I'm sure most of us have heard about the 1% or how Africa's children have it worse off than your most holy fking tantrum moments. You most likely aren't part of the blessed or ill-fated group of people that have garnered attention, and you would know that. But a big question that has bothered me for a while was just where exactly do those two groups of people stand relative to one another, and where am I in between? Yes, it's correct to say that they're at the top and bottom, but just how wide is that gap?

I've always been a numbers kind of guy. Combine that with the fact that I don't like immeasurable vagaries (such as how many happiness points do you get when your boss awards you with a 10% raise in salary), and you get this news post topic: how to place yourself against the world through video games. I can't promise that you'll ever get anything precise, as everything involves uncertainty. And if you hate competition, you'll get even less precision. Personally after having went through this exercise (unwittingly), I can say I see things through a different light than before.

How do you measure your performance in a video game? The easiest answer is that the game tells you. The less obvious answer is that you decide for yourself. You could think that the McVarial 900 you just pulled off was wicked sick air, and it certainly isn't the easiest feat to pull off. But how do you know if that was the best of the best, or more probably the lower half echelons of skill? By repeatedly playing the game, you get a feel for the latter, but without being able to compare to other people, you can't really find out for the former.

eSports games are a great starting place to find out where you compare with other players. They have ranking ladders for comparison, the best of the best usually have videos of them playing somewhere on the interwebs (such as tournaments), and they actually take their shyt seriously as to be a very solid game. All the same though, you must be aware of the limitations of the games's audiences and who the player base consists of. eSports are nowhere near the caliber of real life sports, thanks in part due to the great variety of games that the industry has to offer, and also due to the immaturity and casual nature of gamers. They're probably not abusing steroids, but they sure know how to swear up a mean rant, and it's not unusual for some pro gamers to show up to a match an hour late.

Did you know that South Korea's national sport is Starcraft?

Anyways, we'll take my example to show you what I mean by using an eSport game to compare where you stand versus the world. I've been playing League of Legends (LoL) for about 1.5 years now. It's a F2P MOBA that has recently taken roots into the eSports scene, such as tournaments in MLG, Dream Hack, and ESL. It has ranked ladders for all sorts of play modes, and it is relatively free of hackers, due to how their game is coded. Hell, the client-side data files aren't encrypted, because they're just that badass. (Virtually nothing is hack-proof though.)

So how many players does it attract? Since we're trying to get a comparison of ourselves versus the world, we'll have to focus on the ranked mode of matches. In order to participate in ranked matches, you have to attain summoner level 30, which is anywhere between 100 to 500 games played, average of 275. That's an impressive requirement for entry. Most casual gamers may not stick around for that long, especially considering that LoL, like any other MOBA, has an extremely high learning curve. However, LoL takes several steps to ease the introduction of the game to newbies. But even if players hit summoner level 30, they may choose to never participate in ranked mode. So the number of players that participate in the ranked ladder is...

Well actually we just look that up on the website. There are just shy of 175k players whose ratings for ranked solo/duo mode are 1200 or higher for Season 2. (Season 1 had a little more than 184k players rated 1200 or higher.) This is somewhat problematic, since 1200 is the starting point of one's ranked career, and a rating lower than 1200 cannot be viewed and is unlisted. Fortunately, the eSports manager gave out numbers on what exactly the ranked medal designations mean in this announcement. A bronze designation means you have a rating of 1249, and you are in the top 25% of players. Conservatively, we can estimate a total of half a million players in the ranked solo/duo mode pool, which is a good sample size for what we're going for if you ignore the constraints of being able to obtain a computer with internet and dedicate the time to fulfill the prerequisites and keep on playing the game. Here are some further factoids that devs have dropped about the game's demographic: the average ranked player is far superior to the average ranked and non-ranked player, and LoL has a player base of 32 million players, where every day about 4.2 million players play at least once.

What skills does playing ranked solo/duo mode games test? Well, it definitely measures understanding, strategy, and reflexes/dexterity in real time. More specifically, it measures the following, not exclusively:
-- Micromanagement of your champion and proximity (e.g. last-hitting, timing your skill combos to kill someone)
-- Macro strategies (e.g. map awareness, lane pushing mid-late game)
-- Knowledge of champion skills and item interactions (e.g. if Skarner has captured your teammate using his ultimate, it is usually very bad idea to use Tristana's Buster Shot on him directly)
-- Picking champions and counterpicking (e.g. use Galio versus Brand)
This can be different from another competitive eSport game such as CounterStrike, where reflexes and sharp senses play an absolutely vital role in whether you succeed or fail as a professional gamer.

So now we know the types of people we're comparing ourselves against, and we can guess what range of demographic those people consist of (teens, young adults from developed areas mostly). And we have the website resources and the eSports manager's post to help us get a good comparison for where we stand versus the world. I personally finished with a silver designation in ranked solo/duo mode Season 1, which means I'm in the top 10% when comparing attributes that LoL ranked games favors. If I'm to compare myself with the rest of the players that play LoL regularly, it's probably closer to top 2%, conservatively.

That in itself was pretty staggering to me. I thought I sucked as a gamer, but that was because I was comparing myself to videos of pro players, and videos of players showcasing their best shyt. Hell, I do just exactly that for NG games. Still, it's good to keep in mind the limitations of this exercise. More hardcore MOBAs exist comapred to LoL. Hell, the original MOBA that everyone recognizes, DotA, is more hardcore that LoL. HoN is a reskin of DotA for the most part, and their community is hardcore. And LoL definitely does not test players on their office skills.

And I have to throw this out here: while eSports games are good for comparing yourself versus the world, get some psychology tests with you-versus-the-world comparisons completed if you can. While my experience with LoL is pretty reassuring to my ego as a gamer, it doesn't beat the confidence of my visual-memory abilities getting blind-sided in a test and still passing with flying colors.

(In one such test, there was an abstract picture with 30 gradeable elements. You had to draw it with the reference, then immediately draw it again without the reference. An hour later, after doing other mind-intensive activities, you had to draw the same picture again. This test does NOT work if you know how to execute it before-hand.)

Again, this isn't the most reliable stuff out there, but at least it is better than nothing.