EPTThe purpose of this blog is to discuss my initial exposure to broodwar in my early years and then once again preceding the release of Starcraft 2 (heard of it?) and trying to reconcile whether or not I played Starcraft 2 because it was easy and dodged Brood War because I thought it was on its way out.
Like many of you reading this, I found StarCraft at an early age. It was at a local internet cafe and they advertised all around town that this was a place you could go to and lan with like-minded individuals. I hopped on board at the ripe age of.. I want to say 9? This was my first exposure to what would some day be known as esports--a group of like-minded individuals whose only burning desire was to find competition at the purest level. More than I wanted to succeed as a stud clean-up hitter and pitcher in baseball, I wanted to succeed at Starcraft.
Starcraft has always reinforced my greatest ideals--and I do consider myself an idealist--about pure competition. We walk onto the diamond as baseball players or we walk onto the field as football players but every player brings with him an innate advantage or disadvantage based on their age and at which point puberty chose to strike them. I was one of the fortunates-- I was the same height I am now at age 11, which made me demonstrably bigger and more intimidating in a little league setting. Parents would have their kids stand 2 feet from the plate when I pitched and so on.
On the other side of the coin we have broodwar. We all start with 4 workers. Yeah, your experience and intellect might exceed mine but everything that manifests from that happens during play, not at the onset. I therefore found the outlet for my ceaseless need for competition in Broodwar rather than in traditional sports because--and I will admit I'm somewhat of a social liberal--everyone starts with the same shit. Your SCVs don't have superior or inferior genes to mine. We start with the same tools. Politics in the school that will have one kid start over another, fuck talent, in competitive sports is not unheard of and very destructive. The destruction is measured in missed scholarships for athletes that would have thrived in a meritocracy but barely made a wave because of local politics.
So, even though baseball was the greatest of my competitive outlets, I needed to play broodwar and warcraft3 to prove to myself that I didn't just win because I had an early growth spurt.
And now we have SCR. I remember playing the game at the local LAN cafe I spoke of earlier. Dudes 4-8 years my senior were embarrassed they could lose to an 11 year old. What I'm saying it's not what you think or what you know. It's how you think/how you know. But really my advantage was having seen pro games (even as young as i was [super fucking nerd]) and my competitive outlet became beating people in starcraft that were much older than I was--They would underestimate me because of my age. This only made me play better because I had a chip on my shoulder.
Fast forward to 2017. I always loved this game and hated SC2 though I was much better at it than the average BW player--which is probably why I stuck to SC2 for so long. Success in SC2 in its infancy blew my head up way too big and I turned my attention from competing to writing guides and explaining starcraft to the casual gamer (something I had to do as I was just entering university and explained the mechanics of the game to maybe 10 people/month)
I am done writing this blog. I don't know what the point of this blog is
Thanks
Mike
