Scarlett, the most accomplished woman in e-sports, is known for her macro mutalisk style and kick-ass creep spread. Photograph by Jenny Hueston

I confess to being bewildered, still, by what is often said to be the greatest game of StarCraft II ever played. Fall, 2013. New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. Scarlett vs. Bomber. Third game in a best-of-three series, a quarter-final in a tournament sponsored by Red Bull. It lasted about forty minutes, although I gathered, from the live commentary on the video that I have watched many times, that it nearly ended far sooner. A couple of minutes in, there came this exchange:

“Uh-oh. Oh, my God! Scarlett is going gas!”

“Oh—oh, God!”

“Gas pool! And it’s a double proxy. Bomber is walking into the worst possible situation.”

StarCraft, a video game, is often compared to chess: it is strategic and extremely difficult, requiring a mathematical cast of mind, and, unlike many other video games, with their scrolling or first-person vantages, it affords a bird’s-eye perspective of the board, or map. But the analogy breaks down in countless ways. The map changes from game to game. (In this instance, it was called Habitation Station, and shaped somewhat like a butterfly.) Instead of black or white, players choose from among three “races,” called Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, with different strengths and vulnerabilities. In the early stages, players cannot see one another’s armies, and must dispatch scouts to illuminate darkened corners; they must also develop economies, with which to fund the inevitable battles. It’s as if Garry Kasparov had to plot a pawnless endgame while simultaneously harvesting minerals, building fuel extractors, and searching in vain for Spassky’s queen. Academic researchers now use StarCraft II—the “drosophila” of brain science, as one paper suggested—when studying people who expertly perform cognitively complex tasks. Chess may soon be eclipsed as the standard-bearer of competitive I.Q.

“Imagine playing a concerto on a piano, and if you miss one note the entire orchestra stops playing and you’re kicked off and you lose your job,” Sean Plott, one of the official commentators on the Scarlett-Bomber match, told me recently. “That’s what this is like.” The piano reference was not arbitrary; top-level StarCraft requires as many as three hundred actions per minute, or A.P.M.; an élite practitioner’s left hand, as it manipulates the keyboard, can appear almost to be playing Chopin. The right hand, meanwhile, darts and clicks with a mouse, contrapuntally, so frantic that carpal-tunnel syndrome and tendinitis are common side effects.

But that’s not what I was seeing as I reviewed the historic footage. I saw blue robo-soldiers (Bomber’s Terran marines) and red, buglike creatures (Scarlett’s Zerglings) scurrying around an apocalyptic space station—which seemed, despite the absence of any natural light, to be sprouting green shrubbery. Occasionally, the marines were flanked by friends (reapers) who appeared to be wearing jet packs. With time, the red bugs received assistance from winged dragons flying in formation—mutalisks, or “mutas.” Red was fast. Blue was heavily armed. Firefights broke out every so often, seldom lasting more than five or ten seconds before one side retreated to focus efforts elsewhere and keep its army intact—the micro game ceding to the macro, in the parlance.

There is no definitive scoreboard, just a variety of economic indicators, which describe potential rather than success. Comebacks are not as straightforward as in, say, baseball, where a run is a run and play starts anew each inning. Economic advantages compound, and an early lead is more likely to be extended than merely clung to, let alone overcome. The ultimate goal, of course, is to annihilate one’s opponent, yet tradition and courtesy frown on drawing out the inevitable, and a loser who fights to the last is not being courageous but wasting everyone’s time. When the situation grows dire, the weaker player is expected to type “gg,” meaning “Good game”—a white flag.

Back to the broadcast: “This is looking increasingly excellent for Bomber right now.” We were a little more than a dozen minutes deep, and the momentum had reversed completely, such that the commentators would soon be discussing Scarlett’s “terrible situation.” So much for that vaunted gas pool. During our recent conversation, Plott explained to me that Scarlett is notorious for “carefully sneaking around these huge, possibly game-ending mistakes, and she’s so close, and you want to yell at her, like, ‘Stop it! Either attack or don’t!’ But she’s utterly patient.” Watching the game unfold, I couldn’t discern what those mistakes might be, but I detected a ratcheting up of anticipation in the crowd’s reactions, and in the commentators’ tone, and gathered that she had skirted danger successfully. Past the half-hour mark now, and a poll of the audience indicated a fifty-fifty split: anyone’s game.

Scarlett began dropping domed pods near land bridges and other choke points, while fending off Bomber’s steady marine assaults. This was a patient strategy with, as it turned out, an explosive payoff. The pods were “burrowed banelings”—suicidal fluorescent creatures, lying in wait, like land mines. Bomber couldn’t see them, and his marines marched right into her trap, lured by the fleeing bugs.

Gg.

At last, the camera pulled back and showed human beings, on a stage. Scarlett, whose real name is Sasha Hostyn, leaped out of her seat—for the first time in her career—and took a bow before a standing ovation from the two thousand paying customers (and, perhaps, from the fifty thousand viewers watching online). Bomber, or Choi Ji Sung, hustled off without a handshake. Soon, the victor—lean, blinking, with a frizzy blond ponytail—was draping the flag of her native Canada around her green hoodie, while the besuited postgame analysts continued to look agog at their desks, as though the moon had just rained candy. Two reasons for everyone’s astonishment: Scarlett was neither from South Korea, where StarCraft has rivalled baseball in popularity, nor a young man, like all the other top players. Korean Kryptonite, she has been called. The most accomplished woman in the young history of electronic sports.

“It’s not a sport,” John Skipper, the president of ESPN and, by extension, the emperor of contemporary sports, has declared, referring to gaming in general. “It’s a competition.” He added, “Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports.” That “mostly” was an acknowledgment that the network has nonetheless begun hedging its bet against a cyber-athlete insurgency. In July, ESPN2 aired a half-hour program previewing an annual tournament for a game called Defense of the Ancients 2, or Dota 2, thereby enraging football and basketball fans who would have preferred round-the-clock speculation about off-season roster moves, and who vented on Twitter: “None of these people are anywhere near athletic,” “Wtf man. This is our society now,” “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING ON ESPN2?,” and so on. Meanwhile, the winners of the Dota 2 tournament took home a total of five million dollars.

A month earlier, in June, I had my own first exposure to gaming-as-sport, at an ESPN event: the X Games, in Austin. It was an inadvertent discovery. I had gone to see the skateboarders and BMXers, so-called action-sports stars, and found that many of them were incredulous at being asked to keep company with joystick jockeys. For the first time, X Games medals were being awarded for Xbox proficiency. There was a pleasing irony in the circularity of the kvetching. Here were traditional outsiders, some of them outspoken victims of childhood bullying, who, twenty years ago, were dismissed by the jock establishment for bringing their alternative fashion sense and disaffected miens to an Olympic-style competition. And now, secure with their corporate sponsors and honorary square jaws, they, in turn, were sneering at a new breed of outsider arrivistes: nerds!