invited back to the Braves organization when he was finished, but the two years of non-practice had taken their toll on him, and he simply didn\u2019t have it anymore.\u00a0 I have no idea what he\u2019s doing today, but it\u2019s probably not baseball.<\/span><\/p>\n Now Dong-Hwan Kim allegedly made a very upper-middle class wage playing Starcraft; but let\u2019s not kid ourselves here; it\u2019s definitely not professional sports money, and it never will be.\u00a0 Playing video games isn\u2019t like any sort of athletic skill; dexterity with your hands and fingers is necessary sure, but at the core, video games are about understanding mechanics, and are still ultimately limited to the capabilities that are programmed into them.\u00a0 There\u2019s far less of a chance for a gamer to lose his talent after two years than it would someone who played a professional sport, and probably a way higher chance for a gamer to pick back up where they left off as opposed to the former.<\/span><\/p>\n In fact, in a way, the mental toughness that most forms of military basic training wouldn\u2019t probably be a bad thing when it comes to playing video games, I\u2019d think.<\/span><\/p>\n Doesn\u2019t matter though, because Dong-Hwan Kim, and everyone else who\u2019s going to aspire to be like him are all taking the lazy way out, and in my opinion, lay down the groundwork for really bleak futures, by trying to find ways to skip out on military service so they can play video games.<\/span><\/p>\n If I were born in Korea, would I serve my mandatory two years?\u00a0 If it\u2019s mandatory, then I most certainly would, unless I were also Shin-Soo Choo.<\/span><\/p>\n There are far more important things in life than video games, regardless if I enjoy playing them in my spare time.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The guy on the left is Shin-Soo Choo.\u00a0 Shin-Soo Choo is a Major League Baseball player, and an extremely talented one at that.\u00a0 Aside from that, Shin-Soo Choo is something of an international hero, as he has been a chief member of the Korean National Baseball team that enjoyed moderate successes in tournaments such as … Continue reading This \u201cgamers as athletes\u201d is going a bit too far now<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,164,103,15,133,58,19,49],"class_list":["post-38029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-baseball","tag-futbol","tag-motherland","tag-og","tag-old-man","tag-sports","tag-video-games","tag-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38031,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029\/revisions\/38031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}