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One man's attempt to deal with change.
The news is out: Brood War is on the way out as a major competitive endeavor in Korea, its last stronghold. Here you go, and here. The rumors have been flying for ages: Blizzard! KeSPA! OGN! LoL! etc. If everything goes as apparently planned, it looks like the major Brood War leagues will be gone inside a year, with whatever teams remain either switching to SC2 or disbanding entirely.
In the short term, I am not happy about this: I (not entirely an exaggeration) grew up with Brood War and I have not found the same interest in SC2 even if I did just watch the MLG final. And then there are the more personal questions: what will ZerO and Soulkey do? sHy? Will TurN, Flash, Jaedong keep playing?
(I am not particularly concerned with "game quality" or "balance" issues: SC2 still has two planned expansions and trying to predict their effects, let alone future patches, seems irresponsible if not downright silly.)
It is the long view that really disturbs me, though. In the morass of video game competitions, Brood War was the one constant. Even if SC2 develops into a (work with me here) superior game, abandoning Brood War emphatically sets a bad precedent. Not a precedent that wasn't set before, but there would be a finality to this one. Brood War survived its contemporary challenger, Age of Empires II. It survived Blizzard's next competitive RTS, Warcraft III. It survived its own major scandal, at least for a time. It remained the flagship game on MBCGame until that channel went down, and on OGN - well, if it is dying it is dying to a foundering interest and to League of Legends, not a direct competitor.
You want to talk about "Esports"?
No, what we have is "E-Reality TV". "E-Game-show". "E-Next-Big-Thing".
Think about it. We may have many of the same people competing, but what happened to MLG's Halo tournament? Follow the newest game. What is happening in Starcraft? Many of the old players switched over, or will switch over, but the game is changed. If Brood War is let go in Korea, the gaming scene will, completely, be able to claim less continuity in its competition than American Idol, let alone an old standby like Jeopardy.
Thus far, negativity. Let me attempt to counter my point.
First Argument: many sports change their rules over time. Penalties, scoring options, more or less restrictive rules. For instance: American football in 1943 looked like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3kyEFCKfP4
To summarize (or for those unfamiliar with the game): there was more running and less passing back then. "Throwing motion" as we talk about it now was clearly not a big issue. Tackling rules have changed: from 35s to 40s there's a run which continues after the modern game would rule the runner down by contact.
But, American football is one of the most changed sports in the world, to my knowledge - and yet it is still the same game and has been pretty much since the legalization of the forward pass. It is not inconceivable even now that new defensive schemes or changes in rulings could make the game more run-heavy - the college game still is.
So what we get in making an argument by analogy is that these rule changes are only equivalent to new maps, not new games entirely. We are talking, in a transition from BW to SC2, at least the difference between American and Canadian football: the basic ways to win the game are the same, and the generic look and feel is similar, but the game mechanics are significantly different.
I do not think this argument will be sufficient.
Second Argument: Brood War never attained a solid popularity outside of Korea: meanwhile, Starcraft II has secured a significant place in - and been a major factor in the growth of - professional gaming in Europe and the Americas. This has more validity: if you poke around and find TLPD International for Brood War, it only lists 4651 games, total. The Korean index approaches ten times that: even if 10% of the Korean index was cross-listed in international (to account for IEF, WCG, etc.), 90% of databased games were Korean. SC2? The Korean games are approaching 8,000, and the international ones are nearly at 50,000 - this is looking at almost two years now, compared to Brood War's 13. So maybe the precedent is bad, but Starcraft II, if given the proper patching and attention, can stabilize the scene.
I find this hard to argue with, if mainly because it is a hypothetical. It is in fact this argument that gives me the most hope for Starcraft as a continuing game. But on the other hand, if we have two years of Wings of Liberty, followed by a year of Heart of the Swarm, and then four or five years of whatever the Protoss expansion is called... after all of that, what would MLG or GSL or Dreamhack (to name I think the most prestigious tournaments in each major gaming locale, assuming they survive) be inclined to do if Starcraft III came out? (Let alone what Blizzard would push for.) What if in ten years another company makes a fine RTS with whatever the newest in electronic graphics gadgetry is? What then?
The problem with stability in computer gaming is fairly obvious: computers are changing too fast for the games. We have at this point computers that won't run older games. A field of grass is still a field of grass, just like it was five hundred years ago; a "computer" five hundred years ago was a frame with sliding beads on it. Does this mean we are doomed to a continually fluctuating scene? I don't know.
One more consideration is that many of the current popular sports are hardly "old" themselves. The various footballs in any modern form? Hard to claim more than 200 years, if that. Basketball? Barely a century. What will be the most popular sport in 2200? I have no idea. So in one sense I am panicking about nothing - change happens, and it is just the rate of change I find uncomfortable. But in another sense... man, this change is way too fast and not a good thing.
Get off my lawn!
 
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your first line should read "One old man's attempt to deal with change."
but 5/5
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E-sports doesnt exist. is just e-games, esports is the word by which gamers try to get accepted by the mainstream media.
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Maybe, maybe not. electronic gaming as a spectator event is not yet two decades old, three and a bit if you count arcade stuff. We don't have a clue what happens in the future. Could a person watching a line of people get high scores on pacman in an arcade 30 years ago even imagine the MLG we just finished watching? Would he think it's awesome?
So no need to worry, just cause we can't comprehend the state of things 10 years down the road is no reason to panic about it.
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On March 26 2012 10:43 caradoc wrote:
Maybe, maybe not. electronic gaming as a spectator event is not yet two decades old, three and a bit if you count arcade stuff. We don't have a clue what happens in the future. Could a person watching a line of people get high scores on pacman in an arcade 30 years ago even imagine the MLG we just finished watching? Would he think it's awesome?
So no need to worry, just cause we can't comprehend the state of things 10 years down the road is no reason to panic about it.
I think it's less aboput being afraid of change of the future but rather that too much change and band wagoning legitimizes the "esports" industry.
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I think if BW goes, "ESPORTS" is gonna basically be advertising for games. For some people that's fine but to me that's not worth watching. I think many of the concerns of games just replacing each other due to graphical enhancements, sequels, etc have been voiced within the first few months of SC2's release tho, so I'm not exact sure what you're doing different with this argument.
I'm not ready to hang Brood War up to dry tho 
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VGhost! Fellow SC2GGer.. nice blog, but I don't think SC2 will crumble even if BW hangs up its belt. I think it'll strengthen the scene.
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On March 26 2012 10:48 ShadeR wrote:Show nested quote +On March 26 2012 10:43 caradoc wrote:
Maybe, maybe not. electronic gaming as a spectator event is not yet two decades old, three and a bit if you count arcade stuff. We don't have a clue what happens in the future. Could a person watching a line of people get high scores on pacman in an arcade 30 years ago even imagine the MLG we just finished watching? Would he think it's awesome?
So no need to worry, just cause we can't comprehend the state of things 10 years down the road is no reason to panic about it. I think it's less aboput being afraid of change of the future but rather that too much change and band wagoning legitimizes the "esports" industry.
de-legitimizes I think you mean, but yeah, I see that side of it, I think it's kind of true. Is it a factor of attempts to commercialize it? If so, we need to look beyond the veneer of ESPORTS into the substance and people and community beneath it- they aren't the same thing.
We aren't dependent on that slick finish and industry to enjoy what we're passionate about. Sure it helps. But we can't get dependent on it, or start to feel like we are dependent on it... On the other hand I don't like that BW is fading, and I don't know how to reconcile what I just said with that-- the truth is, the bandwagon does bring people, and certain things like tournaments do need those people...
I can only hope that having both SC2 and BW together will have some spillover effect and people who know SC2 will learn about BW, but that might be wishful thinking...
but I think the blog post was about more than just SC2 or BW, in which case I think what I said has some weight.
EDIT: just re-read my post, its vague to the point of being almost incoherent. that's what an erratic sleep schedule will do... goodnight.
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Hi man pretty interesting write up. 5/5
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United States10149 Posts
With the fall of BW, i don't think id stay to follow SC2. I'd probs find some big LoL community and follow that, and go here to blog about my memories of BW. The end if unbearable, but it's also inevitable. The day that it dies, I might collapse, shocked, with no1 around to understand what I feel.
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It remained the flagship game on MBCGame until that channel went down, and on OGN - well, if it is dying it is dying to a foundering interest and to League of Legends, not a direct competitor.
You've answered your own question. Why are games replaced so often?
The answer is that they aren't. If BW wasn't weakening already it wouldn't have been replaced by SC2. If Quake wasn't weakening already it wouldn't have been... etc etc
So why are you complaining? Do you think that there aren't dead sports that no one plays competitively any more? Because there clearly are. Just that the biggest ones are too big to die, at this point. Doesn't mean anything about esports.
It just bothers me that you claim that this is an instance of "the next big thing" when you refute yourself in that quote.
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I say that this is quiet awkward moment for BW players.
Quiet sad to see..
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United States613 Posts
Yea its definitely a weird spot to be in...I don't really know what to think. I think SC2 is a good game, but it just hasn't managed to keep my interest like BW continues to do to this day.
I am also a bit...bothered by the mainsreaminess of some of the big tournaments. Maybe thats a price of success, but I guess i like the niche community feel BW has.
Hard times...
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I don't think there will be a switch over as in "ok bye bye BW we switch over". As long as there are fans there are going to be sponsors and leagues and money for teams. You are thinking about BW dieing too early - look there is no info at all about BW dieing in the links u gave in the beginning of your OP.
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BW, dieing since 2002 (random year :D)
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Blizzard is exceptional about using expansion packs to combat the problem of "shiny new game syndrome".
As long as there are viewers, there is a product to sell to advertisers and there is money to pay winning players. So BW scene combining with SC2 scene can only be good for everyone, except hardcore brood war purists.
But face it, lots of the popularity of BW comes from the star power of the players, and that is transferable to a new game. A lot of the popularity is also the mechanical skill - and for all the shit people talk about SC2's skill ceiling it hasn't been reached, even today with MarineKingPrime showing us a mastery over the terran race, a synergy between micro and macro, we've not seen often if ever. So the mechanical skill (should) transfer over to SC2 as well.
A lot of sky is falling posts about Brood War, but really coming to SC2 is just the natural conclusion and I'm surprised it took this long. The FPS players deal with that sort of transfer all the time, and their esport is doing just fine.
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It obviously sucks that BW is dying. I don't really understand your E-Game show argument. What's the argument? That the game changed? How's that make it like a gameshow? O_o
Obviously it's different but people are watching LoL a lot so why isn't there the possibility that SC2 could do well? Same (mostly) target audience. Cross advertising the games on OGN can't really be bad for either.
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I know it is completely different in many respects, but the fighting game "scene", with a few exceptions (e.g. Third Strike), has not secluded itself to a single game for very long at all at any point. They've gone through so many games and remakes and HD remixes and yet the best players consistently place well. Players like Daigo and Jwong - while not as dominating recently - have owned the scene through numerous games over years. These players transcend games because the qualities of a good player are not completely erased when they pick up a new game. The dedication and hard work lives on, and therefore the brand of the player can live through a game change.
I don't know what a falling of such a large pillar for this scene will do, but I do believe, like the fighting game community, it will continue to thrive. Yes, some of the community will leave the scene with the game, specifically those who are exclusionists and do not view the scene beyond a certain game. But new people will join the community with new games. The good players will continue to be good, and our love for the generic "game" - perhaps I should say our love for the scene itself - will allow it to perpetuate through games even if they are inferior to their predecessors. If there's anything the fighting game community as shown, it's that passion can trump anything that seems threatening to this community we love.
edit: hurr durr speeling
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Definitely a tough time for BW fans. It's pretty depressing to watch, for me anyway. It's like SC2 is the son of a 70's Rock and Roll guitar god, and everyone just shoves a Les Paul in his hands and says "go to town kid, you'll do great, you have your father's genes!' But then this kid just ends up using auto tune and slamming on power chords. Sure, his shit sells well, but so much of the talent and the soul was lost in the process.
Theres so many things I could say about BW. Or SC2. Or e-sports. I could rant on about Activision Blizzard, or LoL, or corporate greed. But every time I touch my fingers to the keyboard they just feel tired. And I just keep watching BW. When it dies, I won't be coming back to TL. And I hate to say it like that, but SC2 just doesn't interest me. I tried to like it, but I can't. It's like spending your life watching Major League Baseball then being told that it's disbanded and all you have left is tee-ball.
Ahh it makes me depressed just thinking about it. RTS games in general are kind of doomed as a sport anyway, I think, unless KeSPA's rumored SC2/BW merger somehow goes "best case scenario" and opens everyones eyes to the magic of BW. Barring that, in a few years SC3 will come out, and the process will start all over again. Kind of a pessimistic attitude to have I guess, but eh... I still hope for the best.
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What frustrates me the most about the "BW needs to die" crowd is that they don't seem to have any loyalty to SC2. It's what they play and when WC4 comes out, they'll be cheering "SC2 needs to die!" 'cause they play that now instead.
Maybe I just don't get it, but the idea of a game's competitive lifetime lasting just a year (or anything less then near perpetuity) is weird to me. I can never take CoD seriously as an esport, for example.
If they want to watch/play SC2 come ten years from now, then I'll try to respect that they genuinely feel it's a better game to carry us forward. If they just want Flash to play SC2 until they get bored and play WC4/SC3/DotA 2/LoL at a later date, then fuck 'em.
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EPT
