In South Korea, professional gamers have created a great
sensation among young people. The real-time strategy video game, named
StarCraft, triggered creating new genre of industry, e-sports. In the Korean
portal site naver.com, there is an electronic-sports
(e-sports) section independently in the sports news webpage, and recent articles about progamers’ plays have still been updated. The
leading companies in South Korea, such as Samsung, SK, STX, KT, and CJ, have established professional
gamer team and sponsored gamers. Some popular gamers make really high annual
incomes, and prize money of competition is tremendous. Thousands of audiences
gather at the scene of the tournament to enjoy progamers’ play, and a single
format station is broadcasting those competitions for live and rerun 24/7. Due
to its popularity, game producers from Blizzard willingly visited South Korea
to hold StarCraft II production presentation and provided Korean language
service to make more big fans of this game. Video game competitions
domestically and internationally are held every year; for example, World Cyber
Games (WCG) was inaugurated in 2000 around the globe and national squads have
participated in many different official game events for victory. It is like an
Olympics; the only difference is that gamers do not move their body too much,
and they only use hands to control game console or computer mouse. Obviously, they might be in the enviable
position to young people.
Some people criticize that computer game is only for kids, however, times
have changed. I think whatever the job is, people who are doing something
professionally deserve to be better recognized. The new term, e-sports, is
still unfamiliar with many people even though it was created more than 15 years
ago. There are distinct huge fan bases for e-sports, so not everyone may
understand why playing video game is called one type of sports. E-sports can be
not uncommonly compared with chess, baduk(go) or janggi game because those are
also the type of sports that players have a battle of wits. Taken all together,
e-sports direct electrifying victory often, and young people over the world are
fanatical about it. So, I think it has enough to be called as a brain sports.
Games are made by other people, so playing the game by gamers may not
beyond the range of producers’ intention. Certainly, there are limitation,
restrict, and some bugs to be fixed. There may not be infinite strategies
because the variety of structuring battle building, collecting mineral and gas,
and training units have a fixed limit. There are so many rules; you cannot exceed
the number of unit over 200, a SCV can only collect 8 minerals per work, and
Zerg hatchery is too week for Terran biomedics troops. But it is the same to all
kinds of sports. Football has 90-minute game time, referees sometimes ruin the
whole game, players cannot use their hands, and fans feel anger to unreliable
injury time. I would say we follow the rules that we made, so we are not
restricted by limitation. Within the scope of those rules, players always try
to create brilliant new movements, and fans also want their vicissitudinous
strategy and tactics. The process of the each game always looks different, and
that is why people watch Major League Baseball and English Premier League every
year. Nevertheless it has different perspective for every game, all of those
activities have something in common: VICTORY. Every single player has a different
strength and specialty, so strategies for each game are unique depending on who
the opponent is. Also, exploring to learn the opponent’s strategy to get wind
of his/her plans would be really important to defend and attack
extemporaneously for win.
Now, it is time what I want to talk for today. I feel like I become a
progamer. I sit all day long every day to play with Lives Saved
Tool (LiST). This program does have many bugs and never listen to me what I am
saying. Also, it seems that there are various functions that I do not even know. The
manual related to other projection program in Spectrum has hundreds of pages... The data tell me all different stories, and I can
hardly communicate with staff in Sierra Leone. First and foremost, my time is
limited to complete LiST analysis. All I have is quantitative raw material and
bunch of numbers, and I have to recreate those data into LiST analysis. It is
somewhat frustrating that the LiST result has various possibility, so there is
no single answer to say, “We saved 100
people’s lives exactly.” LiST can be part of evidence how a certain
intervention have impacted or will influence on people’s health, and it is not
an absolute solution to decide what the best intervention and ideal coverage is.
LiST does not embody in all kinds of interventions and situations in our real
life, so it certainly has its limitation to reflect the effectiveness of
child/mother surviving interventions. All LiST analysts may have different
opinions and thoughts for the same project, so every analysis would have a highly
subjective point of view. However, they all have something in common: VICTORY
against disease, infection and disease. Some people try this and other people
try that, so all efforts might have different result of lives saved and
suggestions, but the fundamental long-term result will be rolling into one to
improve mother, newborn and child health in the least-developed and developing
countries.
In the same vein, even though hundreds of public health students enter my
school every year and they all seem to do different things, there is something
in common: contributing the development of medical service for people. The
field of specialization for public health could be global health, environmental
health, social behavior, policy, mental health, epidemiology, reproductive
health, biostatistics, or biology. All area will cooperate with each other to create a synergy
effect for helping people in the world. I believe there is no trivial or
unimportant public health work; all of them must be significant. Either working for
African maternal health or Baltimore maternal health, all of works have worth
doing to improve the quality of our healthy lives. I am terrible at playing
StarCraft, but I have become free from the level of an amateurish about LiST.
Anyway, playing any game is endless, and people do maintain their sense of actual
battle by practicing several hours every day. I have a
long way to go to be called "progamer." No matter what I play, StarCraft or LiST, it is good to become
a specialist for a certain area to make big contributions in the organization, academia,
public welfare, and people. So, let me finish it. I can enjoy it!
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| Lives Saved Tool webpage: list.cherg.org |
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