Date Posted: July 19, 2011
Print Edition: July 8, 2011
By Dessa Bayrock (Contributor) – Email
DEFINITELY!
War is no longer socially acceptable, and since boys will always need a way to prove their manliness to fertile women, society has found substitutes. Often this presents itself through sweaty, sweaty men throwing themselves against each other in activities such as wrestling or football, where it is enough to have a bundle of heavily muscled men writhing against each other to prove how manly they are. Organized sport, the crusade of every generation since marauding in a foreign land fell out of favour.
However, having biceps and the ability to run a mile without suffering cardiac arrest is no longer necessarily a teenage boy’s ticket into manhood. Where there are jocks, there are nerds, but even if geeks aren’t out sweating on a pitch or a field or a court somewhere, they also have a substitutes for war – perhaps something closer to the real thing.
For those of you not well-acquainted with one of the most popular games of our time, let me explain the basic idea; two opponents (be it teams or single players) are pitted against each other in a test of speed, reflexes, and strategy. Players must use the lay of the land to their advantage, and be able to think on their feet and reform elaborate plans in mere seconds.
Yes, dear reader, I’m talking about Starcraft.
For those of you not yet acquainted, Starcraft – and, more recently, Starcraft II – is, in short, a videogame: a military, science fiction, real-time-strategy game, to be precise. Players are given a base surrounded by the same resources as everyone else. The sport of it enters when you take into account the countless combinations of what can be done with those resources.
It might be an unfair example, but there is no better way to see this than by looking at Korea. This game has been called Korea’s national sport; they have ten professional teams, one of which is sponsored by the military purely so that if promising Starcraft players are called to serve in the army, their talent will not go to waste – something I have yet to see in any other, “more athletic” sport.
And it is talent, supplemented by serious work (as in any sport) that makes an excellent player; serious Starcraft players can spend up to ten hours a day, six days a week, practicing their craft. They can get to a point at which they are able to decide and make up to three hundred actions per minute – that’s five keystrokes a second. Their fingers are lightning. Watching them play is like watching a well-oiled machine.
In the professional Starcraft circuit players are paid up to $600,000-a-year, which might not measure up to Luongo’s seven million, but still nothing to sneeze at. Just like basketball or baseball, Starcraft is riddled with match-fixing scandals, where top players throw games or make pivotal mistakes on purpose. There are tournaments year-round, and crowds of up to 500,000 fans gather in stadiums to watch finals. Professional commentators interpret each lightning move and pick apart replays when the action is over. If you want to argue that Starcraft is not a sport, I would say that it’s fairly obvious that, whether you like it or not, it has certainly, somehow, acquired all the trappings of one.
At the end of the day, I know many people would rather watch heavily muscled lunkheads rolling around on a field in order to put a ball through a rectangle. Think of it this way – you can teach monkeys to play soccer, but there is no hope that you could teach monkeys to play Starcraft. It’s a sport that relies on the mind as well as the reflexes. Sports are really only for showing off to any fertile women that may be around, and I must say that the time has come in our evolution as a civilization where it doesn’t only count to have biceps the size of grapefruits; it counts to be clever.
NO WAY!
By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Sport: An activity involving athleticism and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others. (Paul’s Big Book O’ Definitions and Stuff)
Currently, there’s a troubling movement among nerds, geeks, and other nocturnal critters to pass off video gaming as a legitimate “sport.” For some reason, these people seem to think that the moral fiber of our society has decayed to such a degree that they can place Starcraft on the same level of importance as soccer or basketball and nobody will care. Well I’m here to say that society does care, Starcraft is not a sport, and memorizing the hotkey needed to “chrono-boost” your “zealot” is still not a replacement for cultivating actual social skills.
Of course, there are those of you out there who are already complaining. You’re saying “Well poker is a sport isn’t it?” to which I say “No.” Poker is not a sport, and neither is golf, chess, or curling. In fact, why don’t you read my definition above and stop asking stupid questions. To be a sport, an activity requires three things: competition, skill, and athleticism.
Now let’s apply those to Starcraft:
1. Competition: Well there’s no denying that Starcraft is competitive, but then again, it’s hard to think of any human activity which can’t be, under the right circumstances, a competition. My former boss, who shall remain unnamed, used to settle childhood arguments by drawing a line in the dirt and seeing who could piss farthest while standing on the line. This leads to another aspect of competition in that its extremes are generally a male domain; I don’t think many women could have won an argument against my former boss (at least by his rules).
2. Skill: It’s hard to practice something more than ten hours a day for several years and not become good at it. There are Starcraft players in Asia who live in “bunkers” and play the game the way Catholic monks recite catechisms. If the planet Earth ever gets invaded by powerful, enigmatic aliens who insist that the only way to resolve our differences is to play a winner-takes-all Starcraft match for the planet, than these are the people I want in charge. Otherwise, their skill-set is just too specific, like being able to do a dead-on Gaga impersonation after ingesting a drug cocktail consisting of LSD, Skittles, and Windex.
3. Athleticism: Here is my real problem with Starcraft and “eSports” in general: you can be the greasiest, nastiest, most bloated human being north of Louisiana and still be a great video game player. A professional soccer player on the other hand may have the ethics of squid, but (and this is a big ‘but’) he or she generally can run like the wind, jump like a rabbit, and dive like Alex Burrows. Sports require supreme athleticism; they embrace the strongest, the fastest, and the most agile. Starcraft, on the other hand, only requires nimble fingers and an aversion to sunlight. It just doesn’t include the physical prowess which I believe is integral to the definition of “sport.”
Yet, the Starcraft community seems to think that propaganda will succeed where logic has failed. They’ve established “teams,” hired “commentators,” and even distributed significant sums of money in “leagues” and “tournaments,” all to convince the world that this game should be taken just as seriously as say, pro football. And it’s working too. Soon we’ll be seeing commercials featuring Starcraft legends endorsing Gatorade, or warning impressionable viewers about the dangers of snorting Vespene Gas. Soon we may even accept Starcraft matches as a viable alternative to international war, unwittingly enslaving the free world to South Korea.
Resistance may be futile, but I’ll fight to the end. Unleash your little snot-nosed Zerglings, four-gate until your fingers rot, and construct all the additional pylons you desire. Starcraft is not a sport!
