People who know me would say that I\u2019m not a particularly sporty person.\u00a0 This actually isn\u2019t true: for a large portion of my live I have been involved in competitive dinghy sailing which really is more intense than most people realise, which was always hilarious on the occasions I would take said people out on a boat with me.\u00a0 What those that know me would assume is that I\u2019m not sporty because I don\u2019t ply football very well and don\u2019t spend any time watching the football or formula one or rugby or cricket, therefore I\u2019m not sporty.\u00a0 This is fair enough as I don\u2019t have a huge amount of time for sport as I find it for the most part tedious.<\/p>\n
I have found myself enjoying a sport.\u00a0 I have found myself enjoying Starcraft 2.<\/p>\n
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First of all, calling Starcraft 2 a sport is pure flame-bait and could easily draw someone in to a long and pointless argument, but the fundamentals are there.\u00a0 There is a matchmaking league system, there is a simple game that has a vast amount of depth following the \u201ceasy to learn difficult to master\u201d approach, the game play is (for the most part) extremely balanced, and you get professional players who make their money out of tournaments.\u00a0 Starcraft 2 and its predecessor are very firmly E-Sports.\u00a0 I\u2019m just suggesting that it really doesn\u2019t need the E.<\/p>\n
The league system is very well implemented.\u00a0 Once again, this runs the risk of turning into a love letter to Blizzard so to keep the summary short, you play five placement games that assess your skill and then it puts you in a division of one of five leagues.\u00a0 The Copper leagues at the bottom will consist of absolute beginners whereas the Platinum leagues at the top will consist of professional level players that could be making their living from tournament winnings.<\/p>\n
I am, as of yesterday evening, top of my Bronze league division.\u00a0 I\u2019m not a bad player and I\u2019m learning fast, but it is astonishing how much of a difference there is between leagues.\u00a0 I can just about hold my own with silver players but very quickly get shown the door when it comes to gold players to a point where I\u2019m not quite sure how it is humanly possible to multitask as quickly as they do.\u00a0 Of course, if I could have seen the way that I play now a few weeks ago, I would have probably said the same to myself so it is just a learning curve.<\/p>\n
The thing that I have found really gripping me is something that I have not felt since I was competing in a sailing national championship, and that is the desire to climb the league system.\u00a0 I become oddly invested in each match, desperate to earn a few more points that might let me climb another rank and take me a little closer to being promoted to the Silver division.\u00a0 Each match is both exciting for the prospect of more points, and a dreaded event for the possibility of losing points.\u00a0 Regardless, each match leaves my heart rate through the roof and on more than one occasion a gibbering wreck face down on my desk, regardless of the outcome.<\/p>\n
There is real depth to the game.\u00a0 As previously mentioned, it genuinely is an \u201ceasy to learn difficult to master\u201d creature with many different ways to play.\u00a0 It is chess on steroids:\u00a0 It rewards forward planning and good decisions, but unlike chess it brutally punishes you for not making those decisions fast enough.\u00a0 A good indicator of skill is the \u201cactions per minute\u201d statistic which for some of the Korean professionals that have been doing this for years can get up to the 300 mark.\u00a0 A basic match will consist of you building an economy, maintaining an economy, performing reconnaissance and scouting, performing harassment raids into enemy territory, building a military and maneuvering an army all at the same time.\u00a0 Some games will feature some elements more than others, but every single game will involve all of those elements.<\/p>\n
The question that I find myself asking however is \u201ccan this be taken further?\u201d\u00a0 The original Starcraft, a game that is now around 15 years old, essentially became the national sport of South Korea with the top tier players attaining a celebrity status that is almost comparable with the likes of David Beckham.\u00a0 If you fire up Youtube and have a look for some Starcraft matches, you will find small-ish stadiums of spectators for the matches that are broadcast on large screens behind the players hunched over their computers dressed in motor-racing style jumpsuits sporting sponsorship logos and endorsements.\u00a0 It is possible for this sort of thing to happen.\u00a0 It\u2019s unlikely to happen on any large mainstream scale in the west, because the bar to entry is a little high: it is not after all immediately obvious what\u2019s going on to the uninitiated.\u00a0 Not only that, but it can be difficult to make people care about what digital creatures are doing to each other without a human element to attach to (which is almost definitely why the Korean leagues are successful as they really push the individual players as personalities as opposed to relying so much on the game itself, presenting itself with the glossy veneer of any other sport as opposed to focusing on the fact that this particular sport is performed with the help of two computers.<\/p>\n
Starcraft 2 is more than just another computer game.\u00a0 It has the infrastructure to be a sport.\u00a0 This is not the future of an alternative to sport just yet, but I think it might be showing a potential direction that things could take.\u00a0 I am always amazed by just how far computer games have come since Donkey Kong but this is not quite as mainstream as it could be just yet.\u00a0 Maybe in another 15 years with the release of Starcraft 3, we could be starting to see this sort of thing on television.<\/p>\n