The New Yorker profiles Scarlett

StarCraft, a video game, is often compared to chess: it is strategic and extremely difficult, requiring a mathematical cast of mind, and, unlike many other video games, with their scrolling or first-person vantages, it affords a bird’s-eye perspective of the board, or map. But the analogy breaks down in countless ways. The map changes from game to game. (In this instance, it was called Habitation Station, and shaped somewhat like a butterfly.) Instead of black or white, players choose from among three “races,” called Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, with different strengths and vulnerabilities. In the early stages, players cannot see one another’s armies, and must dispatch scouts to illuminate darkened corners; they must also develop economies, with which to fund the inevitable battles. It’s as if Garry Kasparov had to plot a pawnless endgame while simultaneously harvesting minerals, building fuel extractors, and searching in vain for Spassky’s queen. Academic researchers now use StarCraft II—the “drosophila” of brain science, as one paper suggested—when studying people who expertly perform cognitively complex tasks. Chess may soon be eclipsed as the standard-bearer of competitive I.Q.

Kingston, a city of a hundred and twenty thousand, is where Sasha Hostyn, a.k.a. Scarlett, grew up. Her father, Rob Harrap, is a geology professor at Queen’s University; her mother, Joyce Hostyn, a committed Xeriscapist, has worked in public radio, politics, and software design. Sasha is now twenty. She and her older brother, Sean, who is twenty-two and studying math and computer science, refer to their parents as Rob and Joyce. It’s a progressive family in a number of ways. Sasha uses her mother’s last name; Sean uses his father’s. Rob and Joyce practiced what they call “unbundled parenting,” with respect to their children’s education, beginning at the age of twelve. “You treat kids like infants all their lives, and then one day, when they turn eighteen, you expect them to leave the house and act like adults?” Rob said. “That doesn’t make any sense.” He said that he’d never seen Sasha’s high-school transcript and, therefore, could only guess about her best subjects. Joyce told me that last year, when Sasha was nineteen and already the most highly regarded StarCraft II player in North America, she mentioned, in passing, that one of her teachers in junior high had recommended that she get involved in extracurricular math competitions. It was the first Joyce had heard of it.

Before Scarlett, the most prominent foreigner was a left-handed Swede named Johan (Naniwa) Lucchesi, a brilliant but hotheaded player, who had a reputation for lashing out at fans and tournament organizers, and for showing emotion onstage, before and after matches. Some fans coined the term “Naniwalk” to describe his slightly goofy swagger. Korean players, Day9 told me, used to “view it as a badge of honor to eliminate Naniwa, because he was so disrespectful.”