Fifth Cultural Post: Identify a topic for your culture project and your learning goals for your topic.
South Korea is the gaming capital of the world with 30 millions out of 50 millions citizens playing video games on a weekly basis. The first multiplayer games that became played by millions of fans online were Starcraft and Warcraft in the early 2000s. Asia received the games particularly well since the scenario, the environment as well as the characters were very mystical and resembled a lot to the manga-like ambiances. Some players became extremely good and soon some gaming tournaments were organized to determine the best player. With the success and the popularity of these tournaments, more and more players started to exclusively play on these two games in order to perfect their skills. That is the point were cash prizes started to become more and more usual and important.
With the mix of high skilled players and high cash prizes, a new profession was born: professional gamers. Some gamers, actually became so popular that they have fan clubs reaching up to one million fan and an annual income of 350,000$.
My goals are to be able to determine if professional gaming is an actual profession and wether or not it is possible to make a living from it.
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