Why we need regional and national scenes

Hello fine folks and Broodwar enthusiasts!

Christmas is usually a time that is associated with family values and contemplation. For me it seems like the perfect excuse to give into my urge, to talk about the bigger questions of Brood War and to philosophize about a subject that has been on my mind for quite a while. But, before I jump right into it, it might be worth telling you first where my interest in the subject is rooted. I started first playing “competitively” in 2006, I could jump on the reminiscence train here and write a whole article about that, how I got here with this amazing game and its amazing community, but I will try to focus on today. So, to summarize it briefly, my early days in Broodwar were very much defined by the German scene, which centered around Broodwar.de. Basically, the German scene was a micro cosmos of its own. I used to surf the boards and play and talk with people about Broodwar but the main context was almost always the German scene. We had our two national teams that created some drama of their own.

We had our legends like Mondragon or FiSheYe, and our own villains, notorious hackers like Selector and just a lot of guys that were really bad mannered in open discussions. Now it was not a peaceful paradise, there were and in fact still are some guys in the German scene that hated each other ferociously and could not get along if their life depended on it. But we had something going on. In fact I was so absorbed into the German scene, it took me a full year to really discover the rest of the foreign scene and the wonders of professional Starcraft in Korea. How is this relevant to this article? Well, long story short, when I returned to Broodwar in 2012, after having enough of StarCraft 2, I quickly realized that the scene had shrunk a lot and also that the German scene was basically nonexistent. Of course guys still played but the main discourse had shifted from German sites to international ones like Teamliquid. There was not a national team anymore and little topics that concerned the German scene as such. So I embarked on a mediocrely successful quest to bring back some life to the German scene, of which I will spare you the boring details! Suffice to say, other guys and I tried to connect the remaining Germans and put up a few events here and there, to revitalize the “glue” that kept the thing together in the first place.


Now, the obvious question at hand is, why invest a lot of time and work into this project, when the international foreign scene was alive and healthy in comparison and bigger things might be able to be achieved there? Why would you create content that had a specifc group in mind and not everybody?

I wrote this introduction in part to make it clear to you that of course I had nostalgic reasons to do so, and I just missed the old times. But besides that, I do also believe that local (not even necessarily national scenes) serve an important function for the community as a whole. From here on I would like to elaborate on some of these functions.

When we started playing competitively many of us first joined a clan or peer group we shared our language and time zone with. That might sound a bit abstract, but can easily be explained: My first competitive clan had only German users, all my friends on the friends list were German as well. We associate this way, because it is the easiest thing to do. We do not have a language barrier that messes up communication and we perhaps assume we share more of a cultural background. So, naturally, the first StarCraft site we got to know was most likely a site in our own language, which catered to the interests of their specific playerbase. Of course, from there we branched out and discovered the rest of the glorious Broodwar universe, but many guys I talked to still feel strongly connected to their “home site”.

That means that to many users these fan sites keep an important role as sources for information and social contact - keeping in contact with players you know, et cetera. And if all these contacts share the same national or cultural background the user will likely associate themselves as part of this community and thusly take greater interest in what is going on in this scene. This explains why portals create content, which is specifically aimed at a certain group of fans. Identification with the sub group “German Scene” or “Russian Scene” makes a member of said group more responsive to content that caters to this group. To illustrate, if you were to announce a show match between Androide and Flash today, Russians might actually be more excited about Androide playing than anybody else, because they identify with the player more.

Of course all of these sites create Broodwar content; so far that is a no-brainer. But I argue here that dedicated national or regional Broodwar sites serve a function which is not or only barely replaceable by international portals. They allow for the creation of content that would not get enough attention or viewership, when we talk about streamed tournaments, on an international site. The Russian King of the Hill organized by Largo and reps.ru in 2012 can serve as a prime example for this. While also being promoted on Teamliquid.net, it seems clear this KOTH format was mainly aimed at and was supported by its large Russian fan base. Of course it is not coincidental; it was mainly casted in Russian. It is speculative, but I feel it is safe to assume, that the same event would have had significantly less recognition without the backing of a dedicated Russian fan site. But content that is connected to a specific community and their according site is not limited to tournaments. It also includes bits of news (e.g. background stories, player hype), which are not interesting enough outside of the context of the sub scene.

For instance an update on the new player list of Germanys B-Team back in 2007 might not have been interesting to everyone, but to me certainly. And going alongside that, the according discussions, the joy and the drama also takes place in the forums of those websites. What I am going at here is a national fan site can have unique content of its own, that does not even stand in competition to what international sites have. The extent to which such fan sites produce content that is first and foremost only interesting to its own sub scene may vary. While talking to Largo as part of my research, I learned that reps.ru for instance does not see itself as a portal, which covers mainly news from the Russian scene, but instead to cover the whole spectrum of the scene. Only a smaller proportion like the KOTH is primarily aimed at Russians and only secondly at other (third party) users. Reps.ru has been founded as replay café and database in 2002, but quickly started to cover the foreign and Korean scene as well .

We can quite likely attribute that to the fact that reps.ru is an important gatekeeper concerning the language barrier for the Russian users. On the other hand, Broodwar.de back when the German scene was quite big, dedicated more of its resources to content specifically aimed at the German scene. Of course we had the BWCL, an international league after 2005, running each Sunday, and did a few other events supporting English as well. But a lot of attention was given to content which only targeted the German user base.

Obviously a big part of the portfolio of a fan site with a non-native English user base is translating news and covering what goes on in the alien world. An interesting point to mention here is not all fan sites are equally interested in translating content for their “home market”. How much manpower is dedicated to this task is based upon two parameters, as far as I can tell. First, how much manpower is used to translate foreign content is related to how much human capital you have in the first place. When your staff is rather small, you cannot dedicate big chunks to “just repeat what somebody else already wrote” in your own tongue and neglect your core business at the same time, which is still covering your own stuff and creating your own content.

Secondly, it also depends on how much your user base is interested in coverage of foreign content in their own language. A small, nationally-oriented fan site might neglect the coverage of the rest of the scene altogether, when it is safe to assume that the users are reading the coverage on international sites anyway. On the other hand, when we examine the role of reps.ru, their rather extended coverage of the Korean and international foreign scene makes a lot of sense, since the Russian scene used to be pretty big and the percentage of Russians who do not read English adequately enough to follow an English coverage is high in comparison to the German scene for instance, where most users used to surf on English websites like Gousgamers.net and Teamliquid.net. But to a certain extent every non-English based fan site covered international content and translated it back to its home market.

Now you may think, well that is all fine and dandy, but why are you telling us all this? What is it good for? Well, first I wanted to share my impression with you guys, why our scene benefits as a whole from variety and diversity in different Broodwar fan sites. In my understanding, different fan sites offer different things to their users and in sum produce more meaningful content, which is the foundation of our scene being alive and healthy. How often have you heard the argument “Broodwar is dead because nothing is happening?” I heard that line quite often and I think that having a healthy plethora of different sites and different projects going on independently is the best way to counteract such notions.

Now, what I explicitly do not want, is to bash or belittle the great work, that is done on big fan sites with an international focus, like Gousgamers did in the past and Teamliquid still does. We need those platforms to come together and communicate, organize and follow the big projects and have a unified portal as a gateway to the Korean scene. Teamliquid does an admirable job in this and I personally come here often and do some small content creation of my own, like this article. However, as I pointed out earlier, just having one big fan site and meeting point does not suffice in my opinion. When it comes to the foreign BW scene, I believe diversity is a good thing; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.


Nowadays, we live in times where almost all Broodwar Fan Sites have big problems finding motivated staff or contributors. You do not even need to be on the staff list, in most cases you just need a project you want to pursue and you will find a place to do it and people who are willing to help you with it. But where the lack of motivated coworkers is “just a problem” for the big sites, it is a catastrophe for smaller fan sites. Being the only Broodwar related Staff member of Broodwar.de (or inStarcraft.de to be precise) this point is pretty obvious to me. And that is not the only place where we can do a lot with very little. I do not know of any Broodwar related fan site that is not looking for coworkers desperately. So, here is my appeal to all of you who managed to read up to this part: Get involved, do something, be active!

From writing articles, sorting VODs and organizing small or big tournaments, there is plenty of stuff that can be done. If we just rely on a very small core group of guys to get things rolling we risk having nothing in the end, because everybody loses their steam eventually. You do not even need to pursue the classic routes of participation. Write a blog, organize a fun tournament for your teammates and allies or think of something else completely. There are little to no areas, where you will meet resistance when you decide to create some form of content.


Having said my piece, it would be a shame to end this article in gloom and doom mentality. This following Starcraft movie is done by Retuh, a German guy and of course focusses on one of “our heroes”, [pG] FiSheYe. The Germans were very much into Starcraft movies and of course, the most popular movies focused on german players. So, enjoy: