Preliminary Sources and Connections

It’s that time of the week again! This time, I’ll be covering some basic literature review for my project. Since no one seems to be writing about Counter-Strike in particular, most of my sources will relate to strategy games or strategies in sports in general.

Source 1: Tuathail, Gearóid Ó., and Gerard Toal. “Problematizing Geopolitics: Survey, Statesmanship and Strategy.”

You may be asking yourself how geopolitics has anything remotely to do with online gaming? Well, this source introduces three different perspectives or analogies that reflect the topic of geopolitics: geological surveying, statesmanship, and grand strategy. The second comparison is particularly important for my paper as this source compares one definition of geopolitics to chess: “To survey the geopolitical realities of the globe is to read a playing field or rather a series of different arenas of gaming.” If I can definitively map out the similarities between these two subjects, I can expand my paper’s implications to more than just esports betting.

Source 2: Plakias S, Tsatalas T, Armatas V, Tsaopoulos D, Giakas G. Tactical Situations and Playing Styles as Key Performance Indicators in Soccer.

This source focuses more on the quantitative side of strategy. This study aimed to address its own gap in the field of soccer by introducing new metrics to measure performance. By looking at tactical situations and the corresponding play-styles adopted by teams, they could gain insights into the game and predict winners. Since I’ll be doing something similar but for online gaming, I believe this serves as a decent framework.

Source 3: Dresher, Melvin. “Games of Strategy.”

This source also uses a mathematical approach to analyze certain strategy games from chess and poker to “military games as defense against attack”. Counter-Strike broadly fits this description as the objective of the game is to defend 2 objectives from an attacking force. This source claims that in an ideal and optimized situation where the stronger forces win, the solution for the attacker is to all-in on a single objective randomly. Could this mean CS favors this type of aggressive attacking strategy? Also such situations of optimally allocating defensive and offensive units can be compared to certain geopolitical situations in the real world too.

Now that a few, seemingly random sources are out of the way, let’s discuss my gap. Obviously no one is writing about Counter-Strike strategies in a professional environment. However, it can be used to hint at certain geopolitical situations (strictly speaking only ones related to attacking and defending certain objectives but). There are studies that compare chess strategy to geopolitics, but they seem surface-level at best and have little quantitative analysis.  Though, the question of “Why CS?” arises. It’s a fun game. My data can really only answer one question: what is a favorable amount of aggression in certain strategies in CS and real life situations comparable to CS? However, that itself isn’t too bad as the Counter Strike franchise is one of the worlds largest esports. Professional teams draft players to compete in frequent tournaments with up to $250,000 prize pools.

How did your research question evolve as you moved through the research process?

My research question wasn’t very clear cut from the beginning. Though, after seeing how many people write about chess, I decided it would probably be more favorable to only study Counter-Strike in my methodology. As such, I looked into broader implications of grand strategy. I’m currently deciding whether I should also conduct an analysis of geopolitical issues and compare those findings to my CS findings. Who knows?