Sometimes people (including me) wonder why South Korea seems to be the international epicenter of professional competitive video game play. While I wonder about cultural influences (thanks to Joan Chiao), it has been suggested that it is simply this:
Why you should be jealous of South Korea (link to American Prospect recap of NY Times article).
Key idea: S. Koreans all have 100Mbs internet for ~$28/month and the gov’t is co-sponsoring an initiative to get everybody up to gigbit asap.
A lot of top gamers seem to come from Sweden too, so I googled a came up with this old (2004) report:
So big deal, right? Well, if some of these games are training generalizeable cognitive skills, how long until this kind of thing starts to produce a systemic IQ-gap?