How I Became A Casual Esports Fan

At the back of the Hammerstein Ballroom, the bartender is watching the monitor, which is showing a blur of tiny explosions. A loose crowd is cheering on the action. The bartender just looks unmoved.

“Just trying to figure out what’s going on,” the bartender says, “and feeling older by the minute.”

We’re at the Hammerstein to watch eight of the world’s top Starcraft 2 players compete for $50,000. I brought Ben because I have only played about 20 hectic minutes of the video game and whenever I try to consult the internet’s ample supply of Starcraft strategy videos, I’m lost in a wash of specialized jargon and action that happens too quickly to be explained or even seen. I know enough to know I’m a total chobo.

But I’m not at the tournament as a gamer; I’m here as a would-be fan of esports. The worldwide pheonmenon of competitive gaming is booming. Last year, when more people watched competitive gaming events than the Stanley Cup Finals, video games writ large made more money than movies. And yet for most Americans, esports is still off the map.

When I tell people that someone’s going to win $50,000 for beating someone else at a video game, it elicits eyerolls, scoffs, and the occasional derisive “of course they will.” When I start to explain that kids in Korea have been devoting themselves to Starcraft for over a decade—to the point that the best can go pro, move into team housing, and have sponsors and fans and travel the world, but that the game is so demanding that they have to retire by their mid-twenties—usually the conversation get shut down.

Everyone at the Hammerstein knows who’s going to be on the right side of history, but then everyone we meet is also a gamer. As a fan of spectator sports who’s terrible at sports, and as someone who plays chess but didn’t watch a single match of the world championship match last week, I’m curious: Just how big can esports be? Can the casual fan get into it?

Casual or not, any fan has to first scale the steep learning curve of Starcraft II. The game and its predecessor both have one-player campaign modes that have plots, but I never learn any of that; it’s irrelevant at the tournaments. The plot at tournaments is the same as a chess match, football game, or presidential race: it’s that one versus that other one.

“The way I normally say it is that this game is like chess but it’s happening in real time,” Sean “Day[9]” Plott explains. “We don’t take turns, things are moving constantly.”

Day[9] is probably the most charismatic commentator at the event and maybe in all of the Starcraft 2 universe. At a forum at NYU on Wednesday, the minute he walked into the auditorium the kids behind us got excited and—after a short debate—ran down to get pictures with him. It was obvious by the night's end why Day[9] is so well liked. He’s got a cool, older-brother vibe. He laughs sincerely at the other panelists’ jokes. He's insightful both on the micro, game-strategy level, and also on the macro, state-of-the-gaming-union level. When I ask him, as the face of the game, to describe Starcraft II like he was explaining it to his grandmother, he pauses, shakes his head and says, “When I picture my grandma I just think, ‘Jesus she’ll never know.’”

I ask him to switch to imagining my fairly-internet savvy grandmother—she uses emails but still gets a physical newspaper—he picks it back up.

“So I’m a general and I’m commanding my pieces to beat his pieces,” Day[9] says. “I always like to say that Starcraft is a mix between being a chess grandmaster and a concert pianist. You have to think through the strategy of what you want to do, but you don’t have anytime and you have to execute hundreds of commands to get your pieces to do what you want.”

Described as a military/sci-fi strategy game, players are simultaneously commanding worker units to collect supplies for their economies, and building an army. At the same time, the players are constructing buildings that produce stronger weaponry or abilities for their units, all while and setting up their defenses and scouting their opponents, whose actions are hidden from them elsewhere on the map. If it sounds complex, then I’m explaining it right; the complexity is part of the appeal for players—no single best strategy really ever emerges.

There are three different types of armies players can choose from—Zerg, which look like bugs, Terran, which are people and Protoss, which I think are robots—and they all have their own advantages and match up against each other in various ways. For some reason the game's American developer, Blizzard, opted to categorize them as "races," which to my uninitiated ears has some weird overtones, but no one else gives it a second thought. Given the particularities in build order and strengths, players stick with one race, as does every non-pro player I talk to. John, an affable electrical engineering student from Hoeboken, told me he was wearing his Protoss shirt to the tournament and rooting for the Protoss players. Bomber gets some love for being the only Terran in the tournament.

One test of a player’s skill is the number of commands or actions he or she can execute in a minute. This is the “concert pianist” part. Players steadily clock in higher than 300 actions-per-minute and peak at over 400—more than six clicks and key taps each second. Their hands seem to flutter above the keyboard.

All of this complexity—that I really underexplained—is what forces players to train for 10-14 hours a day as professionals. In Korea, players will move into team housing where they sleep in bunkbeds and have their meals provided so they can train both their wrists and their brains to apprehend and act simultaneously.

While Eastern European and Scandinavian gamers do well in the newer, ascendant esports, South Korea still dominates in Starcraft. When Americans were in the basement playing Nintendo, Korean players were down at the PC bang or internet café. High tariffs on Japanese goods kept the cost of consoles above what most could afford, so PC gaming has always been the norm in Korea, and everything I'll learn over the weekend makes it seem like America’s going to be the same way. The only esports scene that depends on consoles is fighting games, but in spite of the fact that they have stuff like scoreboards that make them easy to watch, they’ve got nothing compared to the organizational might and fanbases of Starcraft, Dota 2 and League of Legends—the esports Big 3.

Six of the players at Battle Grounds are Korean and only two are foreigners—the term that everyone uses to describe any non-Korean players. Snute is from Norway, and I only hear his real name once the whole weekend; everyone just uses the players’ gaming handles. Scarlett is Canadian, probably the best North American player and the only female gamer in the tournament. For one or both of these reasons she quickly emerges as the fan favorite. Maybe it’s that she’s coming back from a carpal tunnel-related injury (she’s 19) that took her out of the game for a while. Everyone loves a comeback story.

Scarlett is in group A along with Bomber, a veteran and another crowd favorite, PartinG, the 2012 Starcraft World Champion, and Golden, who announced that he’s retiring at the end of the tournament. He’s also 19.

At the tournament’s opening, all of the players are announced like wrestlers. They take the stage dressed for gaming, which looks a lot like wearing warm-ups for any other sport, but with a lot more corporate logos—energy drinks and computing hardware, generally—plastered all over them. Like NASCAR drivers who are going to bed.

Scarlett’s first match is a best of three against PartinG, who dispenses with her easily in two quick games. PartinG is interviewed afterwards by Smix, the tournament’s sideline reporter and translator who is tasked with explaining the question she’s going to ask, then asking it in Korean, then listening to the response in Korean and translating it back to English for us all. English-Korean-Korean-English. It works.

Apparently, when going up against Scarlett, PartinG thought she was “cute” but wasn’t ever worried because “I never lose to foreigners.” There’s some irked murmuring, but then applause because that’s some personality and some attitude and everyone loves a villain.

All the players are already pretty media savvy and always prudently thank their fans for watching. But they’re not terribly expressive while playing, which takes all of their focus, or even post-match. Intimate fan relationships are built with players through their Twitter and through their other streams and other games, and some even do commentaries for some extra cash. All the games start with the players both messaging “gl hf,” which means, “good luck, have fun.” Each game ends with the loser saying “gg” for “good game,” then resigning.

Even if mainstream America doesn’t know that esports are huge, you know who already knows that they are? Money. Money knows. That’s why Red Bull’s growing media empire is sponsoring this event in Manhattan, sparing absolutely no expense. The Hammerstein is decked out in swooping LED spotlights that alternate between red and blue. Giant, impeccably high-definition screens span the wall behind the stage, which has a table for two announcers to do play-by-play and another table for post-match analysis. Both have professional-grade video cameras trained on them, which along with the crane and steady cams, will stream the whole event.

When the match is going, players sit across from each other in a desk-wide, battleship-gray box with a window running along the side that faces the audience. Their monitors are back to back, and they enter from doors on opposite sides that are emblazoned with the Red Bull logo.

Along with Red Bull, Nvidia is a partner for the event, and their representatives are showing off their new ultra smooth G-Sync monitor technology that eliminates any lag between monitor refresh rates and the computer, I think. I’m not really sure. The demonstration was impressive, and the monitor looked really good, but I ask very little of my computer and haven’t really noticed any of the problems they’re talking about. I spend the whole demo worried that the very nice Nvidia guys thought I wrote for a tech blog that did product reviews, and that I was sort of deceiving them. Midway through the demonstration a large Eastern European man stops by and asks a few really informed (sounding) questions and then says the only problem he sees with G-Sync technology is that he can’t buy it anywhere yet. So take his word for it, I guess.

After the demonstration I talked to a representative from Nvidia’s business side, named James, who told me that teaming up for esports was sort of no-brainer for a high-performance monitor chipmaker. “In 2010 we did a G-Force Starcraft II Pro-Am,” James explained. Almost every conversation I had over the weekend referenced an entire series of things that I knew nothing about, but I extrapolated that Nvidia ran another esports tournament. “We got 72 of the top pros internationally [for the tournament] and when we opened it up to amateurs the server got knocked down because the load was so heavy.”

It was the largest amateur registration in Starcraft yet. Once the tournament started, the stream pulled in a huge number of viewers. “It was amazing, we drew 14 million views,” James said. “We’re not a media company, but we got 14 million views.”

In addition to paying for space on players’ hoodies, companies can sponsor entire teams, and get their logo in the game itself. Scarlett, for instance, is sponsored by Acer.

Speaking of which, Scarlett fought her way out of the losers bracket, and in the process ended Golden’s career. As the second match slipped from his grasp, Golden followed the customary “gg” with “goodbye,” which felt very human and sort of sad. In her interview with Smix, Scarlett said of eliminating Golden, “I always liked him as a player.” She paused and continued sort of meekly, and it strikes me that Scarlett wouldn’t be out of place as a tall, quiet member of any high school marching band, maybe in the woodwinds, but I could also see percussion. “Being the last one to play him was…nice, but I’m sad to see him go.”

The crowd roared. Scarlett was up against Bomber with the semifinals on the line. We went up to the upper balcony to watch, while Bomber took the first game easily. I guess he placed his bases in really smart locations. An affable guy named Mike was sitting behind us explaining to his friend what was going on.

“She just sometimes plays sloppy and loses more units that she has to,” he’s saying. Mike tells us he has played against Scarlett in casual play around the North American servers, and has even beaten her once or twice. “She’s beaten me like six or eight [times],” admits Mike, whose friend played the original Starcraft for a while, but only came to the tournament at Mike’s behest. Day[9], insightful as ever, told me that there would be people like this.

But in spite of what apparently is sloppy play, an amazing thing happens: Scarlett steals a match from Bomber. Before the tournament, people were wondering if she’d take a single match against the Korean players, the cream of the world crop. Snute, the only other foreigner is swept out without much fanfare. But now Scarlett, improbably, is on the verge of the semifinals. The front row of the auditorium is cheering and waving a Canadian flag.

In front of us slouches a hip college freshman-looking type with big messy hair, a cool print hoodie and a sassy girlfriend named Kayla. Kayla’s a big Bomber fan and wants to see him advance, but at this point we’re all in for Scarlett. Kayla wrinkles her nose and turns to cheer on Bomber. There’s an awful lot of cheering in spite of the fact that the players are wearing two layers of headphones, so as to not hear the announcers. I guess being a crowd isn’t really about the players hearing you. It’s about being a shouting crowd and shouting together.

Game 3, the deciding match, begins.

While talking to Day[9], I asked if Starcraft could ever have casual fans like spectator sports do; people who are just hanging with their friends, having a beer while Starcraft is on. Starcraft doesn’t have a scoreboard, although there is a sort of display that lets you kind of figure out who is ahead by the number of worker units they have. Unlike going to see a live event, you’re always at the behest of what the announcer is showing you on the big screen, and I was ever at their mercy and the mercy of Ben to explain what the hell I was seeing.

Day[9] thinks that that’ll all come out in the wash, and he certainly has a point. “When you look at how regular spectator sports work, it’s much more about cultural embeddedness,” he says “When you look at where your viewers come from, you see that none of us ever opened up a rulebook to football to figure what the fuck was going on. There was just people in my house on Sunday watching it, and they sort of told me and then after about seven years I finally figured out what a down was.”

Fair enough. I guess basketball doesn’t make sense until you understand that they have to dribble. But traditional sports always have a baseline of relatability because they’re physical. Have you ever seen Olympic trampolining? I don’t know the rules or how it’s scored but I know that it looks hard, absurd, and fucking awesome. Starcraft is also physically taxing, but it’s not quite as immediately striking to see someone typing really quickly and what's happening on the screen isn't always clear.

For all of their complexity, you can sit down with someone in front of a game of football and explain, “We want the guys in the white shirts to win,” and that’s enough to get them started. Particularities of why it’s good to run out of bounds at certain times, or why teams punt might take a while, but they’ll get the hang of it. The winning and losing is all pretty well spelled out in the scoreboard.

But don’t get me wrong. In spite of knowing next to nothing when it started, by the end of the first at the Hammerstein, I was getting the hang of watching the game, particularly as everyone around me got excited.

Right off the bat Scarlett has Bomber on the ropes and almost steals the match in the first three minutes, although I could not for the life of you explain how or why. Seems like she snuck some troops past his scout and he didn’t see her coming. But Bomber, wily 25-year-old veteran that he is, is a pro and recovers. And the game resumes the normal pace of each player slowly building up troops and scouting the opponent.

The game goes back and forth for a while. It seems like Bomber’s always got more Marines coming out and is able to hunt down Scarlett, and also repel her advances, while she, a Zerg player, is producing weird flying bat/bugs called Muta. The play-by-play is really sharp. The tension in the ballroom is building. Scarlett finds herself at a numbers disadvantage, but both players are losing their bases and therefore their ability to wage war any further. For all the strategic building, it’s becoming a really complicated fighting game.

Kayla is tensed up and turns to us every time it looks like the match will end. Mike keeps explaining the action to his friend in spurts, but the rest of us in the upper deck sit in a daze, watching. Over the weekend, the flashing and blurring of Starcraft seems to lull the crowd into quiet observation, punctuated with cheering. Even though they’re selling alcohol downstairs from when the tournament started at noon all the way until 11PM, when it ends, I don’t see a single person even approaching being drunk over the whole weekend. Part of that is that much of the crowd is below drinking age, but it’s still impressive.

Finally, Scarlett is on the run with what’s left of her force through the middle of her map. A few stray units of hers are destroying what’s left of Bomber’s base, while he’s likely doing the same. But it doesn’t much matter. No matter what, the end of the game is at hand.

Scarlett’s got a couple of banelings, which aren’t actually land mines—they’re larvae, or something—but they function just like them. As her army is chased through a bottleneck on the map, she plants the banelings and tries to bait Bomber to bring his forces right over top of them. The crowd makes that incredible “crowd-anticipation” gasping cheer that precedes slam dunks and long touchdown passes—dawning comprehension mixed with delight. Thankfully someone on the floor captured the moment Scarlett breaks Bomber in a video:

In her post-match interview, the normally composed Smix is almost too excited to ask questions. “I was on my knees in the practice room!” she exclaims to the ever quiet, still reflective Scarlett, who was now draped in the Canadian flag.

I find the whole thing extremely and earnestly exciting. Day[9] would call it hands down the greatest game of all time, but then gamers can be a hyperbolic bunch.

Hyperbolic, but never unfriendly. This is maybe what’s most impressive about the event: The Starcraft 2 community was somehow able to come together on the internet and be totally personable in the real world. Esports have a devoted and obviously knowledgeable fanbase. It's also mostly young male fanbase that, PartinG’s one comment notwithstanding, is happily, even fervently, cheering on the only female gamer. It’s only after the match that I discover that Scarlett is facing down the specter of more than just your usual misogyny. In spite of what you might expect out of video game fans—or late adolescents, in general—no one seems to care that she's a transgender gamer. When she was in the lobby signing posters and taking pictures with fans, the line stretched and curved out the door.

So then what’s standing in the way of esports becoming huge in the States? According to Day[9] there’s still some social stigma to being a gamer or being really into video games to overcome. But time should take care of that.

“I think that will slowly go away as people have kids who grow up never knowing that was ever weird to play games,” he said. As gaming becomes something for everyone, and with features like the new Pokémon "Bank" service promising to turn retro gaming characters into immortal digital heirlooms, games will be designed with a broader and more gender-inclusive fanbase in mind. “Once the high schoolers are seeing their teacher playing on their iPhone during a break in class, that’s the hurdle we need to get over,” Day[9] speculates.

Maybe so, but when I talk to the retiring pro gamer Golden, I get the impression that might be further off than Day[9] thinks. “Contrary to what you might think, there’s still a stigma to being a gamer in Korea,” Golden tells me through a translator.

And while Golden’s career was fairly short—he played for just three years—it did dominate his life from age 16 through 19. Can career-driven Americans afford a diversion en route to a career? Golden said that his parents were really supportive of his briefly-lived career because he’s an only child. Will American parents be so understanding? It remains to be seen.

If I had to guess, I’d say that esports won’t ever take the place of regular sports, and no tournament will occupy a cultural place in the same way that the Super Bowl does, to say nothing of the scale. There’s just too many tournaments, too many players. A comparison to tennis, which is comparably international and individual, is probably more apt, but still insufficient.

There’s a reason that everyone we meet and chat with at the Red Bull Battle Grounds plays Starcraft, though. It’s the secret strength of esports. “It’s so hard to watch something on TV and then go do it. You’re just receiving entertainment. It’s a one-way street. But gaming is fundamentally a two-way street,” Day[9] says.

“You watch a Starcraft player do a strategy, and you can open up Starcraft and try the same strategy,” he continues. “You can’t watch the Super Bowl and be like, ‘That was rad, let me go do a pick up game with 30 of my friends and their armor…’ You can’t do that. Gaming is a hobby and lifestyle.”

Usually when hobbies become lifestyles—I'm picturing people who are a little too obsessed with model trains here—that's when people get weirded out, so let me just say that the Starcraft fans and non-pro players who I meet are by and large people with multidimensional, healthy seeming lives. Just as there are weekend basketball leagues made of people who maybe played in high school and didn't go pro, most of the Starcraft players I meet aren't obsessives. John from Hoboken used to play more, but is now busy with school. Annie from Princeton is a web designer, developer and fan who makes friends with just about everyone on the Mezzanine Level and chatted about where to do karaoke for her birthday.

Just as Day[9] is a self-described esports entrepreneur who actively carved his own career out of a streaming strategy show he runs out of his home in California, doing live events like this one and working as a game designer, esports will carve their own niche in culture.

In the semifinals Scarlett goes up against s0s, the reigning world champ. The series is a best of five, and she leaps out to a 2-0 run. She's one or two pushes from sweeping him, but s0s turns her army back and takes game three. As he runs backstage for a bathroom break before game four, Smix reports that he asks a fellow Korean player and semifinalist, MC, "what am I up against out there?"

Smix doesn’t report what MC says, but the break is all s0s needed. He comes back and wins two more in a row. He goes on to the finals, where PartinG beats him in five games in a best of seven series. Scarlett beats MC and comes in third.

Walking back to the subway to go home is sort of a let down. Basically once you’re out the door, the world you just left—which for two days had become normal and comfortable—becomes strange again.

It’s weird that after having a really good time all weekend, leaving with only positive impressions of Starcraft II, I still have zero desire to play the game. I doubt I’ll start following how these players are doing, and the idea of having to learn about the other hundreds of ranked Starcraft players in the world sort of gives me a headache.

Maybe this was a one-time fling, rather than the beginning of a long love affair. With the future of esports, like all futures, ever in flux, I came away from the tournament able to answer one question: Could there ever be a casual Starcraft fan? I'm sure I'm not the first.