I barely slept during the weekend of the Major League Gaming Spring Championship. I stayed up until three in the morning every night, watching pro StarCraft 2 players and League of Legends teams exploring the limits of endurance and resilience as they fought their way through the championship brackets. Then I'd pass out for a few hours, waking up in time to see the action resume in the early afternoon. But I couldn't stop watching, because the Spring Championship was a chance to watch talented players pushing strategy games to limits most of us will never be able to explore.
It also made me realize that competitive gaming, far from being the enemy of more casual players like myself, actually makes for better games, better online experiences, and better overall gaming. We just need more companies than Blizzard and Riot to realize it.
From Hate to Love
I didn't like StarCraft 2 when it came out because it was such a conservative, eSports-friendly update to Brood War. StarCraft 2 was designed with pro-level skills in mind, and you know it from the first time you try to zoom out to look at the map and realize your view is zoom-locked somewhere back in 1998. You can't get very far without understanding StarCraft 2 strategy, but you can't even execute a strategy without first being able to offload the mental demands of micromanagement to a series of trained responses. Learning to play StarCraft 2 in a competent fashion is uncomfortably close to learning to play a musical instrument, and that's not what I wanted from a leisure activity.
The truth is, my feelings haven't completely changed toward StarCraft 2. I have nothing against games with high skill-ceilings (PC gaming would be a dreary place without them), but I also don't like how exclusionary RTS games can be sometimes. They intimidate people who just like playing RTS games, not studying them.
Pro matches give players something to rally around. They give us a better understanding of game we all play, and they can even inspire us to go back and try to improve our own skills.
But here is the flip-side that I didn't understand back then: the community that forms around a competitive strategy game is also stronger and more novice-friendly than most others. Forget about the ladder-match assassins -- StarCraft 2's competitive landscape keeps people of all skill levels engaged, inspires them to return to it, and gives players an incredible amount of resources to understand and improve. Most RTS games are frustrating if you are learning in isolation with a few guides and a lot of online defeats, but what's different about StarCraft 2 is that there are so many fun learning resources available. You can easily watch pros play and review what they are doing differently, and then you can go study a vast and growing collection of instruction and theory.Sean "Day[9]" Plott's instructional videos are a companionable, unthreatening way to learn a variety of StarCraft strategies appropriate to players at all different skill levels. Team Liquid's incredible wiki, Liquipedia, will come to your rescue if you type an SOS into Google. Phrases like "Three barracks opening" or "blue-flame Hellion timing" lead immediately to good explanations of these tactics and the thinking behind them. As a result, StarCraft 2 comes very close to mimicking the experience of being taught a game by a knowledgeable friend.
Pro matches give players something to rally around. They give us a better understanding of game we all play, and they can even inspire us to go back and try to improve our own skills. The fact that so many people have gotten into StarCraft 2 through its pro scene also saves it from that most depressing of all RTS fates: the broken matchmaking system. I used to think it was just that StarCraft sold a ton of copies that accounted for the strength of the community, but now I realize that's putting the cart before the horse.
Welcome to Summoner's Rift
League of Legends shows us that StarCraft 2 doesn't need to be the only model for competitive gaming. League of Legends competitions equal or surpass StarCraft 2's numbers on a regular basis, because despite being a less spectator-friendly game, it is wildly popular, accessible, and free. League of Legends may require as much skill and practice as StarCraft 2 to play at the highest level, but it is easy to achieve competence and to start having fun. Being a team-based game, it also gives new players more opportunities to ease into the game with friends and teammates. You can't really get someone to help you with StarCraft 2, even in a 2v2 match, because ultimately you have to know how to play your faction. LoL, on the other hand, has plenty of full matches against bots where players help each other out and feel free to experiment with new heroes and tactics. Accessibility and high-level competition are not mutually exclusive, and LoL proves it.
Accessibility and high-level competition are not mutually exclusive, and LoL proves it.
Both games enjoy a healthy feedback loop between their competitive scenes and casual play. Players engage with the games, become curious about the tournaments, and start watching, and the tournaments demonstrate and explicate crucial concepts and strategies. Then the spectators take that knowledge and interest back into their own play, where it enriches their experiences. I may not be able to rock a Medivac-Marine combo like
MarineKing (Lee Jung Hoon), but the first time I pulled off my own clumsy version of his deadly stutter-step spread-and-retreats, I realized that an entire new set of anti-Zerg tactics was opening up to me. Having seen what the Terrans were capable of at a high level, I was inclined to stretch outside my usual unimaginative tactics. StarCraft 2 suddenly felt newer.A Little Healthy Competition
I don't think every RTS should try to replicate StarCraft 2's success as an eSport, and I already think there are too many MOBAs chasing after League of Legends and its status within pro gaming. But I do think RTS developers should be trying to encourage more tournaments and events that showcase their games, even if on a much smaller scale. They should certainly realize, as Valve has with Dota 2, that full-featured replay and spectator features are no longer luxuries, but basic requirements.
It's not that competitive games need the massive stage of an MLG or a Dreamhack event, or the Liberace-excess of a Korean tournament. What they need is competitions that bring their community together for excitement and inspiration. They need in-game tools and community sites that make it easy to revisit great games and to study crucial decisions. These things encourage players to explore and learn each game, to move beyond superficial understanding and into the hard choices and trade-offs that are actually at work within the design.
Because the irony is that while gaming tournaments are incredibly daunting, they make their subjects seem less so. They demystify games like StarCraft 2 and League of Legends even as they showcase the incredible skill required to play them at a high level. Players don't hate losing; they hate not knowing why they lost. Competitive gaming and the tools that facilitate it do what no tutorial, campaign, skirmish, or guide can do: it shows us good players making quick decisions under fire, and lets us see why they made those decisions. It lets us see strategy, where before we saw chaos.