A game about Star Wars once evaluated how players from different countries decide: Do they play for the Empire or for the Rebellion? When analyzing the statistics in the form of a world map, a clear separation between northern and southern countries is evident. The major outliers worldwide in either direction are Russia and Peru.
Where does the statistic come from?
- The statistic comes from the mobile game “Star Wars: Commander”; which was released in August 2014 and ended in June 2020.
- At the release of the game, it quickly gathered 5 million players. Lucas Games evaluated in September 2014 how the player base is distributed by country: Do more choose the Rebels (yellow) or more choose the Empire (blue).
- This resulted in an exciting world map that stimulates discussions.
Video games about Star Wars are still popular and in demand today:
World map shows Russia on the side of the Empire – Peru as a rebel stronghold
What stands out on the map? We see a relatively clear division between the global north and the global south on the map:
- The north tends to lean towards the Empire: As an outlier, one can see Russia, where almost 58% choose the Empire.
- The counterpart to Russia are countries in South America and Africa, where at times over 60% choose the Rebels: Especially Peru with 62% and Angola with 66% stand out.
Where does Germany stand? In Germany, the distribution at the time of the survey was quite balanced: 53.7% chose the Empire. In Austria, 55.3% played on the side of Darth Vader.
Interestingly, Spain and France chose the Rebellion, so a dividing line goes directly through Europe.
What to note: One should not read too much into this statistic and assume that the blue countries are automatically “evil” because they sympathize more with Darth Vader than with Han Solo.
In some countries, it could also simply be that so few people participated that the results are strongly distorted: Otherwise, the 80% Empire in the Central African Republic would hardly be explainable.
It raises the question of whether the spread of smartphones, mobile games, and the love for Star Wars were distributed evenly worldwide, so that even in the more remote corners of the world enough people would register for a game to allow for reasonable statistics to be collected.
The world map provides no information about China – the game was not released there at that time.
Furthermore, the statistic is already a few years old: It is quite possible that things have shifted in Eastern Europe given the events in recent years.
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