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I would never use these sources in a normal paper. I should have stated this in OP, but the entire point of the paper was to specifically watch a community, taking examples from the behaviors of people within it. It is a study on the specific sub-culture's standards and ideologies, and we just had to make an argument based on specific concepts we discussed in class. I guess this really wasn't a good paper to post here, just because the phrases and concepts(which themselves are pretty vague and open-ended), as we talk about them, are very specific to class discussion, but I wanted to put the paper out there since that is exactly what I talk about in the paper.I wrote a paper on the Starcraft community for my class. Sorry for class-specific terms that make normal reading a little awkward, but here it is. And sorry if the formatting is bad. Copy and paste from Word. :/
Final Paper: ESports/Starcraft
7/31/13
ESports and Starcraft
"ESports" is the name given to the relatively recent movement that is using competitive video games as a means for professional sport. Professional gaming has grown massively since the nineties, especially in the last few years, with games like Starcraft 2 and League of Legends, the two most popular eSports currently. Professional gamers fly all over the world, region to region, from tournament to tournament, competing and potentially winning large sums of money. Their expenses and salaries are paid by their respective teams. This is a basic summed up description of how eSports operates. This paper will focus mainly on the Starcraft community, as it has a recognizable and site-specific hub which can be read and analyzed as a good example of the community as a whole.
Starcraft 2 is a real time strategy game made by Blizzard Entertainment. It pits two players against each other to command armies, which they build, on the virtual battlefield until one side is victorious. It takes exceptional talent and hard work to succeed on the professional level, and most players will fail to make a big name for themselves. The game takes strategical brilliance, quick fingers, rapid decision making, but also patience and hard work, and the willingness to grind out matches for twelve hours a day if that is what is needed. The level of excellence in play that this produces is apparently enough to have created a fan base and community of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of viewers. Due to the game's depth, it is not a surprise that the game's community also has impressive depth, history, and people.
The overarching argument here is that Starcraft fans use the community, thanks to its free and democratic infrastructure, as an outlet for their skills, knowledge, personality, etc, which might be missing elsewhere, while also using it as a place to learn or relax and just have fun. Also, the intelligence and effort required to play the game well weeds out people who might not contribute much, while drawing in the more worthy, civilized, positive, intelligent people. The community can be both serious and incredibly silly, smart and brainless. The people of the community are so varied that it is difficult to pigeonhole them into generalized groupings. It has professional basketball players, artists, academics, computer geniuses, players, firemen, radio announcers, musicians, ten year-olds, businessmen, and so many more.
TeamLiquid.net and www.reddit.com/r/starcraft make up the community of StarCraft. Two specific sites are given, because they are so intertwined that it would be quite the incomplete study to only reference one. TeamLiquid is where one typically finds more serious discussion(think blogs), news write-ups, editorials, information, and core components of the scene. Reddit, on the other hand, is the place to go for simpler time-sensitive discussion(think Twitter), quickly digested news, funny posts, art(and crafts!) creations, whining, and band-wagoning. The two are crucial to one another, and almost all the fans visits both, so both must be analyzed in tandem in order to get the full picture of the core scene.
Just today on the front pages of these sites, one will see:
1. News: The results and a write-up about the important match the other night. 16 year-old Maru beat Innovation, the best player in the world, four sets to zero. This was a shocking result, to say the least, and the community reaction reflects that.
2. Humor: An amusing picture highlighting two players, Grubby and DeMuslim, playing back in 2007, and how DeMuslim bore a striking resemblance to Arya Stark from Game of Thrones.
3. Whining: A Blizzard Entertainment employee calling for a Twitter hashtag to be made popular. It is a campaign to the United States government to allow Chinese players to acquire a Visa in order to attend a tournament in the States.
4. Art: A documentary on Canadian eSports is being created and is here being advertised.
These are just a few examples of what is being discussed in the scene on 7/31/13. Discussion and creations vary from day to day, but this gives a simplistic look at some of the subjects that the people of StarCraft discuss. It shows some active, and some passive, interaction in the scene.
To relate back to the original argument, these four things show four different skill sets that enrich the scene. The news is from someone who has a talent for writing and loves the competitive aspects of StarCraft. The humor shows someone who just enjoyed something funny, and wanted to share it with everyone else. The whining shows an activist pushing for the betterment of eSports, and its recognition by the government as a sport. The art shows a person with a passion for film making as well as StarCraft, fusing the two into a product that can be enjoyed by the current community, while also drawing outsiders into it, which is a subject often promoted by fans.
This all adds up to the first general observation of this argument. The community has an "ideology" of production. The production never stops, and no one could consume even 10% of it. The community is thriving and passionate, and looks to grow more quickly than ever in coming years," says Roland Li of International Business Times(5). That truth is an inevitable product of the absurd amount of content produced each and every day within the StarCraft community. The combination of skill, variety of people, and passion makes sure this is the case, leading to a scene that never stops creating and enriching itself.
This observation leads into a second observation. The StarCraft scene takes major advantage of the "technological affordances" that the internet provides, more so than almost any other community out there. As just stated, the level of production is just ridiculous. It is in fact oversaturated and overwhelming at times. The internet allows the production to be done from everywhere on the planet. A 20 year-old college student from Atlanta, Georgia, can enjoy watching a Korean tournament, as long as he is willing to get up at 4AM for it, which he is. A person from India can post a funny picture that a Hawaiian will find amusing and comment on it. In fact, regional barriers are so broken down that almost no one will care from where the poster hails. India is not an eSports center by any means, but there are even tournaments there, due to the lack of any barriers on the web(6). The connection between fans and professionals is possible in a way that has never been true for traditional sports. Professionals post comments and threads just like anyone else. The social heirarchy is almost non-existent, and everyone in the scene is enriched by this fact.
Herein lies a third observation and course concept: The internet's "Culture of Freedom." StarCrafters will object to almost any regulation of the scene, unless it is objectively detrimental to it, and without value entirely. This love of freedom provides the allowance for the original argument to be true. Nearly perfect freedom allows innovation and creativity that a regulated area would not.
Former professional gamer and current popular figure in the scene made a post on Reddit before the current expansion to StarCraft 2 was released. He doubted that Blizzard Entertainment were taking the best route in promoting and striving to make StarCraft 2 the best eSport. The post was called " Starcraft 2 will be dead before Legacy of the Void if Blizzard doesn't change its course."(7) If this were posted on Blizzard Entertainment's forums or a forum that did not love the Culture of Freedom, it surely would have been removed. He made points on the game and scene that could have been interpreted as detrimental to the scene, though he meant well. Whether the post was detrimental or a constructive criticism on the scene, it did create wide discussion. It was one of StarCrafts most upvoted threads on Reddit in history. It inspired new and passionate discourse on how to improve, promote, and solidify the scene's stature in not only eSports, but also public knowledge. And there, just as it is in the advocation of a democratic system of government, is the positive reason for espousing the Culture of Freedom instead of discouraging it.
A text-based analysis of almost any post would be nearly pointless. Nothing in the scene exists in a vacuum, not even a tournament itself. This scene requires that one have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of its history, jokes, results, personalities, players, famous posts, etc, in order to truly understand it and its dynamics.
For example, if Korean player Flash, the best StarCraft 1 player of all time(over a decade in Korea, where the game has always been most popular, and had the best players), is playing a match in a tournament, a commentator might call him "God, the largest of elephants." If analyzed in a vacuum as a textual analysis, one might simply not understand the phrase, or would assume Flash was just a mighty foe. He is a mighty foe, but that does not in any way encompass what the commentator actually means. To get the first word out of the way, Flash was so good in StarCraft 1, that Koreans actually called him "God."To truly understand the whole comment, one must know the history of the term "elephant" within the scene. When StarCraft 2 was first released, the game was mostly populated by players who were new to professional gaming. StarCraft 1 tournaments were still being played on national TV in Korea, and the best players were far from moving over to the new game yet, due to the established scene already built around the first game. "The Elephant in the Room"(8) was a post made on TeamLiquid over a year after StarCraft 2 was released that argued that "the competition in SC2 thus far has been a farce." He stated this due to the fact that the best StarCraft 1 players, who were so established and famous in that incredibly difficult game, had still not moved to the new game. He argued that when they did, they would quickly dominate within months. The thread got over 300 pages of comments, and almost one million views. Therefore, a commentator can make such a comment about a player being an elephant on the fly, without explaining himself, and expect viewers to just understand what he is implying. To most of the scene, this is a comment that they don't even think of as an insider phrase. It was just the commentator talking about Flash. This is a very lengthy example, but a lengthy example is truly necessary to understand how important contextual analysis is to the scene. This is not even a very complicated example compared to others that could be made.
This contextual importance creates quite the "imagined community" that cannot even be understood by outsiders. It is not even something that is always registered by an insider until they try to explain something to an outsider, and they realize they cannot explain without being incredibly longwinded to the point of being obnoxious. This proves how deep the imagined community is. The fact that it essentially has its own language of hundreds of terms, phrases, jokes, a long history, sets the scene apart from any other group or society.
As a final observation, the "Circuit of Culture" obviously permeates the scene. It is relevant to every prior observation. For example, "The Elephant in the Room." The production of StarCraft 2 tournaments that lacked the best players in Korea represented itself as having the best players out there. This may have been somewhat true, since it did have the best StarCraft 2 players, it also bent the truth, as it lacked the best StarCraft players. Someone on TeamLiquid consumed this representation, but used "tactics" to use it for his own purposes, and wrote a post disputing the representation, calling the competition a "farce." This post could have easily been regulated by TeamLiquid, as it was a massive criticism of the scene that could have had negative impacts on the scene, as well as their own revenue as a site that needs to be visited often in order to survive. But it was by choice not regulated. This allowed for the consumption of it by hundreds of thousands of fans. For the fans who bought into the argument, it could change their identity, their view of themselves, into fans who feel like they have been duped, instead of fans believing that they were watching the best of the best. The wheels of the Circuit of Culture go round and round.
The habitus of the group is mostly presented already. The community of StarCraft is deeply passionate, creative, often intelligent, and rich in culture and history. There is a wide variety of people in the scene that add to it in their own unique ways, some of which are creative, some academic, some humorous, and unfortunately some hateful. But there is hostility in most communities to some extent, so that can be partially excused. They enjoy the imagined community that has been created around the game, and intensely desire to recruit others to enjoy it with them. They love to discuss every aspect of the scene, even down to disputing and judging the clothing casters should wear when commentating. Unfortunately, sometimes the amount of history and insider culture in the scene cannot be understood by outsiders, but at the same time, many would say that just shows how rich a culture it is, and that is not a negative at all.
The community uses pop culture in their own culture to build up that culture, combining their unique skills with that pop culture, in order to create something new. Some commentators use pop culture as a way to hone their skills, whether it be by watching sports(9) casters or listening to radio announcers or watching "The King's Speech." They use skills such as film making to make documentaries which take inspiration from classical documentaries. There are many ways people use pop culture in the scene. People want to show their skills. Sometimes in life one cannot find a good venue to do so, so these people combine the passions they have for StarCraft, their talents, and the people of the community that make the sharing possible, and create something unique.
The larger psychology is one of acceptance. This is clear in the culture of freedom, and the ideology of production. People want to be accepted for who they are, and the StarCraft community actively respects and encourages that desire, and the products that are created from it.
The ideology of democracy is visible everywhere. Pros post alongside "nobodies." Social hierarchy is almost nil. Thus equality in the scene is promoted by the very medium which makes the scene possible. This ideology of freedom and equality encourages these "nobodies" not to be afraid to be active in the scene, thus allowing for more production that might otherwise never occur.
The ideologies of the StarCraft community can affect the attitudes of the individual people in the scene in their relations to and views on everyday life. Where they may have believed there to be a social hierarchy in which they were at the bottom, the scene's lack of that hierarchy may allow them to see the world in a more free and open light, full of possibilities for them to show their unique personalities and talents. They might see democratic society, through participation in a quickly-moving one in which they can affect the scene and even the powers that be, in a new light. In the scene, they are put on equal turf of discussion with the most popular people in StarCraft. This must be an encouraging fact. It gives them practice for the real world to be able to interact with a worldwide scene with ideologies of freedom, acceptance, and positive reinforcement.
To conclude, the StarCraft scene is a deep community that, through a free and democratic ideology, rewards people putting themselves out there, with their unique talents and personalities, to enrich the scene they love, and add to the enjoyment of StarCraft itself.
1. http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1je4ha/supportcnesports/
2. http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1je77o/grubby_vs_demuslim_wcg_07/
3.http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1je1b6/good_luck_have_fun_the_1st_canadian_esports/
4. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=423345
5. Author: Roland Li
Article Title: “2011: The Year of Esports”
Journal/Magazine/Newspaper Title: “International Business times”
Volume/Issue No. 20120101
Publication Date: January 1, 2012
Page(s): N/A
Database: Regional Business News
Date Accessed: 6/28/13
6. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=420503
7.http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11m21k/starcraft_2_will_be_dead_before_legacy_of_the/
8. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=221896
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Plott
