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Starcraft is an RTS, meaning that the clock doesn't stop and wait for you to think and see what your opponent(s) will do. That is what makes it so fun to play and watch, the added difficulty of being in real time (or blizzard time in SC2's case) as opposed to taking turns or something else just adds a whole layer of depth and difficulty to the game. This means that the player has to think on the fly about their strategies and how they're going to handle certain potential or current situations while actually playing the game at the same time. The game doesn't wait for anyone, it's constantly going on, giving the player minimal time to think before they need to act.
Racing games are similar in the way that the car is always moving and slowing down to think puts you behind the competition. A high level game of Starcraft is actually pretty similar to an F1 race. None of the players/drivers have much time to think at all, they need to either act quickly or plan everything out in advance or they'll be left behind, and one mistake can put them so far behind their opponent(s) that it is impossible for them to recover and win. The term "thinking time" comes up a lot when talking about racing cars as fast as F1's. In essence, "thinking time" is the amount of time one has to process all the information that they're being fed while driving. It might not sound like a big deal to some, but it's actually one of the most important factors that makes driving so difficult. As a hypothetical example, imagine driving a pretty fast sports car through a hairpin turn that is followed up by another hairpin turn about 40m away from it. Now let's say you exit the hairpin at 18m/s and accelerate at 4m/s^2 out of it. You'd have about 1.8 seconds to think before entering the next corner. Now let's say you're in an F1 car and exit the same hairpin at 40m/s and accelerate at 12m/s^2 out of it. You'd have about .88 seconds to think before entering the next corner, which is about half as much as you would in the sports car. .88 seconds is also a really fucking short amount of time to think about how you're going to negotiate the corner, keep the car under control, and think about how to pass other drivers or defend from being passed. This means that knowledge of the course and your opponents is vital to be able to plan out what you're going to do ahead of time instead of just thinking on the fly. Then there's also the fact that races are not all on the same track, meaning that the set up of the car, driving strategy, thinking time, and way the car handles among other things can all change from track to track.
Starcraft is like a racing game because it has pretty much all the things outlined in the previous paragraph. Racing games are practically a metaphor for how Starcraft is played: a car going down a track at a very fast pace, requiring the driver to act quickly to stay in the lead. Starcraft is so extremely alike to racing games in the way it's played yet it's in a completely different genre and playing it feels absolutely nothing like playing a racing game. It's an entirely different experience but it shares the same core elements, strategy, speed, and skill. The biggest difference between Starcraft and racing games would have to be the fact that racing games don't require other people to play with and the game doesn't change entirely when playing anything aside from 1v1.
  
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Hmmmm while I do agree that Starcraft resembles racing a great deal, I don't think that you touched on the core of the resemblance.
For me it goes like this : Starcraft is a racing game if you look at it from the build order perspective. This means that a build order, just like a race, can be practiced alone, can be raffined, can be planned etc. If a silver player went up against a GM, the game would be decided just like a race would be decided between a race car and a freightliner, it would be a question of speed, like, the silver player would have a similar amount of units/workers/buildings, but 5 minutes later, so he would lose.
But in Starcraft, you can mess with the other player. Which means that... SC2 is more like Mario Kart. Let's say you fall behind a bit, the opponent, build order wise, has been faster than you. While he does threaten to simply cross the finishing line before you, you can also catch up, not by your own speed, but by using an offensive item (hail mary banana peal ftw), in SC that would be a tactic, for example, that would win you an important fight.
With that logic in mind, I sometime see lower leagues player in starcraft completely neglecting the racing aspect. In my eyes, it is as absurd as a Mario Kart player who would almost exclusively practice his carapace aiming. And personally, I like to beat people by winning the race almost solely on build order speed, so that I'm so far away that I'm out of the reach of their "carapaces".
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I see what you're trying to say but as someone who races cars, racing and starcraft have almost nothing in common. There is almost no thinking done by the driver in racing, and quick reactions are generally only helpful once you've already screwed up pretty badly. This is the reason why people can continue to race competitively and successfully late into their lives (I don't mean until 30, I mean past 60). After a crash you never ask yourself what you could have done to stay on the track. You ask yourself what you did wrong that put you into a situation where that could happen. It's about anticipation, not reaction. In that sense it is similar to starcraft in that if something surprises you you didn't scout well enough, but anyway..
The biggest challenge in starcraft is the mechanical one. People generally know what they want to be doing but lack the mechanical skill to actually do it optimally. Racing is the complete opposite. The actual control inputs in racing are extremely intuitive, even necessary racing techniques like heel-toe downshifting can be learned pretty quickly. There is almost no mechanical challenge, it's knowing what you want to do with them where skill and experience come in.
Strategy doesn't really come into play until you're at a level where there's someone else to do it for you. At any amateur level of racing the strategy is to drive as fast as you can while keeping the car on the track. That's pretty much it, and that never changes no matter how many other drivers are on the track trying to mess with your strategy.
Basically, it has its similarities with racing, but also with any other competitive game or sport. I mean it probably has a lot more in common with chess due to the way strategies develop, or anything I can't think of right now that has a huge mechanical barrier. Neither of these are anywhere near as important as raw skill in racing, which is comparatively rather unimportant in a game like starcraft where simply not missing unit production cycles will take you up to diamond.
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Oh I like this a lot this is a highly intruiging perspective!
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On October 03 2013 12:18 futility wrote:
I see what you're trying to say but as someone who races cars, racing and starcraft have almost nothing in common. There is almost no thinking done by the driver in racing, and quick reactions are generally only helpful once you've already screwed up pretty badly. This is the reason why people can continue to race competitively and successfully late into their lives (I don't mean until 30, I mean past 60). After a crash you never ask yourself what you could have done to stay on the track. You ask yourself what you did wrong that put you into a situation where that could happen. It's about anticipation, not reaction. In that sense it is similar to starcraft in that if something surprises you you didn't scout well enough, but anyway..
The biggest challenge in starcraft is the mechanical one. People generally know what they want to be doing but lack the mechanical skill to actually do it optimally. Racing is the complete opposite. The actual control inputs in racing are extremely intuitive, even necessary racing techniques like heel-toe downshifting can be learned pretty quickly. There is almost no mechanical challenge, it's knowing what you want to do with them where skill and experience come in.
Strategy doesn't really come into play until you're at a level where there's someone else to do it for you. At any amateur level of racing the strategy is to drive as fast as you can while keeping the car on the track. That's pretty much it, and that never changes no matter how many other drivers are on the track trying to mess with your strategy.
Basically, it has its similarities with racing, but also with any other competitive game or sport. I mean it probably has a lot more in common with chess due to the way strategies develop, or anything I can't think of right now that has a huge mechanical barrier. Neither of these are anywhere near as important as raw skill in racing, which is comparatively rather unimportant in a game like starcraft where simply not missing unit production cycles will take you up to diamond.
I find it hard to believe you actually race cars legitimately. F1 is huge in brasil and I've been a giant fan of it since I was a kid because of my dad, and I disagree entirely with pretty anything and everything you said, I don't think I've disagreed more completely with a post in my history here haha. There is so much strategy and thinking in racing, there's entire teams constantly talking to the driver about strategy an entire race. No mechanical challenge in car control? It's just as much anticipation as reaction. Every single driver interview I've ever watched contradicts your points entirely.
Also for the last paragraph, diamond league is like your local amateur kart race, of course it's not hard to make it there lol
Not saying OP is 100% right either, racing wouldn't be the first thing I liken to sc2, but all your points about F1 racing are pretty wrong.
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EPT
