Blog Posts from "The Peanut Gallery" - Gameriot.com

IdrA Sounds Off on Valor

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:14:50 -0400

I had a chance to interview Greg "IdrA" Fields on the Valor tournament, his Korean teammates' reactions to foreigner tournaments, and thoughts on trends in the foreigner StarCraft scene. IdrA and I hung out a little last summer in Korea and later encountered each other again at WCG and BlizzCon last fall, so I'm always up for hearing what he has to say. Anyhow, take a look!

: Well Artosis is the world's leading expert on eSports so I'd imagine whatever he says is accurate. Of course there are other options, and variety is always good, but I haven't really spent time thinking about it and I don't care all that much personally so I don't know what other good options would be.

Thanks very much to IdrA for his time, and keep watching Valor, everybody!

Cotter Cup Update 3

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Fri, 08 May 2009 19:21:40 -0400

In response to a previous comment, I will be posting links to VODs once they're up.

Schedule for tonight and tomorrow (Sat, May 9)

Friday, May 8, 8:30pm EST: American semifinals, stream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cotter-cup-2009 livecast by Diggity (off replays, for lag issues).

International semifinals have been postponed to tomorrow (Sat) at 10am EST. Stream:http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cotter-cup-2009 livecast by Cholera (off replays for lag issues)

Finals will hopefully be tomorrow (Sat) evening, 9pm EST, Stream:http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cotter-cup-2009 livecast by Cholera or Diggity.

Please keep checking the Cotter Cup news blog for updates.

Cotter StarCraft Cup Update 2

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:18:57 -0400

Update: Schedule for Friday, May 8

10 am EST: Quarterfinals match between KTH (Sweden) and PKU (China) - livecast by Princeton, Stream: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cotter-cup-2009

11am EST: Semifinals match between the non-US quarterfinals winners - livecast by KennyCasting, Stream http://www.mogulus.com/golkenny

8pm EST: Semifinals match between the two American schools which won their Quarterfinals matches (see results spoiler at the bottom) - livecast by Cholera or Diggity, Stream:http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cotter-cup-2009

Quarterfinals Results

1. Tsinghua vs. KAIST - Tsinghua won 3-0

2. Yale vs. MIT - MIT won in ace match, 3-2

3. Harvard vs. Princeton - Princeton won 3-1

4. KTH vs. Peking University - tomorrow (Friday) 8am EST

VODs will be up on YouTube shortly.

Semifinals

1. MIT vs. Princeton - time TBA

2. Tsinghua vs. winner of KTH vs. PKU - time TBA

$1000 at stake! Stay tuned!

Cotter Cup Update

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:40:09 -0400

Hi folks,

My life's a little insane right now, but I'm determined to bring everyone updates about the Cotter StarCraft Cup. Right now I've started a news blog over at cstarleague.org/cottercup which will have continuing updates on matchups, times, and stream locations. I'll be updating this post with new information this afternoon. The KAIST vs. Tsinghua quarterfinals match in particular will be very exciting! Stay tuned ...

Edit:

Lineups for tomorrow (Thursday), May 7th:

1) Harvard v Princeton Thursday night, (7pm EST) - livecast by Hazel, Stream location:http://www.ustream.tv/channel/Cotter-Cup-2009-Stream-2
2) Yale v MIT, Thursday night (8pm EST) - livecast by Cholera (possibly off replays), Stream location:http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cotter-cup-2009
3) Tsinghua v Korea, Thursday morning (8am EST) - DONE, see results
4) KTH vs. Peking - RESCHEDULED for Friday, May 8, 8am EST / 8pm China / 2pm Sweden

Match times for Friday, May 8th will be decided once the quarterfinals are finished, due to issues with time zones.

Maps for both days: Destination, Neo Medusa, Colosseum II, Tau Cross and Blue Storm (ace)

The format will be five 1v1 games per set.

Main Stream location: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cotter-cup-2009

KAIST v Tsinghua

Destination : Seokmin Lee "[KAIST]Flyingstone" Random
Neo Medusa : Sangjeon Lee "[KAIST]103ekj" Protoss
Colosseum II : Cheolhyung Lee "[KAIST]bloodwass" Protoss
Tau Cross : Sungho Eun "[KAIST]dkrtndhkd" Terran
Blue Storm ACE

Destination : Qiang "smth_xq" protoss
Neo Medusa : Shuguang Liu "smth_willow" zerg
Colosseum II : Yubin Gao "smth_GB" zerg
Tau Cross : Hao Yu "smth_orion" zerg
Blue Storm : TBA

KTH v Peking

Destination - [KTH]Siege (z)
Neo Medusa - [KTH] Scoobydoo (t)
Colesseum II - [KTH] Pizza_maker (z)
Tau Cross - ***erlund (p)
ACE

Peking lineup TBA

MIT v Yale

Destination: Hyun Soo ([MIT]StRyKeR, Z)
Neo Medusa: Yongjin ([MIT]yongstra, Z)
Colosseum II: Max ([MIT]MAX, P)
Tau Cross: Haitao ([MIT]HAITAO, Z)
Blue Storm: TBD

Destination – Sherwin P, Sherwin[yale]
Neo Medusa – Randy Z, julysick[yale]
Coliseum 2 – Jeff P, dullahan[yale
Tau Cross – Justin Z, justin[yale]
ACE

Princeton v Harvard

Destination - Patrick Park "[pu]agonyx90" zerg
Neo Medusa - Peter "[pu]daisy" Protoss
Colosseum II - Jack "[pu]raiame" Zerg
Tau Cross - Bowen "[pu]Ja." Zerg
Blue Storm - TBA

Harvard Lineup TBA

The Cotter International Collegiate StarCraft Cup

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:46:08 -0400

First of all, props to PolygonreVue for his excellent interview with Mona "Hazel" Zhang, a relative newcomer to the foreign StarCraft community whose commentating skills and initiative in founding the Collegiate StarLeague already foretell great things for her in the world of competitive StarCraft. Speaking of which, I have some exciting news from the collegiate StarCraft scene which might interest some of the more internationally-minded fans out there: the Cotter StarCraft Cup (CSC).

The CSC will bring together 8 internationally-renowned universities in the US, Europe, and Asia to battle it out in an online tournament from May 7-9 for glory and $1,000 in cash prizes. Sponsored by a Princeton alum who came forward after the Princeton-based Collegiate StarLeague was featured in the New York Times for organizing a showmatch between the Princeton StarCraft team and Qinghua University in Beijing, the CSC promises to be a competitive StarCraft treat for SC fans and fans of collegiate sports competitions alike. While the CSC will not be an official part of the CSL, it is notable that in particular the American schools which have stepped up to the challenge were all participants in the inaugural season: Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton. Qinghua University is also another confirmed participant, and the remaining three slots are awaiting confirmation from a Swedish university, a Korean university, and one which remains slightly up in the air as of this time. Several of the games will be livecast online (time zones permitting), with English commentary likely to be provided by YouTube luminaries Cholera and Diggity. If replays are made available, commentated VODs will be produced as well.

While something like the CSC does seem at first like an unexpected windfall for competitive StarCraft, in my opinion it's an astonishingly good value proposition for all parties involved. Given that online StarCraft tournaments have incredibly low fixed costs (no venue fees, no big academic or other entities who'd take a cut) and that university students are accustomed to organizing events with no tangible financial benefit to themselves, $1,000 can go a much longer way when you're sponsoring intercollegiate StarCraft than, say, a lacrosse tournament. $1,000 is chump change to your typical Ivy League alumnus, and yet the rarity of any sum of money in the first place being invested into eSports by people outside of the industry and the up-and-coming status of the foreign StarCraft community means that any person who ventures such a commitment earns eternal gratitude and their name emblazoned on a historical event. It's easier than ever to get students involved in creating interesting, innovative content they are passionate about, and when you're talking about a trailblazing phenomenon like eSports, a little goes a tremendously long way.

The schools which have confirmed participation in the CSC may not be the most elite in terms of StarCraft ability (with the exception of the Korean university tentatively set to participate), but the point of this tournament and related events in the nonprofit sector does not seem so much to organize the highest level of StarCraft play as it is to just get something going that people will pay attention to. eSports needs to gain more recognition as a legitimate arena for exciting competition, and the CSC (as well as the CSL) seems set to take steps in achieving this very goal. I am personally very hopeful that the success of the CSC will inspire other non-eSports entities to sit up and take notice of something we all already can feel intuitively: eSports isn't going anywhere, and perhaps in the hands of the college student demographic with the passionate ambition many of us show in our interests, it can actually become "the next big thing" very soon.

The NYT - Back on my Good Side

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:39:33 -0400

As anybody who follows me on twitter or Facebook or gchat or AIM or MSN (or talks to me in real life, but who does that if they can just talk to me on the internets?) could probably guess by now, I'm pretty pleased with the recent article in the as well as the new initiatives which WCG USA is taking on (Ultimate Gamer, the WCG Fighter Club), I say fie on those who claim American eSports is dead (also apparently MLG is bringing on a new game - wonder what that might be?). We're entering a new era, and it's looking pretty bright and shiny in spite (or perhaps partly because of) the disheartening economic backdrop worldwide.

The NY Times Knows Nothing (about eSports)

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 01:49:38 -0400

I saw this little gem of an article a few days ago (actually it was pointed out to me by several people), and I’m pretty irate about it. Let’s go through the reasons why this is terrible reporting, shall we? First the nitty-gritty, and then the more substantial philosophical bits.

First off, the title: “Virtual Leagues Fold, Forcing Gamers to Find Actual Jobs.” This sounds like something out of The Onion. “Actual jobs”? Would they say that if the NFL folded suddenly and a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys had to work in an electronics factory to bring home the bacon? Would they say that if the World Series of Poker folded and some mustachioed straight-faced card shark had to start selling Xerox machines for a living? Why this implication that professional video game players create nothing of cultural or economic value when they ply their trade? Are gamers somehow cheating the American people out of their hard-earned dollars by getting paid to do something they’re good at?

Second, the “s” at the end of “Leagues.” As far as this article goes (and as far as the major American eSports industry goes), the only league that has folded in recent memory has been the CGS, which the reporter does take pains to point out in this piece. The World Series of Video Games also folded ... in late 2007. So since plural nouns usually indicate that more than one instance of the entity under discussion exists, where is the other “virtual league” that would legitimize that wayward “s”? “Major companies have pulled sponsorships and several tournaments have folded” – great, but a couple sponsorships and a few tournaments do not constitute a league. Tournaments especially can range from your big-budget $100k affairs to a bunch of kids pitching in $5 each on Saturday afternoon in front of a TV and an Xbox.

Let’s also talk about the alt-text of the page itself: “Economy Takes the Controls from Some Video-Game Pros.” This title all but bashes the reader over the head with the implication that the CGS (and whatever other eSports leagues have, apparently, gone bust) went under just because of the recession. This “fact” is not supported anywhere in the article besides via Craig Levine’s very general statement on the effect of the recession with regards to eSports. Nowhere in the article does it say that the CGS folded for economic reasons. It does say that the league shut down unexpectedly after only two years of operation (out of a three year plan, not five), and it does say that DirecTV officials declined to comment, and so of course that means the league folded for financial reasons. There couldn’t be any other possible reason why a large and very well-funded organization that was garnering decent TV ratings would just suddenly shut down.

It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that DirecTV, who was running the CGS, suddenly changed hands from News Corporation to Liberty Media late last year, would it? Of course not. Everyone knows that when corporate subsidiaries get suddenly handed over from one media giant to another, everything just keeps on trucking like nothing ever happened. Also it makes no difference that News Corporation was even reported in the article to have started the league along with DirecTV. Therefore, the only possible reason why an internationally acclaimed eSports league with 18 divisions worldwide would fail would be because of an economic downturn. Of course.

And just to bring the point home, in case you netizens can’t read between the lines, let’s just stick in a poster child sob story about a guy who was making $30k a year just to play video games and is instead probably making more money at Sam’s Club now:

"Until recently, Emmanuel Rodriguez worked on a stage, under bright lights, amid intense competition and before cheering fans. He was a professional video-game player, and a world champion.

Enlarge This Image

Now he works at the customer service desk of a Sam’s Club in Dallas."

Look at how unglamorous his new, “actual” job is! He can’t win any pretty trophies and $5,000 prizes! What a fall from grace! Obviously a perfect parallel to the white-collar analysts on Wall Street who are now useless to society after their collective efforts introduced the term “sub-prime” into all of our vocabularies in a most unwelcome and unexpected way.

“The professional sport of gaming has nearly collapsed,” the reporter moans. Tell that to the World Cyber Games, which has a fairly successful reality TV show on the SciFi channel right now. Tell that to the MLG, whose CEO Matthew Bromberg boasts in the very same article that his league has “driven everybody else out of the business” (you keep thinking that about the CGS, Mr. Bromberg). Tell that to Germany, Sweden, China, and South Korea, whose eSports scenes are still doing pretty darn well, and South Africa, where eSports is starting to gain a major foothold. Yes, because one America-based eSports league has gone under, for reasons that are purely economic, eSports in the entire world is taking its last gasps of air.

Please forgive my heavy sarcasm, gentle readers. It is not often that I’ll come out so strongly against mainstream media coverage of eSports. We need as much of that as we can get. But I strongly object to the poor quality of reporting in this article – the lack of concrete facts, the inaccuracy of reported facts, and the heavily-biased perspective the reporter takes on the issue. It is as though the reporter went in looking for yet another story on how the recession has strangled the hopes of entire industries, and eSports just happened to wander into his sights. Add to this fallacy the idea that being a pro gamer isn’t an “actual job,” and you have a definite recipe for getting up in Peanut’s grill. I only ask that the New York Times and other such historically reputable news outlets take the time and effort to do their jobs – bringing accurate, unbiased (well, when it’s not political) news to the public. Esports is enough of a black sheep in the eyes of the American mainstream: we don’t need you muddying the waters with your dire implications and stealing hope away from those who look to competitive and pro gaming to more accurately reflect the changes in the world entertainment landscape.

On the plus side, this article was in the Sports section. Esports fighting!

Thanks, Mom

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:27:48 -0400

Yesterday was a good day for me, and hopefully for eSports as well (in a smaller way).

My Op Ed article on the Collegiate StarLeague and Korean StarCraft finally got published in the Harvard Crimson. You can check it out here - it's currently the #2 most read article on the Crimson website, which is very gratifying (let's make it #1!). Here's a snippet:

"Instead of pads and helmets, this sport merely requires a computer, keyboard, mouse, and Internet connection. These tools are standard for any college student, and travel costs are negligible, since the opposing teams can play each other online. The game is “StarCraft: Brood War,” and by starting the Collegiate StarCraft League, the Princeton gaming club, “SmashCraft Heroes,” might be setting a new precedent in North America. However, it follows a model that has been tested for years elsewhere in the world with incredible results."

I personally feel it's very important for pro and competitive gaming to get more press in mainstream media, and hopefully the people reading this article who don't know about the global trend in eSports will be inspired to check out some of the links and see the great things that are happening in gaming everywhere (minus the announcement of the fall of MYM).

Then I attended the awards ceremony for the Harvard I3 startup competition, which gives out $80,000 in prize money to startups headed by Harvard undergrads every year. My organization, Voice of eSports, which promotes StarCraft through online media, actually won in the category we competed in. Also very gratifying. Sadly because I'm a senior we weren't allowed to compete for one of the $15k prizes, which I think is stupid, but we won a lesser sum of money and a good deal of recognition in the process. It's great to know that there are people out there who aren't in the gaming community who understand the potential of eSports.

But the best part was that my mom, a 50 year old Korean immigrant who hates using computers, attended the ceremony and finally seemed to understand and support my passion. She gave me a beautiful bracelet after I went up to receive the award, and I intend to wear it whenever I can. Thank you, Mom, for being supportive. I know you'll almost certainly never read this blog entry, but I love you.

The Greatest (Gamer) Generation

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 03:06:55 -0400

“The old gameboy Pokemon has made a comeback in our suite,” my friend Devon said over lunch. I assumed for an ignorant moment that he meant he’d found an old gameboy and decided to fire up Red or Blue or Yellow or Crystal or Gold or Taupe again for nostalgia’s sake. “We found a ROM and started playing on emulator.”

“And didn’t you figure out how to battle each other over wireless?” one of his (non-Pokemon playing) suitemates chimed in.

“Yeah,” Devon confirmed. “We’re 90% there. The computers are clearly connecting, but the game requires you to use in-game save before you do certain things, and since there’s no actual hardware to save to we’re trying to figure that out.” He paused to recall more details of the process. “We found an emulator that specifically allows for network connectivity and everything.”

His partner in crime in the Pokemon experiment added his two cents. “Hey, do you think this only works over a network or could it happen over the internet? Like if you know IP addresses?”

Devon paused again to consider. “It could work. Who’d be interested? Maybe Ben … Chris …”

At this point my eyes were as wide as Jigglypuff’s as the possibilities started flooding in. I’m no stranger to emulators myself, and this past year I’ve played through a couple SNES Final Fantasy and Zelda games on my laptop. There were definitely some nights I stayed up until 6 or 7am fighting through strange caverns of monsters so all the members of my party could expend precious MP on X-Zone and Meteor and the other awesome Espr attacks. Then I remembered the days when I had a lime green Gameboy Color back in 1999 or so, the only piece of video game-specific equipment my mom ever let me buy, and logged endless hundreds of hours working methodically through the different flavors of Pokemon long after my little sister gave up on Ash’s adventures. Give me 10 minutes and I’d be able to come up with almost all of the original 151 Pokemon.

And how many others like me are there out there? Wikipedia says the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color combined have sold 118.69 million units worldwide and the Pokemon franchise is the second most successful and lucrative video game-based franchise in the world (behind the Mario series). Cumulative sales of Pokemon video games, again according to Wikipedia, have reached more than 186 million copies. It’s not a stretch to assume that a very significant chunk of those sales were for the first and second generation Gameboy games – Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, and Crystal. There are millions of people out there who were preteens in the late 90’s and know what it means to get down to your very last Super Potion fighting for a badge.

The frustration of seeing that Charmeleon you traded and traded back fall asleep on the front lines because it doesn’t think you’re good enough to give it orders. The calculations involved in deciding exactly when to offer your Eevee a life-changing Evolution Stone so that it keeps its most useful Normal attacks while developing its more powerful Special attacks (and that’s all in addition to the agony of deciding what sort of form you want it to take). Millions of people who were probably bored by the ease of beating the NPC “trainers” but never got a chance to battle as many live human beings as they wanted to because of the limitations of time, equipment, and strict parents. And they all (or almost all) own a personal computer and have access to the internet. Nostalgia by itself is compelling, but having a second chance to become the Pokemon trainer you always knew you could be and proving yourself to other like-minded people out there is unbelievably seductive.

Then it hit me – the ability to have this kind of second chance is completely unprecedented in the history of interactive entertainment. Of course people revisited their favorite childhood games before video games came around – that’s how corporate softball leagues became a cliche, and parents have a time-honored duty to play Monopoly with their kids at some point in their lives. But sports favor the endless physical energy of youth, and board games are too constrained by the roll of the dice and the limited possibilities for game play. There’s only so many times you can build a hotel on Park Street and feel a rush from knowing you’ll have tons of fake money coming in over the next few turns. The best video games – those that grow with you and are fun to play no matter what stage of cognitive development the players are in – don’t lose their appeal over time in the way traditional games do.

And this is not just any genre of classic video games we’re talking about, but those with good multiplayer functionality. When you have a good multiplayer game like StarCraft or Super Smash Bros. that’s been around for ages, as long as there are other people in the world who are still interested in the game, there is no end to the challenge and discovery that makes games fun. A 10-year-old can pick up Street Fighter and have a blast playing against his 10-year-old friends, and then a decade later walk into an arcade and light up at the prospect of playing that exact same version of Street Fighter again with a buddy because there are still new and exciting possibilities to explore when you’re smarter and more dexterous than your 10-year-old self. There is (little or) no fear of muscle strain or not being able to perform as well as you did years ago because you’re more concerned about how your jeans will look if you slide to first base. There’s no frustration with losing key cards or dice or game pieces when you open up your dusty old game of Risk. The quarters still fit in the machine’s slots, and although you may have to dig out more of them from your wallet than you remember, the clink that the coins make as they fall into the hidden recesses of the big metal box in front of you is the same. That sound is the promise of a new challenge wrapped up in wonderful memories. That sound is unlike anything the world has ever seen.

The phenomenon that I’m discussing is limited in a certain way to a very particular generation. We’re in college, now, or we’ve been out of college for a few years, or maybe we’re at the tail end of high school. We grew up in a world where video games were just starting to proliferate, and so there are hordes and hordes of us who saw the development of a new age of entertainment and were able to share it in a special way. Everyone played Tetris. Everyone played Mario Kart. Everyone had a SNES. Video games were not the province of a select few who had the foresight to pick up a black box called an Atari, and yet they were not so commonplace that everyone was playing something different. Games were not so simple that you had to be content with a couple white pixels on a black screen that represented a ping-pong ball, and games were not so complicated that you had to read endless documentation and buy a completely new system just to sit down and play.

This was the beginning of games that were really fun, that had the graphics and the storyline to engage people for weeks on end and remain in our memories for decades. This was the beginning of true multiplayer functionality where having a great afternoon with a friend could begin and end with an on button in front of a TV. People of this generation were the first to adapt this new entertainment medium to the concept of being social – we were the first to integrate gaming into the way we made friends and interacted with each other. For us, video games were not just a new pastime to become obsessed with but a foundation of our collective social and psychological makeup. The Columbine shootings were blamed on video games, sparking a whole debate about how games affect the way people think that has only recently died down a bit. The legacy of these formative experiences is still extraordinarily powerful for all its subtlety: I’d say at least a quarter of my 400-person dorm would play a game of Smash if given the chance, and most of them would only play the N64 version. The games we played when we were 8-14 years old have stayed with us and evoke powerful responses in a way that few other childhood interests do.

To those of us who are fascinated by the phenomenon of international competitive and professional gaming, it sometimes seems that ages and ages have passed without any improvement in the scene. Leagues like the Championship Gaming Series and the World Series of Video Games have come and gone, and many people wonder whether this means that gaming is not viable for competition and spectatorship in the same way that traditional sports are. But step back a second and take a more comprehensive perspective on the evolution of gaming as entertainment. The generation that I keep talking about is the one that forms the bedrock of competitive gaming – players and spectators, journalists and fans, entrepreneurs and developers. We’re only now entering the workforce in a big way and seeing the possibilities for tapping into our collective gamer childhoods. It will take a few years before we’re solid enough on our feet to demand that competitive gaming be given its rightful place in the way our grown-up selves engage with the world. Soon, all of us who smile when we hear the phrase “do a barrel roll!” and can sing the Zelda theme for 3 minutes straight will be the ones in charge. Soon, we won’t have to worry about authority figures telling us to stop wasting our time on video games because we’ll be the ones who make the rules and define what is a waste of time and what is worthwhile. We are the generation on the bleeding edge of a worldwide gaming consciousness, and there are so many of us that when we start making the big bucks and becoming the core of society we will not be ignored. Even now it’s remarkable enough when parents make playing Halo with their kids a regular recreational activity that it can inspire “gee whiz” news articles wondering at how the entertainment landscape of the civilized world has changed. In a few years, these articles won’t be around anymore because this behavior will be normal.

Getting back to my conversation at lunch, I immediately told Devon that he should send his ideas about internet-based multiplayer Pokemon over an email list where a bunch of my friends and I discuss interesting things happening in the world today. It is amazing and wonderful to me that innovative ideas like this can go from concept to reality to mass awareness in such little time compared to earlier eras. The key is not to underestimate the appeal that these kinds of ideas have in the larger scheme of things. I’m sure there are tons and tons of people out there who would love to be able to revisit Pokemon trainer battles and see if their skills at building well-rounded teams and using certain attack sequences work against peers who have grown older and wiser in the meantime. Then someone might set up a server where people can play and forums where enthusiasts can discuss strategies, and lo and behold college students across the world can play against each other and share a passion they never knew could be reawakened in such a satisfying way. It might not produce a real competitive scene – it might be popular for a few months and then vanish without a trace. It might take the world by storm and produce a professional gaming league. You just never know, and the cost of failure is so low that it would be a crime not to try to find out. It’s all about taking chances, whether it’s trying out a new build order or taking a course on art history or putting a down payment on a house or believing in a world that doesn’t exist yet. I don’t mean at all to belittle the high stakes of reality when I say life is a game, because, for me, in so many ways, the games we play are life.

Why Korean-Americans Should Use Gamer Names

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:42:43 -0500

Peanut here, reporting from a hotel in Philadelphia with 500 Korean-American students from various colleges across the USA. We're all here to attend KASCON, an annual convention which brings all of us "gyopo" (the Korean word for Koreans living/born overseas) to listen to some interesting speeches, network, and have crazy after-hours parties all in one weekend.

It's 2:20am, we got here at 1am after being on the road since 3pm (we got really lost), and we still don't have a hotel room. The reason has to do with the fact that Korean immigrant parents to this country are extremely uncreative with giving their children English names. In the 5-person zipcar I came down in, there was a Christin, a Christine, and me, Christina. Apparently there are at least 10 Danny Kims registered for this convention. And, as it turned out, there were two girls with the same names as two girls in our rooming group who were mis-assigned our room. Imagine our surprise when we opened the door and found a couple doppelgangers sleeping in our beds! The KASCON staff has been trying to work out the issue for at least half an hour, and since breakfast starts at 8 tomorrow (well, technically today), and the convention starts at 9, things are not looking good.

There aren't that many unique Korean last names - or rather, there are a few that are under heavy rotation. I'm sure you've all noticed this - Lee, for example, as well as Kim and Cho. Combine this phenomenon with the conservatism and heavy Christian influence on naming trends and you have a recipe for disaster when checking in for conventions of Korean-Americans. I have a simple solution to this problem, or rather, I know enough to borrow one from Korean StarCraft.

Korean-American parents, I call on you to give your children a conventional or Korean name at birth and then let them choose a gamer-style nick at an appropriate age. Instead of a million Jason Lees, how about a Flash Lee or an ilooov Lee? Granted, the latter is not very easy to figure out how to pronounce, but it's certainly memorable in its own way.

The English language has an incredibly large vocabularly - over 10,000 words in daily use. Some of them wouldn't be appropriate for first name usage ... "the," for instance, or "it." A lot of them are, though, and even if a couple of them are pretty popular (say, Flash), the very diversity of the English language would ensure that there would be fewer non-uniquely identifiable Flashes than there currently are Danny Kims.

The idea of choosing your own name even has precedent on the North American continent with the Native American "spirit names" which are supposed to reflect some sort of character trait in the child, especially one that the parents would like to see develop more fully. Korean and Chinese names also carry this sort of intentionality, albeit with some limits. Why do American names have to be so arbitrary and boring?

The gamer nicks wouldn't even have to be used all that often - just when there's a high probability of people with similar last names being mistaken for each other in an English-speaking area. I could use my regular name at school and then go by Peanut at conventions like this. I know I wouldn't mind, and I'm sure the folks at hotel registration would've appreciated it too.

Getting Your Game On, Offline

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:34:35 -0500

This past weekend I hung out at the G.I.M.P.E.D. 1 melee/brawl tournament at NYU Polytechnic in New York City, not as a competitor but as a photographer, journalist, and eSports scene analyst. While I’m very interested in the Smash scene, I’m primarily associated with the StarCraft community, and therefore it may not be surprising that the number of tournaments I’ve attended in person in the States is different for each game. What may be surprising is which number is higher: I’ve been to three live Smash tournaments so far and only two StarCraft ones. If I’m so obsessed with StarCraft and getting involved in the SC scene, why is this the case? There’s a lot of factors which influence the situation, and none more salient than the nature of the two platforms themselves, and how such fundamental differences affect the purposes of the live events they inspire.

The scene at GIMPED was, I think, pretty common for a tournament of its kind. There were lots of people milling around, almost entirely male and between the ages of 15 and 25, controllers in hand. TVs were set up in rows and on tables – about 15, I’d say – and players sat in front of them while spectators mostly stood behind. KnightMare, the head organizer, walked around with a piece of paper and a microphone calling out matchups while the folks behind the registration desks looked on. It was almost impossible to distinguish between “friendlies” and actual tournament matches. Although there were some very well-known players at the event, the distribution of spectators for their games and for others’ games wasn’t that imbalanced. It was a very friendly, low key atmosphere, with people joking and trash talking and occasionally yelling “WOMBO COMBO!”

The most striking thing to me, though, was the fact that the tournament wasn’t really about having a tournament. Sure, there was money and glory on the line, but it was obvious that the primary purpose of the tournament was to serve as a social gathering. People went there to hang out with their friends and play each other in Smash – to spend an afternoon away from the daily grind of work and school and immerse themselves in a social world centered around playing a game. There was no distinction between players and spectators, except possibly for me, since I was one of the only people (if not the only person) who didn’t play at all during the four or so hours I was there. Calling it a “tournament” seemed like a misnomer or a clever cover-up for something much more genial and community-oriented than competitive. The “stars” who were there were not treated differently from other people from a social perspective, although they were somewhat limited in the people they chose to play friendlies with (due to playing ability, I’d guess).

This is not the case at all for major StarCraft tournaments (except for those in Southern California), and to a lesser extent for PC game tournaments in general. Although it’s possible to play Brawl online, there’s always the issue of lag and the impossibility of playing Melee online which encourage the live tournament scene. In StarCraft and other competitive PC games that aren’t heavily team-based, 90% of the tournaments that happen occur online. This means that there tend to be very few offline tournaments, since the hassles of bringing equipment or finding a computer lab and other hardware problems make organizing a live tournament rather unappetizing. It’s so easy to figure out brackets on iCCup and have a tournament online in one afternoon – as long as everyone shows up – that calling for an offline tournament has to offer other advantages than just being able to compete. If you’re just trying to find out who’ll get the money and the glory, why not choose a venue where the setup costs are minimal to none and participation is open to people around the world instead of just those within a 50 mile radius? It certainly makes for a higher level of play, overall, and with YouTube and live streaming anybody can see the games as they are happening or afterwards (not that this doesn’t also happen with Smash, although I think to a lesser extent).

Additionally, there’s the money issue. People in Smash are used to paying a small fee upfront to participate in a tournament, and that money is used for both venue fees and prizes. The same is not true for StarCraft tournaments unless the potential for fame and prize money is huge. After all, it’s free to play online and tournament administration online is usually the same or even better than administration at live events. Essentially, StarCraft live (or “offline”) tournaments in the States fall into two categories: small events on college campuses or large, expensive events with potential for national exposure (not the Janet Jackson Superbowl kind). Inevitably, only the latter tend to involve cash prizes.

So what happens at a big StarCraft tournament where the stakes are higher and the trappings are glitzier? Well, in comparison to the way Smash tournaments seem to blur the line between competitors and spectators during competition, at SC tournaments there’s a very clear separation. There is tension in the air and there is silence during tournament matches. People often come just to watch. The socializing largely happens at times and places separated from the tournament itself.

What sort of consequences do these differences create for the larger online community? Well, it certainly means that “amateurs” are more likely to compete in live events alongside those at a “pro” skill level in Smash. It seems the Smash scene is separated more along geographic lines than skill lines for reasons of practicality – it’s hard to get across the country or the world to play melee friendlies. High-level StarCraft players, on the other hand, compete against similarly-minded folks from any number of different countries or regions. International Smash tournaments are fairly rare, but for StarCraft it’s practically normal. It also means that Smash players have more opportunities to bond in-person with other players and become “real life” friends. I haven’t researched the language on Smashboard posts extensively, but it’s probably the case that Smash people are nicer to each other than StarCraft people because they often actually encounter each other face to face. The anonymity of online play and interaction often encourages pretty offensive behavior from StarCraft enthusiasts above and beyond your friendly trash-talk. However, the regionalism of Smash is a double-edged sword – it promotes an enormous amount of community, but if you happen to live in an area without many Smashers around you have little opportunity to hone your skills to a highly-competitive level.

In the end, both scenes have their advantages and disadvantages. Smash players may get to play in more tournaments and win more money overall, but StarCraft players can practice at a high level much more frequently even if the matches aren’t of very much consequence in terms of “rankings” (iCCup aside). The StarCraft community is cohesive across geographic boundaries of state and country, but the Smash community is more likely to produce friendly interaction unrelated to the game itself and/or face-to-face. Smash’s vibrant offline culture is a fascinating counterpoint to StarCraft’s intense online fan-based culture. I consider myself very lucky in that I get to experience both worlds although I don’t play competitively (that is, in tournaments) in either game. The moral of the story is that gaming communities are not all alike and cannot be considered as such when talking about building or expanding a competitive scene. People also shouldn’t judge other gaming communities as better or worse than their own without understanding the whole story and why the community dynamics are the way they are. At heart, we’re all gamers, but everything else is up for debate – and I find that kind of diversity beautiful.

Thanks for reading, and please leave some feedback!

The PeaPod - Episode 2

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:05:01 -0500

Hi all, Peanut here with another installment of the PeaPod, my podcast! In this episode I let loose with some of the stuff that simmers in my head whenever I think about StarCraft, and I hope you find the results interesting and informative. The mp3 version is here.

Thanks for listening, and please give me feedback! The SC2GG discussion thread is here.

Announcing the PeaPod

In Defense of Color Commentary

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 13:16:27 -0500

As I said in an earlier post, Iâ€™m a permanent judge on SC2GG Commentator Idol, presented in association with Voice of eSports.Â My main focus in judging the contestantsâ€™ submissions is whatâ€™s known as â€œcolorâ€ â€“ in commentary, this means essentially things the commentator says that distinguish him or her from a person or computer whoâ€™s only analyzing the technical and strategic aspects of the game.Â This includes, but is not limited to, analogies comparing whatâ€™s going on in the game to situations in real life, fiction, etc. and expressions the commentator uses to convey the excitement of the game.Â This approach has generated some controversy over the importance of these aspects in StarCraft commentary, and to that end I composed an explanation for why I think color is a valid judging criterion for Commentator Idol.

Technical knowledge is an extremely important factor when it comes to commentary, but if it were the only factor then anybody with sufficient technical knowledge would be a great commentator. This is not the case. Commentary adds entertainment value to a game, and although StarCraft is more entertaining automatically if you can understand what's going on from a strategic perspective, there are other ways to increase entertainment value that affect the final product.

I'm a person who doesn't care all that much about the commentator's technical knowledge beyond a certain point ... if the commentator says the player is going for a 3-hatch build instead of a 9-pool, that's one thing, but if he says the mutalisk micro was slightly off when really it was that the terran had brilliant turret placement during one particular harass, it doesn't really matter to me. The commentator can have the best technical knowledge in the world, but if he or she is boring or annoying to listen to, I'm not going to listen.

Color is about being able to make the commentary interesting beyond just saying what's going on and why in a StarCraft context. There is a world that exists outside of StarCraft, and the two, in my opinion, should not be kept separate. Fundamentally, if you want StarCraft to appeal to a more general audience than just the people who play on ICCup, you have to be able to make StarCraft relevant to the real world - the world of people who have other interests and values that don't relate to one particular game, and the world of people who want to be entertained. Good color commentary makes the outside world relevant to StarCraft, and in return, makes StarCraft relevant to the outside world.

There are many cases where people use sports metaphors for non-sports phenomena without a second thought. Kissing is "getting to first base" and the working world is called the "rat race." People are often told to "go for the gold" or "keep your eye on the ball" by motivational speakers. It's firmly established that sports are relevant to life, and part of the reason why that happens is that sports are enjoyed by a large population of people, many or most of whom don't understand or care about the higher-level technical details of a particular game. If someone who doesn't understand StarCraft that well watches a commentary and doesn't understand that a particular skirmish is key to the outcome of the game, he or she won't understand that fact any better if the commentator just describes it technically. If, however, the commentator says that this particular timing push is like Napoleon going into Russia or like trying to bake a cake without flour, the significance becomes much clearer.

The bottom line is that Commentator Idol is not looking for a commentator who appeals only to diehard StarCraft fans or players. A good commentary should be very technically accurate, but it should also be exciting and leave a first-time viewer wanting to see more, even if they don't understand exactly what's going on. Color helps bridge that gap and make sure StarCraft appeals to a greater population and not just those who are D+ or higher on ICCup. Is competitive StarCraft just a niche novelty or can it also be a general spectator sport? Color commentary is a lot of what lets StarCraft make that transition.

Get my RSS feed:
http://starfeeder.gameriot.com/blogfeeds/The-Peanut-Gallery

My Archived Posts:
http://starfeeder.gameriot.com/blogs/The-Peanut-Gallery

Announcing ... The PeaPod!

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:40:02 -0500

Letâ€™s face it â€¦ Iâ€™m not cut out to be an SCBW commentator â€“ the game has been around too long and the effort involved to rival the best would be a little more than I could handle with my other activities.Â However, I do want to contribute to the community more than just by managing things at SC2GG and occasionally writing blogs or articles, so to that end Iâ€™ve started a podcast â€“ The PeaPod! Available on YouTube on the PeanutSC1 account.

This episode features a very entertaining interview with a special and elusive guest â€“ check it out!Â Leave me feedback for what you want to hear in this podcast as well ^_^.Â Next episode out in two weeks!

SC2GG Commentator Idol!

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:14:17 -0500

Hi everybody, terribly sorry for being afk for so long â€¦ Iâ€™ve had some financial issues and other stuff pop up, but I still shouldnâ€™t have waited so long to write a good article.

One major project that I got drawn into and has dominated my StarCraft life for a few weeks already is the SC2GG Commentator Idol, presented in association with Voice of eSports (the company I started a while back with some SC2GG people) and masterminded by Cholera, the history-loving Reach-adoring commentator who is one of SC2GGâ€™s best-known voices.Â Iâ€™m one of the two permanent judges of Commentator Idol, which is a parody of American Idol with up-and-coming YouTube StarCraft commentators in lieu of Kelly Clarkson and Taylor Hicks.Â

Hereâ€™s the first episode â€“ go to the Violetak account on YouTube to see the rest!

Iâ€™m the Paula Abdul figure of the show, I guess, with Cholera playing Ryan Seacrest and another well-known SC2GG commentator named Rise attempting to be Simon.Â We just released Episode 3: Foreign but Gosu today, and for the last couple episodes weâ€™ve had some really interesting guest judges on the show too â€“ Diggity for Ep 2 and Chill from TeamLiquid for Ep 3.

The Guest Judges (so far)


Diggity in avatar form	Chill, celebrating BlizzCon

The Permanent Judges


Yes, Rise really is this cool	Itâ€™s me!

The Host

No, Cholera is not actually an ungodly hybrid of Reach and Chuck Norris.Â

Â This is just what he aspires to be.

What Iâ€™ve really been impressed by, though, has been the quality of the contestants who are on the show.Â Cholera, Rise, and I went through 17 applications consisting of two commentaries for each applicant in order to come up with the six (originally five but one more slot added because of interest) contestants for the first episode.Â So far two of them have been eliminated, and we were very sad to see them go, but this just underscores for me how incredibly talented, smart, and eloquent the remaining four are.

The First to Fall


Hamilcar was eliminated in the first episode with guest judge Diggity	smi1ey was eliminated in the second ep with guest judge Chill

The Final Four

If any of you are looking for some fresh new voices in the YouTube commentary scene, Iâ€™d highly recommend you click on these avatars and check out the contestantsâ€™ YT channels â€“ theyâ€™re all excellent in different ways.Â And yes, Hazel is a girl.Â Sheâ€™s also a damned good StarCraft commentator.

Anyway, stay tuned for episode 4 â€“ dual commentaries!Â Kenny and Hazel are casting two Korean SC mirror matches, as are Morph and Parcx.Â The VODs will be listed on SC2GG on Thursday (although they may be up on the contestantsâ€™ individual pages before then) and voting will open Thursday evening.Â If youâ€™re interested in taking part, sign up on the SC2GG forums and vote!Â The judgesâ€™ votes count towards the total, but the majority is held by you, the people!

Happy Holidays and Video Games = Art?

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:44:04 -0500

A holiday video treat from Peanut and aÂ special guest!

Â

My friends often debate the merits of gaming over email, and recently we've been talking about this article from the London Review of Books.Â Are video games an art form?Â Where is the video game industry going, and how might it parallel the growth of other media like movies?

My friend responded with this opinion:

[quote]Â Â Â Â Video games are not an artform.Â They may possess artistic elements--such as design and environment--but they will never stimulate the human mind and capacity as other true artforms, like painting, music, or dance.Â These artforms possess the capacity for true creativity and expression, which video games will never possess.Â I'd also like to point out, on an unrelated note, something that was said by this author:

Â Â Â Â "And what do they want? The same thing the audience for any new medium always wants: they want pornography, broadly defined. They want to see things they aren't supposed to see. This is why video games, in general (and away from the world of Miyamoto-san) are so preoccupied with violence - it's what young men want to see. (Pornography in the sexual sense is less of an issue: they can get that from the internet, any time they want.) Their rule-bound, target-bound educations and work lives leave them with a deep craving to go and commit imaginary crimes - as well they might."

Â Â Â Â I think the crucial problem is within these lines.Â He, like so many others, assumes that regimented society is what is encouraging young people to find outlets for their "craving" for imaginary crimes, but this is impossible!Â Historically it is completely untrue.Â We live in a less-regimented and goal-focused society than ever before, yet people are angrier and more willing to commit violence.Â Why is this true?Â It's complicated, but I would venture that a large part of it has to do with the fact that people are being exposed to activities which promote cycles of violent thinking and destructive behavior.Â Obviously it is difficult to establish a correlation between the child who plays GTA and the child who stabs a peer at school with a knife, but I have no doubt that this choice subconsciously becomes more attractive because of prolonged exposure to what this author has so charmingly described as "pornography".[/quote]

I thought for a while about this, and here was my response:

Â Â Â Â I'd like to take upÂ the point that society is less regimented and goal-oriented than ever, and yet people are angrier and more violent, perhaps because of cultural influences like violent video games.Â This is a radical oversimplification of the way human civilization has changed, and even if we are only referring to the small percentage of the world that can afford to play video games and enjoy "art," it seems to overly focus on Western society to exclusion of the East.Â Americans and Europeans game a lot, it's true, but it's nothing compared to their counterparts in East and Southeast Asia who spend 12+ hours a day playing computer and console games and have to go to rehab camps to be weaned off of gaming addictions.Â I don't think there's any debate as to whether or not Eastern collectivized societies are more regimented and goal-oriented than Western individualistic societies (they are), nor is there a debate as to whether or not Eastern countries tend to have more violence than Western societies (they don't).Â There are over 30,000 internet cafes in Seoul alone where the main activity is gaming, and yet Seoul is one of the safest cities I've ever lived in.Â Of course, in Korea people aren't allowed to own handguns, but my main point is that you can't necessarily correlate violent gaming with the level of violence in a society in general.Â Korea also has its share of violent movies and imports all the latest Hollywood blockbusters.Â Why is it then that a skinny, 21-year-old girl can walk around by herself at night down dark alleyways in the most urbanized region of the country without being afraid of a violent encounter?Â There are just way too many cultural factors involved, and there is no strong correlation between gaming and general level of violence internationally (in addition, correlation does not imply causation).

Â Â Â Â People have been exposed to cycles of destructive behavior all throughout history.Â Slaves were routinely abused in all ancient societies, and culturally-rooted caste systems codified irresponsibly violent behavior on the part of the haves to the detriment of the have-nots.Â War is not a new phenomenon, and until the 20th century war was seen as a healthy, catharctic, masculine activity by most of the Western world.Â Domestic violence used to go completely unreported or was even sanctioned by law until relatively recently, and let's not forget those romanticized stories of Billy the Kid and other folk who essentially lived off of destructive behavior and were celebrated for it.Â I'd argue that violent behavior is less glorified now than ever in history.Â There may even be less violence now in first world countries than ever before, but it's difficult to tell because violence is highly publicized now in an unprecendented way through all the different kinds of media available to us.

Â Â Â Do video games consitute an art form?Â My mind is not entirely made up on this score, and part of it has to do with the fact that gaming combines notions of high art with notions of entertainment (largely considered non-high art) in an entirely new way.Â To me, one of the fundamental ideas behind "high art" is its non-interactiveness - the author, artist, or filmmaker creates a complex work that is subject only to his/her whims and arrives before the public to be appreciated in an immutable form.Â The public then judges through its passive experience of the art whether or not the work has the qualities necessary to count as "high art," with perhaps some input from the creator as to its interpretation.Â The creativity involved in "high art" is the reserve of the creator and not the audience.Â In interpreting video games as art, a major stumbling block is that the quality of the experience depends not just on the creator of the game but the person/people playing it.Â Someone who has the motivation to explore the game and figure out how to stretch it to its limits may be able to encounter layers of complexity that truly indicate artistic genius on the part of the creator, and someone who picks it up and gets frustrated with it after an hour may decide it's trash.Â Then there is the vast majority who plays the game for a while and thinks it's fun and valuable for various reasons but may not consider it art; this is comparable, in my opinion, to people who look at a Rembrandt and think "oh, that's pretty" but don't have the motivation or the training to understand all the reasons why that painting is considered "high art" and a painting that took a comparable amount of time and effort to create but isn't all that remarkable otherwise isn't considered "high art."Â The major difference is that this person in question will automatically assume that the Rembrandt is more valuable and is "high art" because all of his or her upbringing in affluent Western society has ingrained that assumption into him/her.Â Video games are so new that no such comparable set of cultural assumptions exists.

Â Â Â Â Why is "high art" more valuable to an art collector than a work that took the same amount of time and effort to create but isn't considered "high art"?Â Is it that the collector can spend more time absorbed in the painting's aesthetics and history, contemplating the wonders of the human artistic faculty?Â Is it that it's more expensive and is therefore a mark of high social status?Â Is it that it was within the collector's price range and just happened to go well with the color palette of the room?Â Is it that the collector remembered from Art History 101 that this particular work exemplified the genius of the era and he/she really liked that class so he/she jumped at the chance to acquire the painting/sculpture/collage?Â Is it that the collector just really likes large-scale depictions of unicorns used as metaphors for the human condition?Â The question of the true nature of "art" or what makes something "art" have been around for centuries or maybe millenia, with many arguments over whether or not a particular work or the works of a particular artist consitute art.Â There are tons of examples of works we now consider high art that were considered trash when they were created, or at best very good examples of lowbrow entertainment (several of Mozart's operas spring to mind).Â The same may be true for video games, but the difference with video games is also that the question of whether video games are "art" cannot be resolved with time and cultural agreement in the same sense that examples of traditional art forms have in the past.Â Because of gaming's interactivity, it challenges the assumptions we hold about art versus entertainment in a totally different way.

Â Â Â Â Let's look at Photoshop.Â With Photoshop, normal people can create images that some would consider art, which makes Photoshop similar to the painter's brush or the sculptor's chisel.Â The brush and the chisel are not considered art in and of themselves because they are so simple and do not require a great deal of skill or ingenuity to create.Â Photoshop, however, is a piece of software that took tons of time, resources, skill, and problem-solving ability to create.Â Someone with an intimate knowledge of the program can produce incredible images that stretch the limits of human creativity in unprecedented ways to the point of creating "high art," but this creativity depends on the features that were coded into the program and the constraints that the program imposes on the end user - therefore, this expression of creativity and skill owes its existence to another expression of human creativity and skill.Â Is the Photoshop software package "art" in and of itself?Â It depends on what an artist can do with it that he/she can't do with non-digital means or with other image editing programs.Â It depends on what your definition of art is.Â It depends on what you consider the "medium" and what you consider the "message," and whether those two categories are mutually exclusive.

Â Â Â Â If we revise the definition of "high art" to include works that enable others to create "high art" or that unleash human creativity and engage the human spirit at its highest levels, then I would say that video games can potentially be art.Â Time will tell.

CGS, WCG, and American eSports

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:19:35 -0500

The news today that the CGS has folded was neither sad nor unexpected for some, but I for one am sorry to see it go.Â There were good intentions behind that venture, and it had the potential to boost eSports into the mainstream in a big way, but there seem to have been too many hurdles and too many mistakes along the way.Â Topping the list of faults from the gaming community's point of view was that CGS was changing too many of the rules, splitting up teams, and embracing a showbiz-type style in a way that turned many hardcore fans off.Â In the farewell letter on their homepage, the "CGS team" did leave us a bit of hope for the future of gaming in broadcast media: "BSkyB, STAR, and DIRECTV continue to be committed to the video games sector, which is an important part of many of our customers' lives and a great source of entertainment."Â It's still pretty obvious that parent company and media giant NewsCorp pulled the plug on that one, though.

On the other end of the spectrum is the World Cyber Games, which, at least in the USA, is both very disorganized at the tournament level and somehow still well-loved by at least some in the gaming community.Â Recently, WCG USA Senior VP and General Manager Michael Arzt was fired, only a week or so after the USA Finals concluded.Â WCG apparently has its own corporate demons to deal with in addition to less-than-stellar tournament administration.Â The threads on TeamLiquid bashing WCG run (digital) miles long.Â However, it does appear that WCG is open to input from the community, which hopefully means they'll be able to stick around for a while, if only to prove that you can't keep the earplugs in when the internet gets up in arms.Â Especially if the prizes are nowhere near the amount of cash CGS was throwing around.

Both the CGS and WCG USA as it has been are/were imperfect models for large eSports organizations, which means there's a lot to learn from them moving forward.Â Luckily WCG USA seems to be open to change.Â If America can't develop something like the eSports culture in Korea or other parts of Asia, we'll have to find our own way to a fruitful eSports scene somehow.Â It can't be done without failures and casualties along the way, but at least the community lives on.

TL-SC2GG Showmatch Tomorrow 11am PST/2pm EST

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:27:40 -0500

That's right, folks, TeamLiquid and SC2GG staff are going head-to-head tomorrow in a bloody Proleague-style grudge match.Â Here are the lineups:

Game 1: Deus (T) vs OneOther (P) on Othello
Game 2: Cholera (Z) vs Hot_Bid (P) on Blue Storm
Game 3: JWD (Z) & Mr.Bitter (P) vs Carnac (P) & Cow(Z) on Python
Game 4: Vaul (T) vs DeadVessel (P) on Chupong-Ryeong
Game 5: Delirium (Z) vs Insane (T) on Byzantium 2
Game 6: PsyonicReaver (P) vs RaGe (T) on Medusa
Game 7: Salv (P) vs Chill (Z) on Andromeda

Moletrap will be commentating, and I think Chill will as well (when he's not playing).Â Head over to either TL or SC2GG tomorrow to find the link to the live cast!

My Visit to KeSPA

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:01:34 -0500

After wandering around the busy streets of Seoul in the rain asking various people for directions, I finally found myself on a gently-curving side road populated with office buildings. Walking along, umbrella balanced precariously on my shoulder and a heavy shopping bag in each hand, I was relieved when a familiar face leaned out of a window in an unassuming brick building and waved to me. The sign in front of the building had several eye-catching logos, but one in particular stood out: that of KeSPA, or the Korean eSports Association.

After nevergg snapped a few group photographs, there were introductions all around. The Korean man who had acted as impromptu MC was Jason Lee, and after enthusiastically handing me his business card he introduced me to Mr. Choi and Mr. Kim. Mr. Lee and Mr. Choi were clearly good friends and were also a study in contrasts. While Mr. Lee was short and boisterous, Mr. Choi was tall, quiet, and to my relief, spoke English pretty well. I told them about my passion for Starcraft, and they warmly responded to my excitement and told me to drop by the KeSPA offices anytime. As I left the restaurant with my many new friends that night, I knew that my future lay in Korea and in eSports.

When I visited KeSPA a few days after returning to Seoul, the atmosphere in the office was more subdued but the men I had met still showed the same keen interest in me and my potential involvement in eSports. I showed them my autograph book and heard a few stories about some of the pro gamers whose autographs I'd obtained. Mr. Lee proudly told me that BoxeR was "his man" and that he had actually been the one to recruit the Terran Emperor for SKT1. He also promised that I would be able to meet BoxeR when I returned to Korea, which will hopefully be next summer.

I planned to make this entry more about KeSPA's role in Korean eSports than my personal experiences, but I guess I got a little off-track. In the meantime, check out disciple's post on TeamLiquid about a very informative KeSPA powerpoint presentation from this past May.

Obama Wins! +1 for the Internet!

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:26:32 -0500

Barack Obama is now the President-Elect of the United States of America.Â What does this mean for we technology-loving folk?Â Here, I defer to Randall Munroe of xkcd, in a blog post that helped convince me to vote for Obama in the primaries:

"Obama has shown a real commitment to open government. When putting together tech policy (to take an example close to home for xkcd) others might have gone to industry lobbyists. Obama went to Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons (under which xkcd is published) and longtime white knight in the struggle with a broken system over internet and copyright policy. Lessig was impressed by Obamaâ€™s commitment to open systems â€” for example, his support of machine-readable government information standards that allow citizensâ€™ groups to monitor what our government is up to. Right now, the only group that can effectively police the government is the government itself, and as a result, itâ€™s corrupt to the core. Through these excellent and long-overdue measures, Obama is working to fight this corruption."

A Creative Commons president ... now that's someone I can support.Â Good times are ahead for the USA, and I'm sure much of the rest of the world is breathing a sigh of relief!

SC2GG-TL Showdown?

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:32:48 -0400

TeamLiquid, flush with victory in its recent inter-fansite match against GosuGamers.net, is apparently throwing down the gauntlet to SC2GG.Â If the long and very active threads on both websites' forums are any indication, there's much more to this challenge than just a few friendly games of SC.Â SC2GG and TL have an ancient (well, in internet terms) and angst-ridden history together, and it seems some old grudges are resurfacing, especially on the TL side.

One notable theme in all this commotion is the prospect of SC2GG staff member and popular YouTube FPVOD commentator Combat-EX facing TL mod/caster Chill in what would widely be considered a grudge match.Â Wishful thinkers would also like to see SC2GG admin Radivel facing off with TL admin Manifesto7, as well as me playing against lilsusie, TL translator-turned-commentator who is currently residing in Korea.

Typically, both sites would just come up with one Korean-style team each, drawing from its staff members, and schedule an all-in match patterned after the Proleague.Â The strains of deeper animosity running through the discussion give me pause for thought, however - it could be just me looking for melodrama, but the stakes seem to be unusually high for the internet.

We'll see what happens.Â It should be an exciting match.

Artist for header graphic: http://www.slight-shift.com/

BlizzCon 08: World's First SCII Show Match and the Consequences for eSports

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:58:33 -0400

As you may have seen on Coldlogic's blog, I was lucky enough to go to BlizzCon a couple weekends ago in Anaheim, California. Although the entire convention was spectacular, there was one event in particular that stood out to me, both because of its sheer novelty and because of the implications for the future of eSports: the first ever StarCraft II show match.

That weekend, the RTS stage was home to both a StarCraft and WarCraft III tournament featuring both American and international top-notch gamers (Koreans took the top three spots for SC, predictably) and $25,000 plus a really awesome sword for prizes. Watching a StarCraft tournament in truly professional, organized Korean style in the States was a rarity enough, but Blizzard pulled out the stops (or took advantage of the international involvement) and featured a fascinating best-of-three match pitting American WarCraft III pro Nik "SonKiE" Cassidy against KTF MagicNs player Jin-ho "YellOw" Hong in the alpha version of StarCraft II.

SonKiE, a rising star in the international WC3 scene, had recently earned a place on the WCG USA Team for the upcoming Grand Finals in Germany and was one of only 12 international players invited to the ESWC Masters of Athens tournament. He has also just joined top-rank European team Gravitas Gaming, home to GosuGamers #4-ranking player Yoan "ToD" Merlo. YellOw, also called the "Storm Zerg," is no slouch himself, having won third place in the first season of the OSL in 2006 - he hasn't won much since then, but then again he's a Korean pro and that's already a cut above.

StarCraft II is not just a sequel to Brood War - it attempts to be a next-generation hybrid of Blizzard's twin RTS blockbusters. Combining the storyline and familiar three races of StarCraft with the lush visuals, smarter AI, and other gameplay features of WarCraft III, SCII in its tournament debut posed an interesting question. Would YellOw enjoy a home court advantage, or would SonKiE's greater familiarity with WC3 mechanics give him the edge?

The historic match inspired additional excitement with the presence of SCII lead designer Dustin Browder and Blizzard eSports coordinator Rob "The Voice" Simpson behind the commentators' podium. Browder, a cheerful shortish fellow with a beard, spoke with an authority only a developer could possess about SCII's ever-changing technical details. Simpson, an experienced WoW caster who has worked with MLG, added a great deal to the spectator experience with his professionalism and apparent familiarity with the game.

Beyond serving as a showcase for Blizzard casting talent, the match also revealed another unprecedented aspect of StarCraft II: commentary-specific software. Browder, as observer in the match, was able to zoom in on specific units and effectively change the "camera angle" to better illustrate his remarks. Although there are still significant problems to be worked out, as it seemed that using the zoom feature caused in-game lag, the very promise of commentary-specific software in such an anticipated game has great implications for the eSports world. Not just in Korea, where StarCraft supports a billion-dollar-per-year entertainment kingdom, but for all gamers, fans, staff, sponsors, and the unsuspecting public.

With this new offering, it seems that Blizzard aims to merge the existing SCBW and WC3 and perhaps WoW communities into a user fanbase the likes of which this world has never seen. As CEO Mike Morhaime informed us during BlizzCon's opening ceremony, if World of WarCraft were a country, it would be the 74th most populous country in the world. Azeroth has more paying subscribers than Portugal has residents. Add to this the estimated 18 million fans in Korea, the hordes on BattleNet, and the legions of WarCraft fans in China and various countries in Europe, and the potential for a worldwide StarCraft II audience becomes staggering. Then further consider the implications of commentary software, implying that Blizzard plans to market SCII as an eSport from the get-go, which introduces the possibility of additional fans who experience the game primarily as spectators - live, on the internet, or on TV - instead of as gamers. If StarCraft II turns out to be as appealingly well-balanced and innovative as its predecessor, it will change the face of global entertainment.

This is still a big If. Ultimately, YellOw won the show match handily 2-0 - an outcome owing more to the overpowered Protoss units and his opponent's inexperience with the game than any real test of skill. But the match was still a joy to behold, and the future of eSports seemed to shine from the faces of the enraptured audience as much as it did from the Stalkers and Zerglings on the huge LCD screens. StarCraft and WarCraft III became the celebrated eSports that they are by accident, not design - this time around, Blizzard isn't taking any chances. We might all be tuning in to the results for years to come.

Say hi to Peanut!

no.spam@gameriot.com (Peanut) — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:59:52 -0400

Korean Pro StarCraft: An Eyewitness Report

Greetings! Peanut here, posting an article I wrote while in Seoul, South Korea, the epicenter of the StarCraft pro-gaming world. There I attended two sets of exciting games for WCG Korea: Much vs. firebathero and BeSt vs. Kwanro. You all know what happened, so this will be more audience experience-focused than an article on gameplay.

The games were held at the e-sports stadium in the Yongsan I'Park mall at the top floor of the Digital Life electronics supercenter. The mall starts on floor three, so there are five whole floors of all the electronics and computer accessories a computer connoisseur's heart could desire. Each display case and booth is so packed with merchandise that I'm pretty sure just half a floor could fully stock your typical Best Buy. Plasma monitors, digital SLR cameras, little rubber cases for thumbdrives - you name it and it's there in all the varieties you can think of (except for Apple stuff ... I guess Korea's not big on Apple).

Take the escalator to the 9th floor and you see a small waiting area outside the doors of the e-sports stadium. I got there about an hour in advance and there was already a line of 20 or so people waiting to get in. The scene reminded me much more of a movie theater lobby than what you would think a group of kids waiting to see a computer gaming match would look like - everyone was in their teens or twenties, and the ratio was about 40% girls and 60% boys. Of course, all of them were Korean, and many of them had signs or banners prepared for their favorite players. They chatted excitedly and amiably while they waited for the doors to open, looking for all the world like a normal, wholesome, well-dressed bunch of middle-class young'uns.

The doors finally opened and I quickly snagged a plastic lawn chair in the second row in front of the stage where I had a perfect view of the two booths and the huge LCD screen in the middle. If I listened carefully I could hear background music ... was it what I thought it was? Yes, it was the Terran battle theme.

Food and drink were nominally not permitted, but many people were sipping on drinks and munching chips, and so I took out my snacks as well while we waited for things to get going. The stagehands taped up banners with sponsor logos around the edge of the stage and tested the fog machines, lights, etc. There were two stationary TV cameras on either side of the audience set up on large tripods that would afford the cameramen perfect views of the profiles of the players as they sat in the booths. There was also a camera on a moving crane arm suspended from the ceiling behind the audience and a girl with a handheld camera walking around.

People were trickling in but things were pretty dull, so I took my wallet and did a little shopping for headphone splitter cables downstairs while they were setting up. There's very little petty theft in Korea, at least in all the places I've been to, so I felt perfectly safe leaving my bag with my camera and other effects in my chair while I asked around for the cables in my broken Korean elsewhere in the mall. 1000KRW for a Y-cable (~$1) ... not bad at all.

When I got back to my seat, the lights were dimming and the excitement was starting to build. Besides the huge screen onstage, there were three smaller TVs set into the walls on each side of the stage (6 screens total) showing replays of various SC games, replays of WCIII games, and advertisements. Korean commercials are hilarious. The guys sitting next to me were talking about the SC replay they were showing on two of the screens and words like "starport" and "probes" jumped out at me as I quietly eavesdropped. There was a small commotion when the first two players - Much (Protoss) and firebathero (Terran) - unobtrusively entered their respective booths, but then the WCG logo appeared on the central screen and everyone immediately started applauding.

By this time the roped-off audience area in front of the stage was full and I could see people standing or sitting on the floor near the entrance to the stadium. It was very cozy, since I think the maximum seating capacity of the place was 100 people. Girls took out folding fans, posters, and brochures to hide the lower halves of their faces while the two WCG official commentators introduced the match onscreen. People cheered as each player's face, expressionless but somehow determined, appeared on the central screen along with a few statistics. Then all was quiet as the countdown began.

The audience dynamic was very interesting and markedly different from what I expected. There was no booing and hardly any cheering or chanting aimed directly at the players at all. I guess this makes sense since the players are in soundproof booths with headphones on. There was also no pointed audience reaction to the official commentary ... and I guess this makes sense since the commentators were broadcasting from some studio somewhere and weren't actually in the room. This isn't to say that the audience was silent - far from it. There was plenty of ooh-ing and aah-ing when, say, Much somehow simultaneously cast 5 stasis fields on firebathero's tank line, and the anticipation/anxiety was palpable whenever a dark templar strayed a little too close to a buried spider mine. I found myself caught up in the eager spirit of the whole stadium, and suddenly a game that I'd only known as a cerebral exercise among friends (I don't play on battlenet much, clearly) transformed into a true spectator sport. The audience deeply appreciated every brilliant tactical move and recognized every strategical blunder, and laughed as one whenever a cute or witty sign was briefly displayed on the central screen along with the grinning, embarrassed face of the audience member supporting it (or half a face, when that audience member was a girl). The only negative vibes I felt from the crowd subtly emerged when in what turned out to be the last game of the set one of the players refused to declare gg (or ì§€ì§€ in the Korean transliteration) long after he should've accepted defeat. But gg was eventually called, and the audience cheered while the winning player Much (again, unobtrusively) exited his booth, followed in suit by firebathero after a minute or so of sullen self-reflection.

There was a bit of a break before the second set, so I followed many of the fans outside to a small outdoor balcony area where I hoped they were waiting for their heroes. My hunch was correct, and firebathero emerged with a few of his teammates from a door on the side of the building. He walked quickly, looking a little downcast, but stopped when a few fans ran up to him and respectfully offered him a small box of Dunkin' Donuts, a liter of soda, and a greeting card. No pictures or autographs - that might've rubbed it in a little too much. He quietly walked off while the small crowd of mostly girls turned and noisily cheered the winning player who had just appeared to greet his fans.

Fan behavior in Korea is very different from fan behavior in the States. The gang of 20 or so young fans - again, mostly girls - could barely contain their excitement as they gathered around Much, leaving the poor fellow with ... actually, about a 3-foot radius of breathing room. There was no hysteria, no screaming, no pushing each other to be the first to get a body part signed. In fact, most of them were content to exchange witty banter and ask embarrassing (I presume, at least, from the reactions they elicited) questions of the player while snapping away with cell phones and digital cameras. The few that lined up for autographs were unfailingly polite, gesturing to each other to go ahead when there was confusion about who was supposed to go next. Much was surprisingly human and modest despite his chic pro-gamer jacket and special over-the-shoulder keyboard backpack. No sunglasses, no "I'm too busy for this" attitude, no bodyguards, no paparazzi, even. For a guy so obviously adored by a large group of nubile women, he seemed so normal. I didn't get his picture, but I was reassured by the low-key atmosphere and promised myself I'd bring my camera out to this special meeting point after the next set.

The BeSt (Protoss) vs. Kwanro (Zerg) match went much like the Much vs. firebathero one in terms of the audience experience. It seemed, though that this was the match many of the fans had turned out to see. One fan would yell out "[name of player] hana, dul, set!" ("one, two, three!") and a perfectly synchronized group cheer would erupt. Then another fan would start a cheer for the other player. I think there were more BeSt fans in the audience than Kwanro fans, just from hearing the differing volumes of cheering I heard when each player's picture was thrown up on the central screen. This set was truly epic, and people went absolutely nuts time and time again. When it was all over I headed out to the fan meeting spot again and witnessed the same soda and donuts ritual with Kwanro, the losing player. Then BeSt came out and we jostled politely into in a semi-circle around him with the same 3-foot radius. He excused himself at one point to go to the bathroom, bowed, and ran off while I stood amazed at this show of etiquette. After he came back, I snapped a few photos of him signing various notebooks and banners and then timidly announced myself as an American who wanted to take a picture with him. There were collective gasps and all the fans seemed really impressed as they motioned for me to stand next to him (and for him to put his arm around my shoulders) and photographed away.

After the photo session I snuck off while the fans kept up the friendly banter. Clearly this was the best live entertainment money can (well, doesn't even have to) buy in Seoul.

Â [Article originally posted on the SC2GG forums on August 5th, 2008, and then at Gravitas Gaming on September 17th, 2008]