EPTEveryone has interests, this site is based on a collective one, Starcraft or the greater ESPORTS. Over time, interests also fade and reappear, there's a cyclic nature to interest itself usually depending on conditions.
What you are quantifying is your enthusiasm in a given interest topic.
Let's give it a semi-meaningless arbitrary value, like an IGN ranking.
A score from 1 to 10. For Starcraft, a 10 was at your most activated fandom, a 1 is you walking away from the scene to pursue something else, probably something stupid like hiking.
A lot of people think of enthusiasm as something that just either exists or doesn't. I like X, but I don't like Y, that is how it is. I heard about Starcraft and then I was a 7! I will be a 7, and my children will be a 7. Enthusiasm is a gift, and I have what I have because I do.
Others see that of course, a nominal interest is perhaps doomed to deplete over time. Certainly to them a game is just a game, so although maybe they were once an 8, now they are just a 6, soon to be a 4, then within half a year just a 1, already scheduling plans to hike across the some local countryside. Enthusiasm is a resource, and mine will eventually run dryu.
Now both these groups are uninformed, and perhaps fictitious. But it's merely mentioned to reveal perceptions. The reality is, of course enthusiasm, or interest in anything can be gained and lost. The gift-model people will eventually walk away without blaming a lack of interest, the resource-model people will do the opposite. Both could have been saved.
Maintaining those people is a big task, it is the job of developers, media, event organizers, and entertainers to stoke that flame in the hearts of their fans and maintain it. Of course enthusiasm will wane and surge, but this must be expected and combated, like the dying of a precious fire in the cold night.
The job also falls more than in part on the individual, they've got to consume the right things in an environment of mixed quality, but dismiss that for this discussion.
So Starcraft is awesome. Why would anyone lose enthusiasm, or bore of it? Let's talk about one hot button way this can occur, 'over-exposure'.
As the scene grows more, content options begin to expand. There is more of everything, in both quantity of sources, and size of each source. Eventually a person only has a finite appetite, so they have to make decisions on what content to consume.
This is a reality, one which has very quickly nested on the scene.
Just a little over a year ago people were talking about the 'over-exposure' point as a far off parable, what they might not have expected was that it has so rapidly occurred that the rise to a super-saturated scene barely received documentation.
Of course it is a healthy problem to have, there should be a bevy of content. You want enough food to feed your customers right? Some would argue the other way, that you'd be better off with an audience of starved minds who will readily accept anything put out there. But equilibrium is key.
But I do think the prognosis here has a media sway, and has been wrongly classified. The real issue here is in fact not 'over-exposure', but people not being able to fully absorb the scene as they once were used to. As such fans are becoming disenchanted and slowly turned off by the change, the full grasp of competitive Starcraft now trickling through their hands.
Starcraft fans, enjoyed having something small.
Everyone likes to be a guru, and have all the knowledge. I feel like it is nearly indisputable that it makes fandom the most enjoyable to know all the relationships between players, their histories, their styles. But as things grow you lose this to a degree.
This completionist philosophy is present in many hobby groups, but perhaps it is especially exacerbated by Starcraft being a hobby possessed by people with long backgrounds in videogames. Certainly collecting everything, knowing everything, finishing everything are all taught habits that frequently come up in game design. Need all the golden bananas, the 120 stars, and so on.
So with scene growth, comes a need for distillation in order to maintain enthusiasm. Without the right information, stories fall flat, interest wanes, our enthusiasm depletes.
Typically you'd expect the media to service this role, but their means are small. ESPORTS media is basically built on exploiting volunteerism, they have a hard time, undoubtedly. It is a god damn skeleton crew. Tools need to be supplied to aid in this process. It is simply unfeasible to hope for good writing alone to be able to process all the information out there to an edible size for the fans.
But of course, this problem isn't unique to the ESPORTS channel, its something that was seen elsewhere long ago.
Compare the Starcraft scene to say a professional sport like the NBA.
In the NBA you have, 30 teams playing 82 games each. This equates to 1230 games across 7 months, ignoring playoffs/preseason/allstar game. Crudely saying that is 6 games a night, means you are looking at about 12 hours of basketball available for 7 months straight. Of course consuming all that would require a lot of creative local broadcast routing, but it is out there.
As such basketball fans make choices about the media they watch, a lot of them, even the devout. A gigantic fan watching all of their supporting team's games and a handful of other games. (~120 games), would only be absorbing ~10% of what is out there.
Really consider that. It is a stat not often reflected, to how vast some sports worlds can be versus even a committed individual's consumption. So do basketball or mainstream sports fan even hope to stay afloat in a sea of content?
So the answer to part of this is the Box Score.
Not unprecedented in its application towards a video game, (seen for CS at some point) but certainly largely unrealized in its potential towards the current incarnation of the scene.
A box score was many moons ago, the preeminent way to transfer information about a game from point to point. At the turn of the 19th century, before radio, and just after photographs, newspaper baseball box scores would make the results of game efficiently known to a fan base that would otherwise be inaccessible. It is a frighteningly old idea.
Well Starcraft, or other ESPORTS may have more masking complexities than a game of baseball, but that doesn't make the task of focusing results into a small transferable format impossible.
The task is a little more than elementary though. Fortunately digital tools can grant a lot of advantage.
But what is the correct method? Looking at case studies, even with baseball box scores in the 60s, many defensive stats were dropped for ease of reading. Basketball box stats are similar. People's interest are drawn to the explosive, the interesting, the offensive. So the choices about what information to appear in a box is important.
But can you best describe a style, a player, an event by only catering to what people want to read? Gut says no, but if the idea is to make something that people want to read, catering might be neccesary at least for an initial adoption stage.
So if you take a game of Starcraft an atomize it, make it into some combination of the core information to properly describe it while still interesting a fanbase, what do you get?
Curious on what people would be interested in seeing.
