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So I wanted to write this when I had more time, but I really wanted to get it out there, just so I could take it off my mind, but given the amount of time I had, this is a bit rushed and not as good as I had wanted it to be. So sorry for any grammatical mistakes or any parts where I might skip over something critical for your understanding. Also it may be lengthy as I have a tendency to ramble. So here it goes.
I started playing StarCraft II (which I will abbreviate as SC from here on, for simplicity) in February 2012. My friend told me to download the Starter Edition just to see how i liked it. Within a month, it was the only game I played in my free time. At the time I was in Grade 9, not quite 15 years old. For my birthday I asked my parents for the full edition of the game. Now, I really liked SC. It was a lot of fun. For some reason, there was something almost exhilarating about getting roflstomped by my "really good" friend who was top 25 bronze at the time (it's funny how perspective changes). I enjoyed challenging myself to learn hotkeys more and each game was a test to see how long i could last before getting facerolled by a Protoss deathball. Having spent almost 2 full months, Xel'naga Caverns (the map) felt almost like a home to me, as it's where I played most of my matches against my friend. Anyways, I really liked SC, but I was growing tired of Terran. A full 2 months of Terran without trying the other races was annoying, as I felt that Zerg was the most OP race anyway (I must have been having premonitions or something, haha). So I got the full edition for my birthday in April and experienced the first low I had had with the game. I switched to zerg and started out losing against the Easy A.I. Yeah, you are allowed to laugh. I can laugh about it now too. That's just horrible. So one day, overhearing a conversation at school, I discovered there was a Masters league player in one of my classes. I was ecstatic! So having never spoken a word to him, I approached him and said "So I hear you're really good at StarCraft." And he said "Who are you?" As abrasive as that sounds in writing, it was actually quite friendly and good-natured. We became pretty good friends. He wasn't very good at biology anyway, so sometimes during class we would sit in the very back and I would do the work while he wrote tips for me about playing Zerg (He was masters Terran but had been masters Zerg before switching races). So I slowly began to ladder, having received help from 2 other masters players at our school. I learned one build, the 1-base 7 roach rush, and did it every game to silver. So proud of myself, I laddered some more. Then I started losing. A lot. Apparently silver players were good. They were really good, so good that they could hold off my roach rush. I was demoted. This was the second low I experienced. By the way, when I say low, I mean I went through a stretch where I really hated the game for being so cruel to my ego. You all know that feeling. So I went down to bronze and came to school and complained to my friend. Then I decided, hey, this guy switched from Zerg to Terran, maybe I should do that. I remembered ruling out Terran fairly quickly. I decided that I hadn't given it enough of a chance. I offraced a bit against the A.I. and made the decision to switch.
The summer of 2012 will always stick in my mind as pretty much the height of my enjoyment with SC. This will be important later. I didn't even have a good computer then. I was playing on a 2010 HP laptop. It was a piece of shit. But I watched a lot of Day9, learned my 3 build orders (one for each matchup), and began "Terran up dat ladder" (not sure who came up with that, but I didn't, so not taking credit for it). I tore through bronze league with my execution that was on par with all the top Koreans. I got all the way to top 8 silver. I was a fucking badass. I was better than my friend. Ultimately I think part of my success with Terran made him switch to Terran as well, haha. Then I sort of plateaued. The third low. I don't think that I wasn't getting better, in fact I think I was improving at a very fast rate. But I wasn't getting promoted. The MMR system was so cruel to me! I deserved to be Gold. I was a badass with great execution, remember? So I played and went 13-3 in my final 16 ladder games of the year. It was only August. I told my friend "this is bullshit, I should be in gold." He said I should just keep laddering and I would get promoted. But I was persistent "nah man I've been laddering, but I'm not getting anywhere." I wish I had listened. So for about 99% of my 10th Grade year I went without laddering. It was around the time that I stopped laddering that I learned about Monobattles. Wow, those were a lot of fun. They still are, really. So I was really mad about my lack of ladder success, and I began to just play only Monobattles. So many Monobattles. For Christmas I got a sick new custom PC. Monobattles, and occasionally some 1v1 Obs, just so I could get the satisfaction of winning some 1v1 without laddering. Oh and a beta key. Didn't matter, I wasn't going to ladder pshhht. Monobattles. Then came the fourth low.
I wanted to play with my friends in masters. I was basically gold, in my mind that was close enough to masters to be considered good enough to play with them. But my other friend told me that I was shit because I don't ladder. I almost never got a chance to play with them again. I was really disappointed that I had wasted all that time not getting better. Hell, the only reason I wanted a new PC was so I could play SC. It's the only PC game I have ever played, even to this day. I told myself that I was going to ladder. Every time I logged on, I would look at that "Find Match" button. Monobattles. Then with the release of HotS I decided I wanted to switch to Protoss. Fuck, Terran was getting me anywhere on the ladder. I couldn't even get gold with it. Protoss OP right? Well I thought so. I watched more Day9, learned lots of builds, and then I really started to a lot of pro games. But this is the point where my life outside of SC began to get in the way. I was approaching the end of 10th grade. I had more schoolwork than ever before, and I had to work harder than I was used to. I would go up to my room, close the door, and watch SC. My parents would walk in and see my stack of textbooks on my bed and then yell at me for not getting my schoolwork done. What can I say? I was obsessed with the idea of being better than ever before. I was gonna learn Protoss inside out, watch every GSL match and every Protoss streamer. I was never going to be called shit again and I was definitely not going to be in gold for long. Ladder anxiety wouldn't faze me and I would finally be accepted by my friends as good enough to play with them. Then they quit because they were tired of WoL and didn't see HotS as that fun. One went to college, the other switched to League. I was devastated. The main reason I got into the game was gone. What was I going to do? Become better than they ever were. YES! That was it. A new goal. All I had to do was just watch more, learn more, then when summer rolled around I could adopt my own KeSPA style training regimen and go at least 10 hours a day. But school got in the way. My parents got really frustrated with my procrastination. Every night that I had a lot of homework was blamed on too much SC. I told them the truth: I was just watching streams while doing my homework. It was no worse than watching TV right? Wrong. I knew they were right, that I was wasting way too much time. I was getting behind and staying up way too late to do my work. None of the nights I stayed up until 3 am doing homework should have happened. But NonY was streaming! But I was watching Day9! I had to learn! SC became more important to me than school. I didn't want to do anything else. It was like I had gained the greatest passion in the world for it. I felt like I was experiencing what progamers experienced when they decided to make their career choice and tell their parents. But I hadn't even laddered yet. I was nowhere close to that. I'm a smart kid. I get good grades. I have a promising future in something academic. My parents are old school. Computer games aren't legitimate hobbies. eSports aren't even a thing. Nothing on a computer could possibly be a sport. I play a sport, I play basketball. That's a sport. Instead of playing or watching SC, my parents wanted to know why I couldn't be practicing basketball or getting in shape? Because I loved SC more than that. I could never lose the passion I had for SC, as it had begun in Summer of 2012. Well, I heavily curbed my SC out of compliance and managed to pull off straight "A's" in school again. My parents had grown to expect nothing less. Summer of 2013 was going to be my time for rebirth, for redemption.
So more monobattles and more not laddering. Lots of sitting at my computer watching the DreamHacks and the WCS and Day9 and wishing I could be like PartinG or Rain. I didn't care about anything except SC anymore. My parents would make fun of me for spending an entire day on my computer. I could do this for multiple days at a time until I had a commitment out in the real world. But that wasn't even the real world anymore. The only world that mattered was my idealistic one where I would log on to SC and crank out 30 ladder games a day every day until I hit masters. That was supposed to be before summer ended. But every day, it was more monobattles. I felt hopeless. What could I do? I had horrible ladder anxiety. I would distract myself from the matchmaking screen by watching streams or kpop videos. I would put off my summer assignment despite my parents' nagging. I had to get better. I thought that watching hours and hours and hours and hours of streams would make me better. I'm going to make this part short. I spent the WHOLE summer without laddering. I managed to fail 110% at my goal. I let myself down. I had stopped enjoying SC. I was actually going through mild depression. I dreaded going back to school more than anything in the world because I would have to go from spending 12 hours on SC to 14 on school. But 14, you say? Yes, 14 hours is how long it takes if you combine a 7 hour day with 7 hours of homework. That's ridiculous, no 11th grader should have 7 hours of homework. Well, I don't. I still watch streams. I still dick around on /r/starcraft and TL. My parents still yell at me for spending too much time "split screen" as they call it when I have a stream open while doing homework. But I'm forgetting a part. I actually did manage to ladder. One night. My parents were gone for the weekend. I promised them I would do my homework before they left and they wouldn't have to worry about me playing SC and not doing it. So what did I do? I watched ATC finals instead and pretended to do my homework. They left thinking I had done it. That night I got on Skype with a friend and in the comfort of his company I ground out 11 ladder games. Gold league, 6-5 W-L. I was devastated. I thought I was better than that. I lost to 2 cannon rushes. I knew enough from watching streams how to hold off all kinds of allins and do all sorts of cool things, I knew maps inside out and I knew how to respond in so many situations. Everything was thrown out the window. I was trying to play at too high of a level. I was in over my head. I got too cocky. So that was it. 11 Ladder games on just about the 1 year anniversary of when I stopped laddering. Since then I have had too much schoolwork to sit down and grind out some ladder games for about 3 hours straight. Why do I have too much work? Because I still watch streams and browse /r/starcraft and TL instead of doing work.
Taking away from this experience, I learned a few things. I actually hate what SC has done to my life. I do. I think I would be infinitely happier without it in my life. I can't believe that I am saying that, whenever I think back to the summer of 2012. But it's true. I never even mentioned basketball, and how time consuming it was to be on the school team. Especially when I would sit the bench for an entire game, because I'm bad, and think about how I might actually be better at SC than basketball. Then I realized that I love both, but I'm not committed to practicing either. It made me realize that I need to reconsider my values and how I manage my time. Then came tennis season, more wasted time as I saw it. I wasn't doing homework or playing SC, so that seemed like a waste of time. I decided to quit tennis this summer. I could focus on basketball. My parents liked that. But I don't. I still would rather just stay home and spend all my time on homework and SC. SC is really the only thing I enjoy. I won't get into the reasons my basketball coach and team are annoying and stupid and hypocritical, because that's all you really need to know. But it sucks. I am at the point now where I have to start thinking about college applications and when I want to quit everything I do so I can do what I really love, I need to have things that I can put down on an application. My parents think I'm good at basketball. I'm not. Frankly, I don't think it would mean dick to any college that I played basketball if they aren't recruiting me. Why should I even bother putting down basketball? Just because it's my favorite athletic sport doesn't mean it represents me as a person. What really represents me is my love for SC. Everything about it. But gaming has such a stigma about it among elders. They don't give it legitimacy, so the most I can ever get out of telling people about my hobby of SC is using some of the research that has been done about how it improves reflexes and cognitive flexibility and stuff like that. But they just think that's bullshit anyway. Just an excuse for playing some dumb computer game. The same dumb computer game that ruined my life. Where would I be without SC? Basketball, homework, tennis, homework, what? Where is my other hobby? How else would I spend my time? Watching TV? How is that any better than playing SC? It's actually a lot worse. But nobody sees it that way. There has to be some way I can turn my passion into something academic. Well what I came up with is relatively simple, very appealing to me, but also not quite enough.
My solution to balancing school, SC, and a hobby, is Korean. The language. I know it's pretty cliche in this community to say that I want to learn Korean. Really almost run of the mill. But seriously. I love kpop. I love SC. The scene is full of Koreans. I don't have to be a translator for GSL to fill my dreams. Besides, my parents would be so disappointed in me. They don't see me doing anything that isn't academically challenging and also lucrative as a profession. Well at this point fuck them. As we speak they are yelling at me for not knowing how to do some of my homework. But I could do anything with a language as awesome as Korean. The idea makes me really excited. I have a reason to pursue school now. Except that I still will always have a desire to play SC and not do physics or calculus. These classes serve me no good to achieving my goal, as I see it. My time could be better spent playing SC. I just need to get to college so I can learn Korean and play lots of SC. I want to live my dream. I am ready. I know I can do it. But the only thing in my way is 2 more school years full of time that I see wasted. Most importantly, my biggest obstacle throughout all of this is, of course, SC. I love it. But I hate it so much.
I started playing StarCraft II (which I will abbreviate as SC from here on, for simplicity) in February 2012. My friend told me to download the Starter Edition just to see how i liked it. Within a month, it was the only game I played in my free time. At the time I was in Grade 9, not quite 15 years old. For my birthday I asked my parents for the full edition of the game. Now, I really liked SC. It was a lot of fun. For some reason, there was something almost exhilarating about getting roflstomped by my "really good" friend who was top 25 bronze at the time (it's funny how perspective changes). I enjoyed challenging myself to learn hotkeys more and each game was a test to see how long i could last before getting facerolled by a Protoss deathball. Having spent almost 2 full months, Xel'naga Caverns (the map) felt almost like a home to me, as it's where I played most of my matches against my friend. Anyways, I really liked SC, but I was growing tired of Terran. A full 2 months of Terran without trying the other races was annoying, as I felt that Zerg was the most OP race anyway (I must have been having premonitions or something, haha). So I got the full edition for my birthday in April and experienced the first low I had had with the game. I switched to zerg and started out losing against the Easy A.I. Yeah, you are allowed to laugh. I can laugh about it now too. That's just horrible. So one day, overhearing a conversation at school, I discovered there was a Masters league player in one of my classes. I was ecstatic! So having never spoken a word to him, I approached him and said "So I hear you're really good at StarCraft." And he said "Who are you?" As abrasive as that sounds in writing, it was actually quite friendly and good-natured. We became pretty good friends. He wasn't very good at biology anyway, so sometimes during class we would sit in the very back and I would do the work while he wrote tips for me about playing Zerg (He was masters Terran but had been masters Zerg before switching races). So I slowly began to ladder, having received help from 2 other masters players at our school. I learned one build, the 1-base 7 roach rush, and did it every game to silver. So proud of myself, I laddered some more. Then I started losing. A lot. Apparently silver players were good. They were really good, so good that they could hold off my roach rush. I was demoted. This was the second low I experienced. By the way, when I say low, I mean I went through a stretch where I really hated the game for being so cruel to my ego. You all know that feeling. So I went down to bronze and came to school and complained to my friend. Then I decided, hey, this guy switched from Zerg to Terran, maybe I should do that. I remembered ruling out Terran fairly quickly. I decided that I hadn't given it enough of a chance. I offraced a bit against the A.I. and made the decision to switch.
The summer of 2012 will always stick in my mind as pretty much the height of my enjoyment with SC. This will be important later. I didn't even have a good computer then. I was playing on a 2010 HP laptop. It was a piece of shit. But I watched a lot of Day9, learned my 3 build orders (one for each matchup), and began "Terran up dat ladder" (not sure who came up with that, but I didn't, so not taking credit for it). I tore through bronze league with my execution that was on par with all the top Koreans. I got all the way to top 8 silver. I was a fucking badass. I was better than my friend. Ultimately I think part of my success with Terran made him switch to Terran as well, haha. Then I sort of plateaued. The third low. I don't think that I wasn't getting better, in fact I think I was improving at a very fast rate. But I wasn't getting promoted. The MMR system was so cruel to me! I deserved to be Gold. I was a badass with great execution, remember? So I played and went 13-3 in my final 16 ladder games of the year. It was only August. I told my friend "this is bullshit, I should be in gold." He said I should just keep laddering and I would get promoted. But I was persistent "nah man I've been laddering, but I'm not getting anywhere." I wish I had listened. So for about 99% of my 10th Grade year I went without laddering. It was around the time that I stopped laddering that I learned about Monobattles. Wow, those were a lot of fun. They still are, really. So I was really mad about my lack of ladder success, and I began to just play only Monobattles. So many Monobattles. For Christmas I got a sick new custom PC. Monobattles, and occasionally some 1v1 Obs, just so I could get the satisfaction of winning some 1v1 without laddering. Oh and a beta key. Didn't matter, I wasn't going to ladder pshhht. Monobattles. Then came the fourth low.
I wanted to play with my friends in masters. I was basically gold, in my mind that was close enough to masters to be considered good enough to play with them. But my other friend told me that I was shit because I don't ladder. I almost never got a chance to play with them again. I was really disappointed that I had wasted all that time not getting better. Hell, the only reason I wanted a new PC was so I could play SC. It's the only PC game I have ever played, even to this day. I told myself that I was going to ladder. Every time I logged on, I would look at that "Find Match" button. Monobattles. Then with the release of HotS I decided I wanted to switch to Protoss. Fuck, Terran was getting me anywhere on the ladder. I couldn't even get gold with it. Protoss OP right? Well I thought so. I watched more Day9, learned lots of builds, and then I really started to a lot of pro games. But this is the point where my life outside of SC began to get in the way. I was approaching the end of 10th grade. I had more schoolwork than ever before, and I had to work harder than I was used to. I would go up to my room, close the door, and watch SC. My parents would walk in and see my stack of textbooks on my bed and then yell at me for not getting my schoolwork done. What can I say? I was obsessed with the idea of being better than ever before. I was gonna learn Protoss inside out, watch every GSL match and every Protoss streamer. I was never going to be called shit again and I was definitely not going to be in gold for long. Ladder anxiety wouldn't faze me and I would finally be accepted by my friends as good enough to play with them. Then they quit because they were tired of WoL and didn't see HotS as that fun. One went to college, the other switched to League. I was devastated. The main reason I got into the game was gone. What was I going to do? Become better than they ever were. YES! That was it. A new goal. All I had to do was just watch more, learn more, then when summer rolled around I could adopt my own KeSPA style training regimen and go at least 10 hours a day. But school got in the way. My parents got really frustrated with my procrastination. Every night that I had a lot of homework was blamed on too much SC. I told them the truth: I was just watching streams while doing my homework. It was no worse than watching TV right? Wrong. I knew they were right, that I was wasting way too much time. I was getting behind and staying up way too late to do my work. None of the nights I stayed up until 3 am doing homework should have happened. But NonY was streaming! But I was watching Day9! I had to learn! SC became more important to me than school. I didn't want to do anything else. It was like I had gained the greatest passion in the world for it. I felt like I was experiencing what progamers experienced when they decided to make their career choice and tell their parents. But I hadn't even laddered yet. I was nowhere close to that. I'm a smart kid. I get good grades. I have a promising future in something academic. My parents are old school. Computer games aren't legitimate hobbies. eSports aren't even a thing. Nothing on a computer could possibly be a sport. I play a sport, I play basketball. That's a sport. Instead of playing or watching SC, my parents wanted to know why I couldn't be practicing basketball or getting in shape? Because I loved SC more than that. I could never lose the passion I had for SC, as it had begun in Summer of 2012. Well, I heavily curbed my SC out of compliance and managed to pull off straight "A's" in school again. My parents had grown to expect nothing less. Summer of 2013 was going to be my time for rebirth, for redemption.
So more monobattles and more not laddering. Lots of sitting at my computer watching the DreamHacks and the WCS and Day9 and wishing I could be like PartinG or Rain. I didn't care about anything except SC anymore. My parents would make fun of me for spending an entire day on my computer. I could do this for multiple days at a time until I had a commitment out in the real world. But that wasn't even the real world anymore. The only world that mattered was my idealistic one where I would log on to SC and crank out 30 ladder games a day every day until I hit masters. That was supposed to be before summer ended. But every day, it was more monobattles. I felt hopeless. What could I do? I had horrible ladder anxiety. I would distract myself from the matchmaking screen by watching streams or kpop videos. I would put off my summer assignment despite my parents' nagging. I had to get better. I thought that watching hours and hours and hours and hours of streams would make me better. I'm going to make this part short. I spent the WHOLE summer without laddering. I managed to fail 110% at my goal. I let myself down. I had stopped enjoying SC. I was actually going through mild depression. I dreaded going back to school more than anything in the world because I would have to go from spending 12 hours on SC to 14 on school. But 14, you say? Yes, 14 hours is how long it takes if you combine a 7 hour day with 7 hours of homework. That's ridiculous, no 11th grader should have 7 hours of homework. Well, I don't. I still watch streams. I still dick around on /r/starcraft and TL. My parents still yell at me for spending too much time "split screen" as they call it when I have a stream open while doing homework. But I'm forgetting a part. I actually did manage to ladder. One night. My parents were gone for the weekend. I promised them I would do my homework before they left and they wouldn't have to worry about me playing SC and not doing it. So what did I do? I watched ATC finals instead and pretended to do my homework. They left thinking I had done it. That night I got on Skype with a friend and in the comfort of his company I ground out 11 ladder games. Gold league, 6-5 W-L. I was devastated. I thought I was better than that. I lost to 2 cannon rushes. I knew enough from watching streams how to hold off all kinds of allins and do all sorts of cool things, I knew maps inside out and I knew how to respond in so many situations. Everything was thrown out the window. I was trying to play at too high of a level. I was in over my head. I got too cocky. So that was it. 11 Ladder games on just about the 1 year anniversary of when I stopped laddering. Since then I have had too much schoolwork to sit down and grind out some ladder games for about 3 hours straight. Why do I have too much work? Because I still watch streams and browse /r/starcraft and TL instead of doing work.
Taking away from this experience, I learned a few things. I actually hate what SC has done to my life. I do. I think I would be infinitely happier without it in my life. I can't believe that I am saying that, whenever I think back to the summer of 2012. But it's true. I never even mentioned basketball, and how time consuming it was to be on the school team. Especially when I would sit the bench for an entire game, because I'm bad, and think about how I might actually be better at SC than basketball. Then I realized that I love both, but I'm not committed to practicing either. It made me realize that I need to reconsider my values and how I manage my time. Then came tennis season, more wasted time as I saw it. I wasn't doing homework or playing SC, so that seemed like a waste of time. I decided to quit tennis this summer. I could focus on basketball. My parents liked that. But I don't. I still would rather just stay home and spend all my time on homework and SC. SC is really the only thing I enjoy. I won't get into the reasons my basketball coach and team are annoying and stupid and hypocritical, because that's all you really need to know. But it sucks. I am at the point now where I have to start thinking about college applications and when I want to quit everything I do so I can do what I really love, I need to have things that I can put down on an application. My parents think I'm good at basketball. I'm not. Frankly, I don't think it would mean dick to any college that I played basketball if they aren't recruiting me. Why should I even bother putting down basketball? Just because it's my favorite athletic sport doesn't mean it represents me as a person. What really represents me is my love for SC. Everything about it. But gaming has such a stigma about it among elders. They don't give it legitimacy, so the most I can ever get out of telling people about my hobby of SC is using some of the research that has been done about how it improves reflexes and cognitive flexibility and stuff like that. But they just think that's bullshit anyway. Just an excuse for playing some dumb computer game. The same dumb computer game that ruined my life. Where would I be without SC? Basketball, homework, tennis, homework, what? Where is my other hobby? How else would I spend my time? Watching TV? How is that any better than playing SC? It's actually a lot worse. But nobody sees it that way. There has to be some way I can turn my passion into something academic. Well what I came up with is relatively simple, very appealing to me, but also not quite enough.
My solution to balancing school, SC, and a hobby, is Korean. The language. I know it's pretty cliche in this community to say that I want to learn Korean. Really almost run of the mill. But seriously. I love kpop. I love SC. The scene is full of Koreans. I don't have to be a translator for GSL to fill my dreams. Besides, my parents would be so disappointed in me. They don't see me doing anything that isn't academically challenging and also lucrative as a profession. Well at this point fuck them. As we speak they are yelling at me for not knowing how to do some of my homework. But I could do anything with a language as awesome as Korean. The idea makes me really excited. I have a reason to pursue school now. Except that I still will always have a desire to play SC and not do physics or calculus. These classes serve me no good to achieving my goal, as I see it. My time could be better spent playing SC. I just need to get to college so I can learn Korean and play lots of SC. I want to live my dream. I am ready. I know I can do it. But the only thing in my way is 2 more school years full of time that I see wasted. Most importantly, my biggest obstacle throughout all of this is, of course, SC. I love it. But I hate it so much.
Thanks for your time! :D
