I have long been of the opinion that We Play Sports For a Reason. I’ve rambled about this in the past. Our fascination with contrived competitions isn’t caused by a desire to watch beer commercials and eat outrageously priced hot dogs. It’s part of our heritage as mammals.

Things being what they are on this planet (and maybe others, I dunno – I don’t get out much) creatures that don’t compete don’t get to survive. That’s kind of mean, but that’s nature for you. Some of us are more aggressive than others, but on the whole we’ve got a lot of homo sapiens running around who want to climb the mountain, lead the pack, be the biggest, run the fastest, kick the most ass, and generally assert their place at the top of the pecking order of the top species. It’s the old, old biological imperative: Go out and conquer something. And then maybe eat it.

Over the years this type of conquest-ing activity has made a few successful people incredibly happy and made just about everyone else miserable. Or dead.

But lately we’ve had pretty good luck finding ways to channel this desire for dominance into things that don’t result in war and murder. It’s not like we’ve transcended violence or anything, but we’re getting better. And the best salve for our inner barbaric spectator is something that feels like conquest without being, you know, too conquest-y. We let someone else do the fighting and we enjoy the winning and losing vicariously.

I’m talking about sports. Which includes things like Starcraft.

Shamus, videogames are not sports! Sports are physical activities. Videogames are just games.

When it comes to playing them, I’ll agree with you. On a purely physical basis, playing Starcraft is closer to filing your taxes than to rugby. But I’m not talking about the players. I’m talking about the audience. For the audience, watching football is physically indistinguishable from watching Starcraft: You sit in a chair and watch somebody else fight. And this is who we’re interested in right now, the people living vicariously through the competitors by choosing sides, building narratives, and lifting players up as heroes. The people in the stands always outnumber the people in the arena, and the arena exists for their benefit. The guys in the ring can fight in any dirty alley they like, but they fight in the arena because this is where we can get the best view of the metaphorical bloodshed.

With this in mind, I can’t escape the notion that Starcraft is – for the purpose of entertainment – the best sport-as-surrogate-conquest ever invented.

It depends on what you’re looking for in a sport, of course. Soccer and basketball have continuous physical activity, but their lack of physical contact makes them a bit tame for people looking for substitute warfare. Football has the more direct conflict, but the pace can be maddening for people who don’t grasp the overall rules. Boxing has all the physical contact you could want, but sometimes it’s just a little too close to the real thing when you realize you’re watching two actual human beings punch each other’s faces and brain matter into porridge.

Hockey was pretty violent for a long time. (The sport has cleaned things up a lot over the last couple of decades, and is now a lot less about Goons on Ice.) But the violence was always this awkward sideshow. People who were there for hockey were constantly having their show interrupted for some bare-knuckles boxing, and people there for the boxing had to sit through a lot of hockey. The fights were dangerous and sometimes gruesome and distracted from what was, on paper, a game about speed and precision.

Don’t ask me to explain baseball. I don’t get baseball.

(Oh, and I know “football” is actually “American Football” and Soccer is actually “football”, but that’s the awkward and verbose way of referring to things. Yes, it’s silly that the American version doesn’t actually involve using your foot on the ball as the primary means of transport. Language is annoying and people sometime choose dumb names for things. It’s all part of what we like to call “The English Language Experience”. It’s not enough to have incomprehensible pronunciations and absurd spellings, we also need to have crazy, mixed-up words. So let’s just endure this football / soccer thing without causing a riot.)

ANYWAY.

The taming of hockey kind of reveals the problem with sports-as-warfare: We want our games to be spectacular, exciting, and visceral, but we don’t actually want human beings getting hurt. Because that would be bad. (This is the part where you quickly agree and change the subject.)

In this play the team was penalized for violating gravity. The NFL maintains its strong stance against both steroids and levitation.

Find a sports-illiterate person and sit them down in front of a football game. They will have no idea what’s going on. They can’t follow the action on-screen, because the game is really complicated and the reasons behind actions are non-obvious. They can’t glean much from the announcers, since the game is really jargon-heavy. To the uninitiated, the average football comment sounds like this:

The protecting row is behind Chicago’s very long marker line . Pittsburgh is inside a weapon looking to lift wide area here on the low three .

If you don’t know the lingo, it’s gibberish. The newbie can’t intuit the jargon by watching the action, and they can’t follow the action by listening to the announcers. They’ll get it eventually, but they’re going to spend a long time being baffled before they figure out when they’re supposed to be cheering.

At the other extreme, soccer is obvious but also visually monotonous. I realize the game has all kinds of finer points, but to a newcomer it looks really one-dimensional and one game looks like any other. If the running game isn’t working, they can’t switch to passing, attempt an onside kick, or a sweep, a counter, a bootleg, the quarterback sneak, the Mashed Potato, the Funky Chicken, or the Watusi. They just run back and forth. Unless a goal is being scored, it takes a newcomer a while to figure out why this particular moment of the game is different from any other.

These sports aren’t bad or anything. It’s just that it’s tough to find the right balance of depth vs. accessibility and human safety vs. brutal spectacle.

MLG Dallas 2013 Starcraft II tournament.

But Starcraft? Everyone can wrap their heads around the visual depiction of stuff blowing up. You don’t need an announcer to explain that your goal is to avoid death. The units themselves are mysterious to newbies, but they’re flashy and interesting and they explode when they die. Centuries of warfare have given us all a pretty firm grasp on the need to protect supply lines, maintain production facilities, acquire resources, and kill off the opposing army. You can absorb the lingo as you go, because you can follow the action. And despite this easy-to-grasp foundation, we have a game with so much depth and variety that among thousands of professional-grade players we’re still finding new strategies and new tricks.

Starcraft gives us all of this. The spectacle of war. The harmlessness of chess. Easy to understand. Endlessly deep. Visually diverse. A true test of strategy and skill, with just enough randomness and unpredictability to allow for upsets and surprises. Inclusive, crossing international boundaries. (Although I’d love to see more women join in.) It’s colorful. It’s fast-paced without being incomprehensible, and the rules can be intuited. You might need someone to explain to you what “holding” or “pass interference” is, bur nobody has to explain that hellions are good against zerglings, because the burning zergling corpses will give you a really handy visual image to work with.

This is a good game to watch.

If there’s one complaint I have about the sport, it’s that their system of exhibiting series online is awful. Every channel and website has this thing where they name episodes after the players, and they list them most-recent-first. Which means episode titles are almost always terrible, terrible spoilers. Some of this is just a matter of convenience for the people recording the games. The matches are often streamed live, and the broadcast is just chopped up and uploaded. This makes things easy for the hosts, but it’s basically a giant time-sink and a spoiler bomb for anyone not watching live.

If I send you to a YouTube channel or the MLG homepage to watch a recent tournament then the first thing you’ll see is who won. The final match will be right in front of you, letting you know which two players made it. What you won’t see is a link to the beginning of the tournament. Instead, you’ll need to wade through the archives looking for the start, reading episode titles and spoiling the entire tournament in the process. You’ll see titles like, “Patient ZvT – Moonglade vs TheSTC G1 – RoE 81 Part 2”. If you know the game, then that’s a spoiler. If you don’t, it’s gibberish. Either way, it doesn’t tell the viewer what they really need to know, which is where this game fits in the overall chronology. For big tournaments, they should title the shows stuff like, “MLG 2013 Marine Drop Invitational: Part 13 of 50”.

If you want to take in a few games for yourself, let me offer these suggestions:

Husky Starcraft is my go-to place for fun matches. Husky casts BRONZE LEAGUE HEROES, which is both fun to watch and amazingly educational as an ongoing guide of How Not to Play Starcraft. He also does some casting of pro-league games on his channel.

Major League Gaming is a good place to go if you’re looking for professionally produced exhibition of top-league performed in front of a live audience. It should feel more or less like your average ESPN production with color commentators, intro graphics, shots of the players with brief career biographies, and a slathering of sponsorship advertisements.

Day[9] is probably a little hardcore technical for newcomers, since he spends a lot of time talking about the finer points of the game. On the other hand, he’s friendly and fun and you might enjoy his stuff in the same way that non-coders enjoy my stuff on programming.

HD Starcraft is a pretty good source for interesting games. He’s also pretty good about explaining aspects of the game during slow moments, and telling you who players are.

This list isn’t really comprehensive at all. In fact, this is list is mostly driven by my own viewing habits, which are pretty influenced by the YouTube suggestion links. Feel free to drop a link in the comments if I’m missing someone noteworthy or fun.

But seriously. This game is fun to watch, even if you’ve never set eyes on the game.