I was about to polish off an article on whether or not Amy Adams passes for a high jumper in her Oscar-nominated turn in The Fighter (spoiler if/when I do finish it: she doesn’t) when this huge piece of news came over the wire, announced by Geoff “InControl” Robinson: Russ, the founder of GosuCoaching, has assembled and funded the North American Star League—an apparent American counterpart to professional Korean StarCraft leagues and championships (such as GOMTV’s Global Starcraft II League or the World Cyber Games) that have held almost mythological status for gamers around the world for years.
Well, despite being quite fond of Starcraft 2, I’ve spent some time recently on the site bashing it, so I figured I’d give it some equal time and talk about this development, which may or may not endure, but is important whether it succeeds or fails.
What makes the North American Star League special? Frankly, the prize pool — $100,000 in prizes for the first two seasons and $200,000 for the third season. These are the numbers that turn heads – numbers that can go a long way to sustain the livelihoods of professional StarCraft players. In Korea, where StarCraft is an institution, and where StarCraft 2 has yet to truly surpass the original, six-digit payouts are not unheard of for tournament winners, and five-digit payouts are common. There are larger numbers that go out in the form of endorsements both inside and outside the United States for professional gamers, but prizes on this level for U.S. StarCraft tournaments have the potential to be a game-changer.
The payouts in Korea for playing StarCraft are so much higher than anywhere else that progamers specializing in StarCraft generally have to move to Korea to hope to make a living, which in turn weakens prospects for domestic professional scenes. Neither America nor Europe can truly feel legitimate in pro StarCraft gaming with their best players playing somewhere else.
What does this mean to non-StarCraft fans, and what is eSports? More after the jump —
The Differentiators
Why does StarCraft matter? Because it has long been the flagship game of eSports, a movement to legitimize video games as a mainstream spectator sport. In South Korea, StarCraft matches between top professional players are broadcast on multiple television channels, and the Internet cafe is as ubiquitous a hangout as our sports bars. Major corporations (like Sony, Korea Air, Intel and others) offer sponsorships that total in the millions across leagues. Somewhere between 1998 and now, StarCraft in Korea passed a tipping point, and video game enthusiasts in the United States or elsewhere hoping to see video games rise to the same level of legitimacy as athletic competitions have pinned a lot of their hopes on the video game that has already made it once.
North America already has plenty of professional gamers – Major League Gaming is the biggest name in the U.S. pro gaming circuits, but it is more diversified across titles, with a bigger focus on first-person shooters and fighting games. And while you still see the occasional six-figure payday in an MLG matchup in one of the more popular titles, MLG doesn’t stand up to the Korean leagues in StarCraft, nor does it carry their mystique or prestige.
So, the answer is, StarCraft doesn’t necessarily have to matter, but StarCraft has succeeded in cultural ways in which other games have failed. It seems to be the title that has mattered most in advancing the culture of gaming into the mainstream, and it seems to possess some quality that makes it more likely to succeed as an eSport than a Street Fighter or Halo title. (At least that’s the belief among StarCraft fans, which is admittedly hugely biased, but, I think, still interesting.)
Korea also has all these other genres of games. The dominance of StarCraft there is perhaps overstated because its presence is so conspicuous, and the success of StarCraft 2 there on the level of StarCraft: Brood War is by no means a given. Plus, the World Cyber Games, while run by a Korean company, has moved its tournaments around the world for some time, and its last finals, in the United States, no less, awarded $250,000 in prizes in 11 games (among them CounterStrike, the other granddaddy of games that, along with StarCraft, has shown entirely unreasonable endurance over the years.
So, there are a lot of holes in the StarCraft myth – but it’s still a compelling myth capable of shaping history. And maybe the North American Star League can help push that myth further into reality. Maybe. It has many pieces in place, but has not yet proven it can execute on its mission. It has a goal of broadcasting games with a high-quality stream and high-production values five nights a week on a consistent basis – something no professional gaming circuit in the United States does, but it has yet to prove it can do so reliably. The money is as yet the only differentiator worth noting – while InControl is certainly a big name in StarCraft, and while the money will bring the attention of top players, it lacks the cache of a confirmed top-tier caster like Day[9] or Artosis, who are busy with many other one-off gigs.
In pro gaming, commentary is very important. It is often more difficult to figure out what is going on, even if you know the game, than it is in, say, football or baseball, because the players may have different views and so much is happening on the screen at once, and there is no way to have a “sky cam” that sees everything at one time. Top-tier commentators are in-demand, and it seems hard to believe the North American Star League will succeed without hiring or developing a top-tier commentator.
The IdrA Factor
Release the Gracken.
Perhaps the biggest draw of the North American Star League is the very likely presence of America’s most highly skilled pro gaming export, Greg Fields, a.k.a. “IdrA.” Fields is by far the most successful American StarCraft player – a few years ago, he declined a full ride to RPI to study theoretical physics to move to Korea and play StarCraft professionally. Among non-Koreans playing StarCraft 2 in Korea, he is only rivaled by Jonathan “Jinro” Walsh, a Swede who has beaten IdrA in several recent high-profile matches.
IdrA has a reputation for being very “BM,” or “bad mannered” in games, especially after losing. He is known for such affronts as refusing to type “GG” after losing a game or, more entertainingly, hurling obscenities at his opponents while complaining about imbalance in the game design. This is quite a step outside the norm in the even-tempered world of Korean professional gaming. “IdrA rage” is an institution among StarCraft fans, and IdrA-based memes are not too hard to find, even if you may have no idea what they mean. After one of the all-time StarCraft greats and huge general class-act, Lim Yo-Hwan, a.k.a. SlayerS_BoxeR (who in damatic Ted Williams-esque fashion left full-time professional gaming for a time to perform mandatory service in the Korean military) accidentally misspelled “Greg” as “Grack” in a chat, “Release the Gracken!” became a common call among StarCraft fans.
In the professional wrestling parlance, where the good guys (like BoxeR) are “babyfaces,” IdrA is StarCraft’s biggest “heel” – a beloved bad guy very popular among fans, especially in the United States.
IdrA recently announced plans to leave Korea and move back to the United States, most likely, according to speculation, to participate in the North American Star League.
Grack to the Point
Why does this matter? It all comes down to what exactly eSports is and what it is trying to accomplish.
Can you get professionals to play your game full-time? Well, if you pay enough, sure. Money can fix that problem.
Can you create superstars and media personalities to serve as brand ambassadors and get people to connect with your activity on a personal level? While this is historically quite difficult with video games, guys like BoxeR and IdrA make it seem possible. I would add that, as someone who also follows the Magic: The Gathering professional scene, there are a number of professional players who do a very good job as brand ambassadors and sports-quality superstars; I’ve been very impressed with what Luis Scott-Vargas has built over at ChannelFireball in recent years, and there are dozens of others in that game. But ESPN2 broadcast Magic the Gathering more than a decade ago, and we all saw where that went. By which I mean nobody watched it.
The biggest hope for a lot of these people is poker – the poker craze, driven largely by the innovations in the use of the pocket cam, the loose money of the economic bubble, and the democratizing effects of the Internet, has helped many to think their activity, too, if it is backed by sufficient money, if it can manufacture superstars, if it can be democratized by online access and if it can just get time in front of people’s eyeballs in the right way — it can also rise to the level of esteem of a “sport.”
Look at What We Can Do
I had an interesting conversation tonight with a friend who had spend significant time in both Spain and Chile in the last few years. One of the observations she made that really stuck with me was that, in Chile, she found people generally downplayed the ability of the government and country to coordinate logistics and run complex institutions – Chile was, after all, a third-world country, they would claim, and would not have the capabilities of a first-world country, such a Spain. Except, by her experience, Spain was a mess compared to Chile, especially with government institutions and logistics, and the Chileans had grossly underestimated the relative competence of their countrymen/women. By aspiring to a mythologized idea of what Spain might be, Chile had driven itself farther than if it had copied what Spain had been doing exactly.
This is, of course, an anecdotal first-person oversimplification, but it makes its point. By aspiring to a thing, it is very possible to reinvent the thing to a degree that serves instead to create something entirely different.
A lot of people spend time trying to define “eSports” from the standpoint of “sports,” but I see fewer people looking to do the opposite – to identify the qualities in sports that eSports would have to achieve to have realized its mission and made its moniker real. And I think when you look at that, you realize that sports are not quite as elite or unapproachable as they often feel. Most people who play sports do it only occasionally, and never for any money. A lot of people who follow teams don’t necessarily watch many games. Sports teams have big stadiums, but they need to rent out those stadiums to music groups and job fairs and stuff to make ends meet, and even they the teams are occasionally crushed by debt burdens or need massive financing to keep their facilities current.
Most things that qualify as “sports” have much smaller and less enthusiastic followings than StarCraft does. HuskyStarcraft’s YouTube channel has more than 10 times the total upload views on YouTube channel for Major League Soccer, and more than 100 times the total upload views of the NFL Players Association channel (the NFL doesn’t even appear to have its own YouTube channel). For your amusement, here is one of HuskyStarcraft’s YouTube videos, which hit the top listings on YouTube very quickly out of the gates (it’s a Justin Bieber parody that isn’t all that accessible to non-StarCraft fans):
There is of course the myth that if you play sports, you will be popular, attractive and loved by all, whereas if you don’t you will not – but the sooner we all dispossess ourselves of this idea at any age, the better – except insofar as much as physical activity and friendships are healthy things to have. People who play sports still have difficult times in high school, people. The football captain who is happy when everybody else is sad is imaginary. And besides, high school only lasts so long, and a lot of pro gamers are done with it.
There is perhaps the desire to subvert this myth, however mistaken it always was – this is like calling government entities “terrorists” to subvert how they call all their enemies “terrorists.” (“I’ll tell you what the real crime is, man!” etc.) At a certain point these rhetorical conflations become unnecessarily confusing and unmoor you from what you are trying to accomplish. It might be satisfying to call an “I’m rubber, you’re glue” at first, but, as Robert Frost might say, it “butters no parsnips.”
Actually, the full quote from Frost is more instructive and appropriate:
There is one qualifying fact always to bear in mind: there is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. I may not be able to do that. I believe in doing it — don’t you doubt me there. I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does. I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.”
This is, to a degree, an apology for selling out, but it also acknowledges the unique problem of reaching this great mass of people who lie outside one’s niche community. This is, perhaps, the great proving ground for eSports. Can it reach out to this greater humanity who right now does not play these video games as enthusiastically as the eSports evangelists?
But who exactly does this effectively these days? The audience is fragmenting for even the mainstream media channels – I’m reminded of the college kids who eat their seed corn – the scores of interns who provide so much free labor they destroy the jobs they were looking to score in the future. By building their own edifices that take the place of sports – that draw more and more people away from “mainstream” sports and to their own hobbies, eSports evangelists are leaving a smaller and smaller “mainstream” pool on which to draw from if this tipping point for which they are searching is ever reached.
This is not a bad thing, of course, but it does mean that “eSports” is most likely an aspirational myth, not a cogent strategy – and that, if it does succeed in its mission, it will look very different from more conventional sports – or at least how those sports are imagined in the zeitgeist – or in the hearts and minds of StarCraft players.
Conclusion
Sports as we commonly understand them grew out of a combination of social factors – most notably a need to find something for industrial laborers to do with their time so that they didn’t get into as many of the unacceptable kinds of fights and trouble. Churches and schools were major drivers of the initial rise of modern sports, looking to drive connection within communities and provide ways for people to adapt to changing lifestyles. Everything that has come after has been built on this quirky foundation – it is not necessary that the thing that houses the Super Bowl Commercials is a football game, but because of historical luck, it is.
Perhaps eSports is the sign of a new wave of this adjustment – to the person-as-workstation, the knowledge worker who perceives him or herself as an extension of the computer, a way of actualizing the competitive drive and finding connection and personal fulfillment in online competition where it is denied by the realities of modern life. Perhaps future institutions will build on eSports they way they have built on traditional sports.
But even with money, superstars, branding, accessibility and a good way to broadcast, even if the North American Star League is a huge hit, I am of a firm belief that eSports will turn into something entirely new – its own cobbled-together phenomenon – and that its goal of supplanting or surpassing conventional sports, while motivating, is at this point not a precise description of its larger mission or qualifications for success.
What are your thoughts about eSports – its past, present and future? Will the NASL be a game-changer? Sound off in the comments!