University Starcraft Lecture

In addition to being a PhD candidate at my university, I'm also a tutor (teaching assistant). This generally means that I teach tutorial sections (also called conference sections in some universities) in which we discuss lecture/reading material in more detail and come up with activities for the students to apply and synthesize knowledge. Staff cuts and departures in our Games program have resulted in me taking a more hands-on role with the introductory first-year course; I'm teaching far more than I'd ideally have wanted to and my thesis is suffering for it, but there are bright spots. Before the semester started, I was called in to do two of the lectures for it and help redesign the curriculum for this class. This meant that I could spend time talking about stuff that was interesting to me, as long as I could make it relate to the students and course objectives.

That's where Starcraft comes in. Last year, I gave a guest lecture in a third-year course about the unintentional effects of design decisions, which included some reference to Starcraft. (The slides from that lecture are lost, tragically.) I'd been watching a lot of Starcraft (Brood War and 2), playing SC2 when my schedule would allow it (not much), and thinking about the e-sports, pardon me, E-SPORTS, scene regularly. I would write a lecture about Starcraft.

Let me add here that it was really exhilarating, as a junior academic, to be able to take things over and talk about stuff that is interesting to me. There's also a danger in this that any savvy academic needs to be able to navigate. I've been in lectures where a lecturer spoke very passionately about some esoteric project of unbelievable interest to him that he could not for the life of him tie back to his students. I've been in courses where the lecturers have put their own books on the reading lists and continually made reference to it to validate their own work and its importance to themselves, but never be able to look beyond themselves to the students and the world at large. (When I graduated with my BA, the convocation address went like this while the Faculty of Science had Daniel Dennett say far more interesting stuff to their graduates.)

Education, to me, and some educational theorists, isn't just about giving the teacher's knowledge or institutional knowledge to the students. Instead, education is about working with students to produce specialized bits of knowledge, but more importantly, processes by which the group (educator and students) can arrive at knowledge that is of mutual use to everyone on their own, in their own time. In this process, educators might still be authorities, but their role isn't to be an authority so much as a facilitator. This makes the notion of lecturing a bit tricky in general. It's very easy for a lecturer to fall into the trap of his own arrogance.

This is why that lecture I wrote was about Starcraft and the study of history, as opposed to just the phenomenon of Korean Pro Starcraft.

In my last blog, I said that the material (economic) conditions in South Korea were absolutely essential to Starcraft's success and development into a cultural phenomenon there and I'd like to go over that a bit as well. In fact, I'd argue, the story begins long before Starcraft's release.

From at least the end of the Korean War until 1997, the South Korean economy was largely a planned economy rather than a market economy. The economic plans focused largely around a set of approximately 30 large conglomerate companies, formed in order for Korean manufacturing to compete on the world stage. These conglomerates are known as chaebols. In addition to the chaebols having a profound influence on the Korean government, and vice versa, different chaebols had varying degrees of influence over Korea's commercial banks. Some were shareholders, others owned commercial banks as subsidiaries.

Jahyeong Koo and Sheryl Kiser argue that collusion between the government, chaebols, and commercial banks created major economic problems in Korea. Transactions from the commercial banks to the chaebols lacked regulatory oversight, and this led to inefficient use of capital. The government directed the economy by allocating investment capital to the chaebols through the commercial banks, but the chaebols underperformed. The chaebols guaranteed the loans they took out from the commercial banks with promissory notes that they didn't have the capital to back up. Meanwhile, profitable smaller and mid-sized companies generally didn't receive even close to a proportionate amount of investment capital. (Koo and Kiser, 2001, citing Borenzstein and Lee, 1999) As a result, while Korea's macroeconomic fundamentals were strong, this put a significant drag on their economy.

This was a problem, but it wasn't quite severe until 1997, which was the year of the Asian financial crisis. The crisis in particular began in December with a rash of speculation on the Thai currency, the baht. As the baht's value skyrocketed and Thai export markets and domestic goods pricing suffered, the Thai government announced that it would not intervene in response to this speculation. The Thai populace broadly lost confidence in their currency's value, and the speculative bubble burst. The baht lost over half its value in the space of 2-3 months. Accusations abounded that the reason the Thai government didn't intervene was that their officials liquidated their baht holdings at the height of the bubble, profiting heavily. That seems plausible but there isn't any indication that I'm aware of that this was definitely true besides the fact that they were rich. This wasn't a part of the story that I've looked into very heavily, though.

When the Thai currency collapsed, the structural problems in Korea's economy became more widely apparent, but there were signs of trouble earlier that year.

"As a result of the chaebols' aggressive expansion and lax financial supervision, the debt/equity ratio of the thirty major chaebols was 500 percent. In January 1997, Korea's second largest steelmaker, Hanbo Iron and Steel, was unable to honor its promissory notes, thus forcing it into bankruptcy. The collapse of other mid-size chaebols, such as Kia Motor, Jinro, and Haitai, followed in early 1997. The weakness of the Korean financial and corporate sector had become obvious." (Koo and Kiser, 2001) This also led to a credit crunch in Korea, as the commercial banks' loans were tied up in underperforming chaebols and the merchant banks (smaller banks with tighter regulatory structures that generally didn't deal with the chaebols couldn't roll over their own short-term loans. (Koo and Kiser, 2001)

This had a cascading effect in Korea as these liquidity problems worked their way through the whole banking system and other regional players, notably Japan, began to withdraw their loans. (Koo and Kiser, 2001) The Korean won (currency) and economy tanked as several chaebols went bankrupt.

Korea was the first country to recover from the Asian financial crisis due to a US/IMF baiout loan package combined with aggressive financial reforms. These reforms included the nationalization of many of the struggling commercial and merchant banks, the dissolution/restructuring of many chaebols, a tight domestic monetary policy, and a shift in the economic plan from low-tech domestic-centric manufacturing to high-tech exports. One aspect of this shift in plan was the implementation of a national broadband internet network. As a result, the Korean currency and economy both stabilized by the end of 1999 (whereupon the economy resumed 5% annual growth in the early 21st century), though it would take another few years for both to return to their previous levels.

When Starcraft was released in March 1998, Korea was in the thick of this crisis. With the economy contracting, there was suddenly an abundance of unemployed men with a lot of time on their hands. Also, with the beginnings of national broadband, combined with the fact that most Koreans did not own home computers at this stage, an industry of inexpensive internet cafes (pc-bangs) sprang up, with one on nearly every major city block. Costing about the equivalent of $0.80 per hour, these unemployed Korean men could use the computers to refine their resumes, write cover letters and send them to companies, but they could also stay there afterward playing networked multi-player games because it was cheap enough entertainment to be affordable.

This gave Starcraft a large, readily available player-base with cheap, easily-accessible places to play the game. This explains why there were people to play the game, but not why Starcraft was the game that this happened with in particular.

The fact that the game was designed for multi-player play, with some semblance of balance in mind, definitely helped this along. Granted, the early balance of Starcraft was far from perfect (150 mineral, fast building Spawning Pool, anyone?), but the game had a long time to develop as these economic conditions persisted.

Another design condition that affected this was the robust map-editor that was included with the game. This led to communities of players, map-makers, and custom-map enthusiasts forming that helped to maintain an interest in the game while the balance was being adjusted. Also, later in the game's life-cycle, map-makers developed new techniques that allowed for them to compensate problems in unit balance to some degree with changes in map balance.

As competitive Starcraft play began to emerge in pc-bangs, groups also formed within these environments. Each pc-bang might have its own team, or clans would form out of that structure. Competitions pitting one pc-bang against another, or larger tournaments featuring players from whole neighborhoods (which encompassed lots of pc-bangs, considering how densely they were arranged) began to spring up. Players refined their strategies and skills, practiced with each other, and formed broader groups.

As this developed, Blizzard's approach to patching the game helped maintain the competitive balance so that the game's design goals and the player's goals were in some measure of harmony with each other. The economic, social and design conditions all lined up.

Sweeping cultural phenomena, as a general rule, attract the interest of entrepreneurs. There was money to be made in Starcraft then in the same way that there is money to be made today in being a pre-pubescent child writing songs about heartbreak and uploading them to Youtube. This manifested in two ways:

• Broadcasting: KeSPA formed and licensed the broadcasting rights for Starcraft in Korea to MBCGame and OnGameNet. Whether they held the rights s a dubious legal question that didn't become an issue until the release of Starcraft II. In any event, making the game accessible by television broadcast was a hugely important material factor in the game's success and reach.
  
  
• Corporate Sponsorship of Teams and Events: Corporations saw advertising and revenue opportunities in sponsoring Starcraft as a cultural activity, either by sponsoring players and teams, or, by sponsoring events and prize pools. Broadcasting the tournaments meant that these corporations brands could get exposure.

Broad questions about the exploitation of players in this system are worth noting, though I'm not going to dig too deeply into that in this blog.

At this stage, design and social factors continued to affect the game's success. On the design front, the game's strategic emergence was crucial to the game. Emergence refers to a situation where a small set of simple rules creates exponentially more possibilities for complex game-play actions and strategies. Starcraft: Brood War is extremely emergent, strategically speaking, with new strategic developments and steady balance 10 years after its release. The addition of replay functionality in the game led to more refined strategies and counter-strategies, and this kept the game fresh. Fan communities, in addition to player communities sprang up.

Again, material, design, and cultural factors all played a role in Starcraft's success.

Today, Korea maintains a vibrant Starcraft community, but the release of Starcraft II and an analysis of the material, social and design factors around it suggests alternative models for professional real-time strategy gaming than the early 20th-century Korea-centric one.

Part of the reason for this derives from the struggle between Blizzard Entertainment, KeSPA, and the Korean government over the intellectual property and broadcasting rights to Blizzard's games. Arguably, this has hurt Starcraft II's uptake in Korea, as well as Blizzard including subscription fees for pc-bang owners to run the game. Other material factors, however, suggest movement away from this model, from the inclusion of English commentators at Korean tournaments to broaden the audience, to the emergence of large tournaments outside of Korea with prize pools to rival (and, as of recently, beginning to exceed) even the largest Korean tournament prize pools. (NASL, TSL, Dreamhack, to name a few.)

This is not guaranteed even if the outlook is encouraging right now. Western pro-gaming has been plagued by boom-and-bust cycles; a new game arrives on the scene, interest builds, money pours in. A new game arrives on the scene, the interest shifts, the money goes with it, the scene around a game dies. Whether Starcraft II is the latest game in this cyclical motion is unclear.

Social and design strategies continue to play a large part with the release, present success, and potential future success of Starcraft II. Following on the success of the first Starcraft game, Blizzard have decided to design the game deliberately with professional gaming in mind as a desired outcome. There are arguments to be had about how seriously they are taking it and the pace at which the changes occur, as well as whether sticking to that strategy is going to pay dividends in that respect considering the mostly organic growth of Starcraft: Brood War out of very specific conditions. The conditions with Starcraft II are not the same, and how the differences will affect the game's success is still to be fully seen.

On the social front, the development of a large Starcraft II community based on the absorption of smaller RTS/gaming communities seems to bode well as it demonstrates a demand for competitive Starcraft product. Whether that demand will translate into a continual stream of dollars is also uncertain.

Material, social and design history provide ways to examine complex cultural phenomena in such a way as to get a reasonably complete picture, and are powerful as combined methodologies. There is much in gaming and the world at large that we can view through these lenses, and so we should.