E-sports is a childhood pipe dream made real: earn millions doing nothing but playing your favourite video game. Less than a decade ago, it was still anomalous, a niche pursuit that would only sometimes be acknowledged by mainstream media. But now, e-sports is everywhere, its prize pools growing exponentially with every tournament. Even television channels like BBC Three are moving to capitalise on the explosive growth of the field. Hidden behind every headline, however, are a hundred stories of those who did not make the cut.

At times hilarious, at times meditative, SC2VN is a free visual novel—a form of interactive fiction popular in Japan—that explores the rigours of pursuing a pro-gaming career. You play as a young foreigner, nicknamed “Mach,” who travels to South Korea during the dawn of the StarCraft II scene to make a name for themselves. While a fantastical-sounding premise, SC2VN very quickly establishes the underlying difficulties. The game opens without optimism. Mach has just been defeated in an important tournament and we’re quickly told that if they do not qualify for an upcoming competition, they’ll have to return to their home country.

Despondent from the loss, they travel into a PC Bang—a LAN gaming centre—and are subsequently introduced to some of the key members of the cast. From there, the game establishes your objective: to create a professional team from a handful of down-on-their-luck misfits. It’s an interesting subversion of the genre’s usual conceit, which frequently has players manoeuvring a bevy of romantic entanglements. That said, SC2VN does not linger long on the pursuit, an unsurprising design choice given that the developers’ creative vision. At its heart, the game is a monument to those struggling to make it big in the viciously competitive industry, which rarely sees people competing past their early 20s.

“I lived with a North American pro, binski, for all of 2013. Before meeting binski, I still had starry-eyed assumptions about how great being a pro-gamer must be and aspired to sit in the booth someday,” SC2VN writer TJ Huckabee told Ars via e-mail. His housemate’s frustrations showed a different side to the dream. “Seeing his frustrations firsthand taught me just how hard it was to play StarCraft at a high level not only as a professional gamer, but also as a guy who still has to answer to his school and parents.”













While ultimately a triumphant celebration of e-sports’ best aspects, SC2VN does brush against some serious topics, including the sometimes exploitative nature of the scene. Still largely unregulated in many countries, it’s only recently that organisations have made a move to police the field, which is replete with horror stories like the catastrophic downfall of ESGN and match-fixing scandals in Korea.

SC2VN also addresses the treatment of female professional gamers. Historically speaking, women have suffered intense discrimination in e-sports. According to co-creator Timothy Young, they had intended to set the game in a world where this was not the case, an alternate Earth that addressed both genders equally. “However, in doing so we were erasing a real issue in e-sports that we wanted to address, so we chose to reference that SC2VN takes place in a world where the inequality still exists,” he explained, before adding that the team wanted to address the challenges faced by female gamers without “destroying the fantasy of living the e-sports dream.”

“Reva is a result of us playing around with the idea of online identity, whereas Jett is jaded and aggressive from years in an environment that wasn't always fair to her,” added Huckabee, describing the game's two primary female characters.

The result is a sensitive, and almost hopeful, exploration of the matter. Neither Reva nor Jett suffer overtly for being women. Outside of the rare exception, they're addressed exactly the same as anyone else in their field— as formidable opponents and professional gamers. In this, SC2VN presents an evocative near-future vision that will likely resonate with many—a statement that holds true with the the rest of the game as well.

There’s an attention to detail that borders on worship. The match sequences, which prove to be surprisingly effective representations of the real thing, are beautifully described. Even without a basic understanding of StarCraft II, it’s easy to get caught up in the intensity, to share in the passion that subsumed an entire nation. More than anything else, SC2VN is about love. And while it, like so many visual novels, is linear and limited in scope, the game does a transcendent job of matching big-budget documentaries in communicating the love of e-sports.

You can download SC2VN directly from Steam, for free.