Fierce intercollegiate competition, frequent practices and blazingly fast competitors. No, this is not a sport — at least not a traditional one. This is the world of competitive StarCraft, and Tufts' team is doing very, very well.
StarCraft, released in 1998 by Blizzard Entertainment (perhaps best known as the developer of the massively popular World of Warcraft) is a sci−fi Real Time Strategy (RTS) game in which players command armies consisting of dozens of units. However, unlike board games such as chess, the action is not turnbased but, as the name of the genre implies, occurs in real time.
Players choose one of three races: the human−like Terrans, insectoid Zerg and the technologically advanced Protoss. Each race has unique strategies associated with it and players usually specialize in playing as one race.
Successful players must not only possess a better strategy than their opponents, but also manage their armies at lightning speed, which means commanding their soldiers and vehicles (collectively called "units" in RTS terminology) in battle, building a base and gathering the resources necessary to build and upgrade units. The top players in the world can input around 400 commands per minute.
Although StarCraft features a story mode for one player, what has kept the game relevant for 12 years is its intense and extremely balanced multiplayer mode.
Although the game has a strong following around the world, the game is most popular in South Korea, where professional StarCraft leagues have a following on par with what major sports teams have in the United States, and top professional players are legitimate celebrities.
"StarCraft in [South] Korea has become a national phenomenon," junior Eddie Hong, the founder of Tufts StarCraft, said. "It's become part of the culture now."
Hong has been playing StarCraft since elementary school but only started playing competitively about two years ago. He founded Tufts StarCraft during the second semester of last year. The team currently has six members.
While playing, Hong puts in about 260 commands per minute. Getting to that level took years of PC gaming, according to Hong. "After playing a lot of different games, it kind of becomes a coordination game … I've grown coordinated in terms of controlling computer games through a keyboard and mouse," Hong said. "It takes a lot of experience and coordinating what you think and what you put out onto your fingers."
"The game has evolved beyond just playing for fun," Hong said. "In a lot of ways it's … a lot like chess where there's a lot of strategy, there's a lot of tact involved, which I really like about the game."
Tufts StarCraft competes in the Collegiate StarLeague (CSL), which is currently in its third season. There are 74 teams registered in the league, which is divided into east and west conferences. The conferences are in turn each subdivided into four divisions. A season of round−robin play culminates in a 32−team playoff tournament.
Tufts is in the "East 1" division, which includes schools such as Harvard, MIT, McGill University and the University of Ottawa. Tufts StarCraft is currently the only undefeated team in the division, though it may have a difficult time maintaining its perfect record, as the team will face two strong teams in upcoming matches. Tomorrow, Tufts will play MIT, which is currently 5−1, and McGill University, whose record is 5−2.
Matches in CSL, which are played over the Internet, follow a best of five format, in which the team that gets to three wins first wins the match. Teams cannot field the same player twice during this period. However, if the victor is undecided after four games, the best players from each team go head to head to determine the winner. Each game takes about 10 minutes, according to junior Daniel Kim, one of the top players on the Tufts team.
Each game is a one−on−one battle in which the goal is the total elimination of the opposing team. Kim said that rather than sticking to a consistent strategy, players must adapt to their situations and employ tactics such as making quick attacks on their opponents' bases or conservatively building up their forces.
"I think the best player optimally varies between the two and makes the best decisions based on specific game situations," Kim said. "There's a lot of variability in the game."
While most computer games come and go in popularity, StarCraft's 12−year run has helped it reach its current level of legitimacy. As it is primarily a competitive game, Hong and Kim believe that the original StarCraft is as timeless as a computer game can be.
"Chess has become a timeless game, and I really love chess," Hong said. "I find that StarCraft has the same kind of potential where it's really a timeless game."
"I think it's resilient because it's so well balanced," Kim said. "Like in chess, there are different pieces with different movements. Just like that, the game of StarCraft is balanced well in terms of types of army units they have and what kind of damage is done and what [units] specialize in and stuff like that. It's just very well balanced between the three races. That makes it very resilient."
The one game that might dethrone StarCraft as the RTS king is the upcoming StarCraft II, set to release later this year. The game will feature all the graphical upgrades players can expect from 12 years of technological advancement, as well as a new online matchmaking system and gameplay tweaks designed to rebalance the game and make it more accessible to newcomers.
StarCraft II is currently being beta tested, and some players desperate to play StarCraft II early have forked over amounts upward of $400 on eBay.com to obtain codes to access the beta from those lucky enough to have beta keys.
While the changes to StarCraft II might entice millions of more casual players to pick up the game on release day, both Hong and Kim believe that players at the highest levels of competition will stick with the original for the time being.
"For me personally, I've played beta versions of the new StarCraft, and to me it's actually less fun or less interesting than the first game," Hong said. "Maybe it's just because I've been playing the first game so much that it's kind of jaded me."
Hong believes that the changes present in StarCraft II mean it is less likely to be used in serious competition. "It's supposed to be easier to play," Hong said. "There's a lot less micromanagement, so it's supposed to increase the level of play to the level where a lot of people can get good, even though they don't necessarily have all the skills that you need for StarCraft I."
Kim has similar feelings. "I think a lot of … what SC I has that SC II maybe doesn't is that there's a lot more management," Kim said. "When you start out a StarCraft game, you start with four units that find minerals and help obtain resources for you … You send each miner to a particular mineral, and you have to separate it out, and in SC II, it does it automatically for you. You just click on all the workers together and click on one mineral.
"You can kind of get a sense of how SC II is geared towards more the causal player," Kim continued. "Some of the skills involved in precision clicking and stuff like that is not as [important]."
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By the Numbers | StarCraft
400: number of actions a professional StarCraft player can perform per minute
$300,000: annual income per year, excluding prize money and endorsements, of professional StarCraft player Lim Yo-Hwan
9.5 million: copies of StarCraft that have been sold since 1998
8: number of minutes it took StarCraft's developer, Blizzard, to sell 20,000 tickets to its annual BlizzCon convention at a price of $125 a ticket
2: number of TV stations in South Korea devoted to 24 hour competitive gaming coverage.
