Starcraft - A Beginner's Guide
Starcraft as a sport. Why it's awesome. And why you should watch.
To anyone reading this, who is already familiar with the pro-gaming scene, most of this will be obvious and uninteresting to you. This essay is meant as a primer for those who know nothing about Starcraft. I have been watching Starcraft since brood-war, but I considered it to be a fairly uninteresting and niche hobby. So, save for a few close friends, I kept the hobby to myself. Recently, however, I was offered a job working for IGN. They are flying me to Atlantic City next month, and I figured that this was a big enough event to tell people about.
If it sounds like a "coming out" story, It's not meant to be. Every person I have told about the IGN job was either happy, or confused. My mom had never heard of Starcraft or IGN, and her entire experience of gaming was having to kick me off my NES a decade ago so that I would do my homework. In order to explain pro-gaming and Starcraft to her, I compiled a lengthy email which contained a collection of youtube clips and publications about pro-gaming. This post is meant to be a one-stop solution for anyone else who runs into this problem, and wants to explain Starcraft to a newbie.
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Starcraft is a real-time strategy game in which two people face off in a large arena. Each player has control of a number of in-game "units". The goal is to try and destroy your opponent's units with your own. The game has a sci-fi theme, centering around three different factions or, "races", that the player can choose: Protoss, Terran, and Zerg. Though they all have detailed stories behind them, the Protoss are basically high-tech aliens; the Terrans are the futuristic and gritty descendants of humans; the Zerg are a biological, insect-like, alien race. Each of these factions have different units, abilities, strengths and weaknesses.
Think of chess; the units start out on opposite sides of the map, and the players control them from a top-down view. Unlike chess, however, the game is not played in turns. Everything in Starcraft is happening live, and usually very fast. In chess, you start with all of your units already on the board, but Starcraft is a bit different. Starcraft is all about resource management. Players start with a few small "worker" units and a main home base. The workers mine and collect resources from the blue crystals near the base and earn the player money. With money, the player can buy new units and new buildings. That's the bare-bones.
Learning more about the units, strategies, and the infinitely complex details of competitive play is your own prerogative. Like any sport, Starcraft can be enjoyed with a very basic knowledge of the game, but the more you understand about it, the more you will realize how unbelievably skilled the professionals are. This is a good article which outlines the basic units and strategies, if you want to get more detail.
That is just the very basic framework of the game, but that is not what makes Starcraft great. Most people watching Soccer don't know the details of off-sides rules, and people who watch poker on TV usually don't know how to calculate hand odds. Sports are the original reality-TV; people watch to see mind-blowing skill, intense rivalry, and the look of victory or defeat on a players face.
A quick warning before you read any further: If you find yourself smirking, already, at how lame this is, it will only get worse. I implore you, take off your cynic cap for a few minutes and enjoy yourself.
Why Starcraft is awesome:
Any great sport rewards skill, not luck. Some spectators think that games like poker are luck based, but this is clearly a naive misconception. Thousands of people compete in poker tournaments, yet the same people consistently rise to the top, tournament after tournament, for decades. The odds of this happening by luck are astronomical, but practice and intelligence beats the odds, and Starcraft is no different.
The premiere Starcraft 2 league in Korea (the GSL) has had 10 major tournaments since the release of Starcraft2. The players fight through massive single elimination brackets to get to the top, yet from 10 tournaments, we only have 4 different winners. One Terran player, "MVP", has won three times now, and is generally considered the best player in the world. Beating the odds again and again like this takes commitment (many pro-players practice 10+ hours per day.) Like chess, Starcraft takes a well-developed strategic and analytically mind, but, since Starcraft is played in real time, it also takes speed.
Yes, he is playing the keyboard like a concert pianist. He moves his fingers faster than I could if speed were my only goal. Despite how it may look, he is not just mashing his hands randomly into the keys. Every movement is precise, calculated, and purposeful. This type of hand speed is referred to as "APM" (actions per minute), and the best players have upwards of 300 actions per minute.
Speed isn't everything though. In fact, most professionals say that "APM" is one of the least valuable measurements of skill. While good APM is necessary, what is even more important is a brain that can handle complex situational analysis and creative strategies developed on the fly.
This example is easy to watch and understand, but the skill of Starcraft is as much in the small things as it is in the large, game-ending, nukes. I could show thousands of other videos instead of that one, but this video is recent and exciting. The more you watch and the more you learn, the better the game becomes.
With sports like soccer or football, people tend to have favorite teams or players, and sometimes a least favorite team or player. The story does not go much deeper than that with most sports. One reason Starcraft works so well as a spectator event, and can maintain peoples interest for such a long period of time, is that there are many levels of depth to the grand narrative of the game.
First, spectators tend to pick a favorite faction, (Protoss, Terran, or Zerg) and they root for them to succeed. The three factions are quite different in style and function, and people love to think that their favorite faction is actually the weakest. When people think their faction is weak, it automatically becomes the underdog in any competition. People often perceive imbalance in the game because, as in real life, we remember the "hits" and forget the "misses" with regards to our own strengths and weaknesses. If our faction wins, it was because of skill. If they lose, the game was unfair. Though Starcraft is very well balanced overall, the styles of play change over time, and there are moments where one faction is generally considered to be the weakest. This was the case for the Zerg race during the very first Global Starcraft League tournament. Zerg was the least played faction of the three, and was widely considered the hardest faction to win with. Because of this, when one lone Zerg made it all the way through the brackets and into the finals, people were ecstatic.
A nobody, a Zerg, nicknamed "fruitdealer" wins the Global tournament. His name, apparently, comes from the profession of his mother, who sold fruit at a small stand in Korea. When nobody thought that Zerg had a chance, Kim Won Gi (fruitdealer) showed them otherwise. His story is perhaps the best underdog story in Starcraft 2 history. His winnings from the tournament totaled nearly $100,000.
But faction rivalry is perhaps the least interesting element of competitive play, and balance opinions shift from day to day. Player rivalries, like in ordinary sports, are where most of the passions lie.
The most well known rivalry, particularly in the West, is between Idra and Huk. Likely the two best players outside of Europe and Korea, these two have fought numerous times for money and prestige. Both have won an MLG, and both have knocked the other out of an MLG. Idra on team "EG" and Huk on team "Liquid," were always, predictably, the focus of any tournament that both of them entered. But nobody ever thought they would join forces...
Beyond petty player vs. player rivalries however, there is an over-arching thematic contention at the heart of Starcraft: Koreans vs. The World
Starcraft is South Korea's national sport, and has been for a decade now. They have a culture that accepts it, they have an infrastructure that encourages, popularizes and monetizes it. In the world of Starcraft, non-Korean players are known as "foreigners." In Starcraft 1, no foreigner ever came within a mile of a Korean pro in terms of skill. Korea competed internally, but didn't take the rest of the world seriously, and for good reason. They were, unequivocally, the best.
Things changed, if only slightly, in Starcraft 2. Professional gaming took hold in the west, and many pro-players stood toe to toe with Koreans. Idra made it into the top 8 of the GSL, as did Huk. Huk went on to beat a Korean called "Moon" at a tournament in Sweden, taking first place. People began to realize that the Koreans could be beaten; they were mortal after all. But the Koreans, nevertheless, continue to dominate. MLG, the biggest North American tournament, had no Koreans competing in it a year ago, but now they steal the show. Korean players have won the last three MLG tournaments, in fact, Koreans have taken the top 6 spots in the last two MLG's, obliterating the western opposition.
In the face of total domination from the Korean pro's, people are eager for a homegrown hope!
Millions of viewers, Hundreds of thousands of dollars, from a video-game?
People connect with the stories of commentators like Sean (day9) Plott, when he sheds a tear about facing his brother in a championship, and when he talks about counting on family support when he was down. People root for Steven (Destiny) Bonnell as he fights his way from being just a guy with a sense of humor, to a pro-player. There are countless other personalities that help make the Starcraft scene enjoyable, but here is not the place to list them all. The individual matches and tournaments themselves are important, but there is more at stake than any given player, or team, or country.
In the same way that fans enjoy the underdog status of their favorite faction, or their favorite player, or even their country, the sport of Starcraft itself is the underdog. Rivalries don't get any more bitter than "nerd vs. jock". Starcraft is football of the mind; and having intellect matter in a competition, more so than muscle, has been a long time coming. Watching the competitive scene grow, from nothing at all, into a thriving global industry is better than just entertaining, it is cathartic.
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If you stuck around for all of that and want more, go here for some links.
None of the above is meant as hyperbole. Personally, I have become a bit bored with my own cynicism. I used to treat passion about life's amenities as evidence of a weak mind. It is true, making digital alien armies fight on a computer screen is ridiculous and silly, but it's no more silly than chess, or badminton or football. Pessimism of this style is exhausting and I highly recommend avoiding it.
Like what you love, and love that you like it.
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