EPTThere are so many reasons why I love Starcraft, some are personal reasons for me and some are much more general, more common kind of reasons I guess you'd say. I'll start off with the more personal reasons.
Before StarCraft I lacked confidence in myself, I was overly pessimistic and consistently doubting myself in what I could do. I was floating around in life, with no set goal or passion in which to fulfill. I had nothing I could talk about with any enthusiasm.
Then I started watching Starcraft after a long hiatus from RTS games, it fascinated me, watching the pros play their hearts out striving to be the best, wanting to win. Seeing the raw emotion when they won or lost, it reinvigorated the competitive side of me, that desire to be better than everyone else and to give pause to people who brought me down in the past.
Once I started playing, my mentality, my confidence started to get a boost. I started facing challenges head on, I no longer backed down from difficult tasks. I went in with a can-do attitude to both the game and real life. Even if I failed I could look back over what I did and thought about possible reasons why I failed and how I could avoid failing again.
Even when I lose to a pro, I look back and see where I went wrong or what I did right. I use previous matches vs pros to dictate what I do. (I once remembered YongHwa proxy gating me on Echo right down to gate location. In a match vs Alicia on the same map I immediately went to scout that place just in case he too tried the same thing. He did.)
StarCraft also gave me a passion and a goal I want to achieve outside of the game. It pushed me into turning my natural curiosity of other cultures and countries into a desire of learning a language, and who do I have to thank for this? Translators such as Smix, Chobra, Sojung and TL's very own Seeker. People I would never have stumbled upon if it weren't for this game, I'm now planning on returning to education so I can learn Korean and become a translator or teacher in either my home country or in South Korea.
But of course there are many general reasons why I love this game as well.
Firstly, it's an intense, adrenaline pumping experience as both a player and spectator. You ride a wave of pure emotion and hype every step of the way, whether you just barely held off an attack on ladder or you just witnessed your favourite pro play their heart out and cause a huge upset in a tournament. You don't just watch mindlessly, you find yourself being sucked into the action, sharing the happiness and glory of a player winning or reaching out to them after a tough loss to let them know that you're still there cheering them on from behind your monitor.
Secondly, the community. While we might not be the biggest we're probably the most passionate and inclusive one there is. We might play different races or support different players and teams but it doesn't matter, we find unity in the fact we love StarCraft. We help each other, we share our passion for our teams and players and we respect our differences. It's so easy to make new friends in the StarCraft community, not just with other fans but with personalities and pros too. That's something you would never see in a more conventional sport.
Lastly and probably the most important, without Starcraft there wouldn't be eSports (while BroodWar was the one that really set the ball rolling SC2 has undoubtedly helped too) and without eSports, there'd be no pro players, no community to frolic in and this blog wouldn't exist. Who knows how their lives would be now if these things didn't exist to give them a sense of purpose or an escape from the harsh realities of life
