Starcraft: The Sport So why are you reading this? You probably saw this on the front page of a website. A website about a computer game. You’re about to read a text about a computer game. There won’t be any cheat codes in this text, nor am I going to write a review about the game. Why would I, the game has been around for almost a decade. Now, maybe someone linked this to you, maybe one of your friends sent this to you so you could read it; I wonder why he did that. He probably thought this text was about the sequel of the game.
I’m sorry? You still play the game!?
You just bought it!? I don’t understand. You
gamers usually hop from game to game, always finding better games to waste your time on. Don’t you want a new game that’s got better visual effects and cooler monsters to fight?
Oh, you don’t like to be called a gamer. What do you call yourself then?
Nothing. You just play this game called Starcraft, I see. Why?
Because it is the best game ever made.
Now, if you are just an innocent bystander that doesn’t know the first thing about games and someone talked you into reading this - probably your son – don’t despair. I’ve made this text as layman friendly as possible. I am, after all, trying to show the world that Starcraft is a phenomenon beyond just any normal game. If this is the case, please don’t be scared off by the introduction below as it is directed to maniacs like myself who busy themselves with ‘playing games’. Feel free to skip to part 2.
1. Battle With The Mainstream- This Is Where We Are Starting From:Generalisation has plagued humanity since the dawn of time. The current number one act of generalisation being “The entire middle east is nuts and filled with evil terrorists.” I’m sure you can think of many more, most of which end in blatant racism. But the generalisation I’m going to focus on has got nothing to do with race, not directly anyway.
I’m a white male in my early twenties. I’m tall, skinny and have long dark brown hair and some rampant facial hair. When I say white, I mean chalk. My social skills border on non existent and I like computers. What am I?
But hold on! I also ‘play games on my computer’. So someone thought up a delightful term to sound less pathetic: ‘You are a Gamer!’. Yes, that made everything better, it sounds cool now. Although anyone over thirty will think you’re a flamboyant homosexual, at least you’ve been boxed in some more.
Well, guess what, I’m not a gamer. I’m not a nerd either. I’m just a very sad individual whose only goal in life is to battle and corrupt the Mainstream!
So you’re a goth? NO! I don’t need makeup to pretend I’ve been dead for five days. I’m an all-natural corpse.
‘You’re weird.’
‘Please no! I want friends! … I’m so alone…
I’m not emo!- It’s A Computer Game.This is the veil that ‘our sub-culture’ is draped in. If a computer game wants to make it into main stream culture it has to pass through ‘nerds’ and ‘gamers’. If a video game gets reported on, you will always see that dark, computer screen lit room. If not on the TV, it is definitely there in your mind.
“These people don’t do anything except sit in front of their computer all day long.”
That’s all people understand. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing with that keyboard, you’re still just sitting there. It doesn’t matter if you are talking to three people, playing against thirty or are in a world with three thousand. You’re still sitting in front of your computer.
This is an image that has to be shed.
- The GoalSo what am I trying to prove with this text? It is time for a computer game to break out of the cage of
gaming. My goal is to make people notice that one game in particular is worthy of being mentioned individually. This game is Starcraft.
I don’t want to mention genres and I’m not going to make comparisons. The competition is over. Starcraft won. It doesn’t matter that people disagree; if they do they are more than welcome to do the same with their own personal favourite, but that doesn’t change the fact that they will fail.
My goal is to turn Starcraft into a sport.
2. Where Others Have FailedOut of the pool of games created in the last thirty years only a handful are worth mentioning, most only because they were pioneers in technological development. Smaller still is the number of games that are transformed into a competitive platform. You will also notice that most of these competitive games are fairly recent. This is only because developers realised that the promise of competition grants higher sales and game-longevity, this last one leading to more sales. But all in all, the cherished ‘gamer community’ only sticks around for a couple of months.
If a developer strikes gold this competition can be stretched for a couple of years. Around that time there is a newer better game, usually a sequel to the former that tingles the gamers enough to switch. This development goes hand in hand with computer hardware advances.
One of these golden games was Counter-strike. A game that is still ‘alive’ today. It had a grand competitive platform, tournaments were held, some lucky individuals even played the game professionally and earned money solely through playing the game. Similar games, like Quake 3 and several others also developed a ‘professional’ scene.
Yet these games never made it out of ‘gaming’; they didn’t get into mainstream culture. Why!? People were playing this game for a living! Companies, sponsorship, world wide competition!
These games were made to be played. This sounds like a stupid remark, but this is why they never got an audience. These games, one by one, were ‘First Person Shooters’, games where you look through the eyes of your character.
The object of the game being simple: Shoot and kill all members of the enemy team or complete a certain objective on the playing field. The firing of a weapon is a feat of skill, the aiming and the positioning, the tactical insight and the teamwork. These are all invisible.
When you are playing the game, you are part of it, you know everything that is happening, you perform the skill. But unlike a game of basketball, the players can only be viewed individually. Their feats of skill can only be witnessed individually. All the spectator sees is the execution.
Starcraft is a ‘Real Time Strategy’; a game where a player builds up a base, consisting of several buildings that work towards the construction of an army. This army is then in turn used to defeat the opponent - simple enough. It takes a great deal of skill to operate every facet of such a game. One needs to maintain an economy, see to it that enough resources are available to construct buildings and units. The base itself has to be maintained, enough buildings have to be producing units. Then the army needs to be managed, attacks need to be organised, the enemy needs to be scouted out etc…
All of these feats of skill are visible. A spectator can witness the construction of the base, the movement of the army; even when the spectator is only looking at the playing field, and not just through the eyes of the player. This of course goes for every RTS game ever made. The reason why Starcraft is different will be made clear shortly.
3. Relevance Of A Term.E-sport is what they call it. When a game is host to a competitive platform long enough for money to get involved it’s called an e-sport. There is also the notion that the game is good enough to be played competitively. This usually means that the players require a decent set of skills that have been trained severely. These players have done more than recognise this game as a hobby, they are no longer just your ordinary time wasting gamers, they are
‘e-sport athletes’.
Now at first the idea of a nerd sitting in front of a computer calling himself an athlete is laughable. At least to a layman spectator, let alone an actual athlete who spends months preparing his body for the big tournaments. But now I would like to invite you to look beyond just the generalisation. I want you to actually look at that screen, look at that keyboard and look at that mouse.
These people might not be able to run the 100 meters, but nether can a weightlifter or even a marathon runner. This discipline is new to the world, it takes some getting used to, but it is a discipline nonetheless.
These e-athletes train just as much as your average ‘real’ athlete. Only they focus on completely different part of the body. Eye hand coordination, reflexes, mouse accuracy and a lot of other things that are bound to the game they specialise in. Much like a badminton player and a tennis player will follow the same basic exercises but only adapted to their game’s strategy and layout.
The screen is flashing, images moving, selections being made instantly.
The keyboard, fingers move across it in a blur, to fast to keep track of.
The mouse, moving with deadly precision, clicking hundreds of times per minute.
These are the things you will see when observing a Starcraft player. And if you think that these activities are not tiring. Try tapping one button as fast as you can for a full minute, I got around 480 (using the calculator to count). Now try doing this for 15 minutes, then 15 more. That’s how long average Starcraft games last for. Just to give you an idea.
E-sports are one thing, I don’t mind them but E-sport is still a generalisation of many games being played. The reason for this brings us back to my starting statement about the ‘First Person Shooters’ they are fleeting and they are affected by the hardware being used to play them. One player has a better computer so his information will be more accurate, his bullets flying across the screen will be better received by the server. His graphics will be better, he’ll see his opponents much more clearly.
Starcraft has no need for this race in technology. The game was released in ’98 and didn’t have the option to alter graphics, it doesn’t even let you change screen resolutions. Because of its age, it can be played on almost any computer, regardless of hardware capabilities. Only peripherals like the mouse monitor and keyboard can give the player a possible advantage, but I think it is safe to say that this is similar to a runner’s shoes and a tennis player’s racket.
This is because internal hardware advantage leads to the player experiencing the game differently on a fundamental level. The physics of the world alter around the player. This equals a tennis player altering gravity or the weight of the ball, but only for the player’s own benefit. Starcraft is bound to its rules of environment and nobody can alter them.
This creates a standard of rules that sets out Starcraft out from other games. The balance between the different factions is pretty much set in stone. Once in a blue moon a small change is made, but this hasn’t happened in a long time. Again a real world analogy would be the implementing of the ‘challenge’ in tennis, where the player can question a call made by the referee – a small change that doesn’t alter the fundamentals of the game.
So, what do we have so far?
We have a game that has stood the test of time. Has the potential of being a very immersive spectator sport. It requires skill and training to advance up the learning curve. It has a standard of play that is unlikely to be changed. It is impossible for a player to become perfect beyond fair competition. It is easily accessible to the general public; a computer able to run Starcraft is probably a lot cheaper than a new set of golf clubs. Oh and it’s also a lot of fun to play, but let’s not get into that.
Now, just for the sake of being awkward, let’s take a look at the actual definition of the word sport. You can look up others, but I found the one from dictionary.com best suited for my needs:
Sport - [spawrt, spohrt]
– noun
1.
an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.
- dictionary.com
I think it’s fantastic that fishing is mentioned in this list here. If a fisherman would be as active as a Starcraft player the river would be reduced to a mousse of lumpy mud.
But I don’t want to degrade fishing as a sport, it has a whole different set of skill requirements compared to any other sport, I just wanted to make that lame joke.
All joking aside, I’ve tried to point out that Starcraft stands above the term of ‘game’. It has proven itself to be different from the other creations that lie buried in the primordial pool of computer technology. But I still sense some doubt, I’m going to explore my bubble just a little further before it bursts.
Starcraft is a sport. Now what?
4. Olympics: A New AgeOver the course of this text, I’ve considered you, the reader, to be a layman; someone who has never set foot in the world of computer games. I assume you had never heard of the game before. If this is true, then this text has travelled quite a long way. I did explain the concepts of ‘FPS’ and ‘RTS’ as simple as I could. Now I want to talk to you about the actual game. Why is Starcraft so special that I spent so much time on this
peroration.
For this we need to dig deeper into the game. For those who know the game, this section will require little effort. For those who have never even
seen the game, things might get rather difficult; I’ll do my best to keep it simple.
In my ever thinning bubble, I imagine a new age of athletics and Starcraft will be its firstborn.
I’ve already made clear that Starcraft rises above all other games to such a level that it becomes a sport, now, with the same breath I will say that Starcraft rises above every other
sport as well.
This is because it is not just an ordinary RTS. It is a representation of every aspect of war, without the cruelty and misery, crammed into slightly simplified form.
Starcraft has three races. The Zerg, The Protoss and The Terran. Each race is distinctly different. A different style of playing, different means of construction, different means of production. Yet these three races all come together in perfect balance. I say perfect, I mean as near to perfection as possible and only when these races are being operated by opponents of similar skill.
Each combination of units from a single race is met with a completely different combination from a different race. There is no optimal combination. Of course, these combinations will only cancel each other out if both players are equal in economy, production and level of unit control. After all, the goal of a player is to win and this is achieved by eventually tipping the scale in his favour.
A player can choose to specialise his assault to a certain facet of the game, but still the other facets need to be balanced in order for him to win.
This is the maths of the game, but there is still the terrain, there are the units that have to traverse it, there are the resources that are scattered across it.
This game managed to represent the cold mathematics with the individual combat and tactics of war to near perfection. Yet still simple enough for one mind to control it all.
It is even said that the Art of War can be applied to this game with relative ease and that the tactics used by Tsun Su actually work within the game.
This sport combines many skills. There is the physical skill of speed, endurance and accuracy but there is also the mental skill of strategy, timing and multitasking. Effectively the player becomes an entire team, an entire chain of command; an entire race. This is unlike any sport the world has ever seen.
ChessWhen I say that the world has never seen a game like this before, I mean it. But some people quickly blurt out this strange five letter word with a smirk on their face like they have just won the war. Chess.
I have used the word many times to describe this hallowed game. “Starcraft is the chess of the gaming world”. That’s when I’m trying to convince my fellow
gamers to try it out.
Then the occasional smart bastard arrives who happens to be in a chess club and starts arguing that Chess is the perfect strategy game and that there is no way a computer game can compete in that category. I mean, chess has been around for hundreds of years, how could it possibly be beaten by something on a hard drive?
A rather weak comeback would be ‘Starcraft is the evolution of chess’ but that’s simply not true. Chess is what it is, and it won’t evolve; many have tried in the past and they all failed. Because, yes chess is very near to perfection, and this is because the players battle inside a perfect world of equality. The only possible imperfection in the chess universe is that white moves first, how very racist.
Starcraft exists in its own level and in this level it is untouchable. It has its own set of skills and its own level of perfection. The game is far more flawed than chess because it has far more content and far more possibilities. Chess has 6 moving pieces, Starcraft has about 48 interacting units stretched over three races – and that’s not counting the production and technology buildings.
Time is also an important factor. In competitive chess there is a timer, if you think too long about a move you have the risk of running out of time. Now in Starcraft the stress is on the timing instead. If you spent your resources to expand your economy at the time your opponent decides to assault you, the game is over. If you stop to think about your strategy, your opponent will be about a hundred actions ahead of you, which means you might as well concede the game.
Chess never made it to the Olympics. This is because, apart from brain muscle, you don’t need any physical skill beyond that of a chimpanzee to play the game.
If the chimp stuck to the rules, he could be told by a chess champion where to put the pieces and the chimp could in fact win against another champion.
Starcraft needs physical skill as well as mental skill. You can tell a person how to win a game but if this person does not posses the speed and multitasking skill of a regular player there is no chance of this person winning against a superior opponent.
Golf got thrown out of the Olympics. Maybe this time, again, the physical requirements were not enough. But at least golf got in for a period of time. So maybe, if pushed hard enough (and wait about a hundred and fifty years) Starcraft might make it into the Olympic circle.
And when you take into account all of the things I have said here, it doesn’t seem as far fetched as you would think. In fact, I think it’s about as far fetched as having ‘shooting’ or ‘curling’ – of all things – as an Olympic discipline. I say curling ‘of all things’ because it looks just as silly as someone sitting in front of his computer. I’m sure it is toiling work brushing that stone all the way to where it is supposed to be, but silly none the less.
A new breed of sports. One that ventures beyond the limits of the physical realm. Just one step closer to the future.
5. The Anomaly. Now you might be thinking ‘this all sounds like a great idea, but there is no way something like this will happen. After all, it’s been ten years and I’ve never heard of it!’
It does seem like a foolish idea, strange to see a bright and intelligent man like myself waste his time on a lost cause. But now I will tell you that Starcraft already
is a sport. No metaphors, no analogies. I’ll explain.
In the small Asian country of South-Korea something very strange happened. Apparently, through the numerous internet cafés spread across the cities in the late nineties, Starcraft as a game really caught on. Now, we are a decade later and there are several Starcraft professional leagues. Better yet, there are special Starcraft professional
TV-stations. In South-Korea, a computer game individually made it into the mainstream culture.
Most of these games get commented on by professional (I like using the word professional now, I’ve been holding back for almost 4 000 words) commentators. At the time of writing there is a huge campaign going on the Internet to commentate on VODs or ‘Videos On Demand’ in English for a mainstream audience. These are basically Internet copies of the matches being broadcast on TV. The American and European ‘pro scene’ for Starcraft is also rapidly growing, with more and more new players buying the game every day.
Even though this ‘movement’ of sorts is still largely obscured from mainstream culture, it is gaining momentum. And my idea is, if it can happen in South-Korea, why not across the globe?
Starcraft is unique, it is unprecedented, it is an anomaly and it is a great game.
6. Don’t be shy.In closing I want to address every player of Starcraft reading this and indeed everyone else too.
Do not be ashamed because you play a computer game. I hope I’ve made it clear that this game demands to be the exception. Rid the world of the gaming nerd stereotype and show people that not every computer game is the same; that you’re not just sitting there staring at a screen, that you’re actually doing something that is worth mentioning.
Computers haven’t been around for long. Games have only been around for thirty odd years. Starcraft has only been around for ten. But I think it’s time for the world to know that this new kind of entertainment is not just some random thing that will go away as time passes. I think this game is the best that has ever been made and that this will continue to be true for a long time. I know the sequel of Starcraft has been announced and I don’t intent to deem it inferior until I have had a good look. But what I know is, this will not be Starcraft 2, it will be a new game, something that looks like Starcraft and uses the same races and setup but in a way it will be like trying to make Chess 2.
If all goes well and the sequel is worth mentioning, then maybe they can go hand in hand, father and son, trying to usher in a new age for sport and entertainment. Much like pub sports like snooker and darts have made it to the television in Britain so long ago. I’m just hoping that Starcraft will have a more global impact. But with you reading this, we are just that little step further in achieving that goal.
- Greth for sc2gg.com
Grethsc at Gmail.com
Several major websites in the English Starcraft scene:
http://www.teamliquid.net/http://www.gosugamers.net/http://www.battlereports.comhttp://www.sc2gg.com
Starcraft: The Sport
Jan 11 2008, 11:12 AM
