EPTPrior to seventh grade, I never played video games -- sure, I watched my brother play games beginning from the time I was in elementary school as he went from Red Alert 2/Yuri's Revenge to Combat Arms and to now with him being a college student and me in high school and his game of choice being League of Legends. I'd never actively control anything; generally it was me watching his minimap for Kirov airships in Red Alert and for zombies when he played Cabin Fever, and when he started playing League of Legends I'd just idly sit nearby as he raged at all the kill-stealers.
I was always the quiet, studious child. I am four years younger than my brother, and I am the child who always gets the higher test scores and perfect grades. I am the child who was better than the other at piano, at Chinese school, at drawing, and who has an entire shelf of achievements. I am the child who my parents seemingly dedicated more time for, and especially when I fell ill towards my third grade years, paid the most attention to.
In seventh grade, I had a crush on a boy named Arden. I didn't even have any classes with him -- but due to the way our schedules and lunches worked out and the paths that we took through the school, I passed him frequently in the hallways. I immediately noticed him not because of his physical appearance, but rather due to his attitude.
He had this aura of intensity about him in everything that he did. I suppose he wasn't the handsomest nor most charismatic boy I'd ever met, but he was very striking. He had things that he clearly believed in and things that he clearly didn't; he wasn't particularly smart in terms of his academics, but he always had something to say in reply to anything that came his way.
He had this personality that, at the very least, made me want to grow close to him. I wanted to know what he was thinking, I wanted to know about him -- he is, undoubtedly, the most interesting person I've ever met.
So, I spent seventh grade noticing him, but never being particularly attached to him. I picked up his name and the fact that he was an Android fan from conversations I'd overheard, but I never spoke to him. I simply carried on with my life and continued studying hard -- at this point in time, he didn't matter that much to me.
In eighth grade, we ended up with schedules that were practically the same, except that he was in orchestra and I was in chorus, and that we had different PE slots. It was in Geometry in third quarter that I was put right next to him -- and that's where everything began.
He had this water bottle he carried with him at all times with a Razer logo sticker on it, and I knew that he was an avid follower of a game called "StarCraft" from the times I caught him watching streams during Civics. The first few weeks after our seating arrangement, we didn't say much of consequence to each other and kept mainly to ourselves. I remember out of curiosity and want to start talking to him, I decided to try and figure out more about StarCraft and identify what the logo on his water bottle was.
It was hopeless for me to identify the logo on his water bottle -- I tried typing into Google terms such as "green", "three snakes", "triangular symmetry" but to no avail. As I was browsing through Liquipedia (which had turned up through a Google search as well), I stumbled across a player named NaNiwa. And, in the main picture of him in the wiki at the time, I saw a logo on his shirt that mirrored the one I'd seen on Arden's bottle.
Browsing through his list of sponsors, I found its name -- Razer.
The next day at school during Geometry, I was nervously fiddling with the ends of my sweatshirt, wanting to bring up the logo on his water bottle, but I didn't say a word until the bell rang.
"Hey, Arden -- is that a Razer logo on your water bottle?"
He turned around and looked at me, surprised. "Yes, it is. Do you follow StarCraft?"
"Uh, yeah. I do," I sputtered out, lying. He smiled, and he started talking about his favorite players and how a Canadian progamer named HuK was the last foreigner in a StarCraft tournament going on at the time -- and I didn't understand anything that he was saying, but I smiled and nodded and made neutral grunts when he ended a thought.
Needless to say, the moment that I came back from school, I looked up StarCraft matches. The first video that I clicked on was Jaedong vs. Stork 2009 WCG Grand Final match -- a tournament Jaedong sweeped. The graphics were blurry and all I could identify from prior Red Alert knowledge was the workers and the attacking units. However, I remember the casters and how excited and passionate they were as they spoke, and I remember the crowd cheering with all their might for these two people behind a booth clicking away at a computer.
And I remember forgetting completely about Arden. I was curious about the game. How could just a mere video game move a crowd like this? I wanted to know what about it caused people to rally around it so.
I watched Jaedong, Flash, BoxeR, and all the other bonjwas (NaDa, iloveoov, sAviOr) and tournaments that I could find on YouTube. I found StarCraft 2 and I watched casts by Husky. I learned about the game mostly due to casters -- the vehicles that allow an outsider who knows absolutely nothing about the game to be able to enjoy and follow the happenings of each second of the match.
I quickly grew close to Arden, and he introduced me to Day[9] and TeamLiquid and Twitch.TV and he asked me which race I intended on playing in StarCraft. I answered Zerg, thinking about that very first game I had watched of Jaedong, and of the feeling of utter inspiration when the game had finished.
Then he showed me Day[9] Daily #100. I watched every minute of it, rewatched it, and thought for a long time.
The main thought in my head was concerning the previous hobbies I'd had. I learned piano from age four and have won countless competitions, but stopped -- because I'd realized that I was turning into, essentially, a robot. I was only learning piano to please my parents, and I quit after acknowledging that my teacher was emotionally unstable, and that piano was not something that I had ever enjoyed. I also was quite good at painting -- and I had learned from the best. I can assure you that my grandmother was a fucking magician. She didn't draw -- she breathed life into still paper. After she passed away though, I lost the will to paint.
And then I thought about StarCraft, and realized that I wouldn't allow myself to be half-assed about it. I wasn't going to do this just for Arden. After I watched Day[9] Daily #100, I thought about how vividly StarCraft had affected Day[9]'s life -- and countless of other lives as well.
Following this, StarCraft truly became a passion of mine. This was around the time that Stephano came out of nowhere and destroyed everybody he encountered while nonchalantly shrugging after beating players along the caliber of MC. I watched StarCraft tournaments with Arden, and after I had convinced my mom to buy me StarCraft (mind you, in my house, we don't even own a console), he was my teacher.
At the time, he was a Platinum Protoss, but had stopped practicing over the years.
I was a Bronze Zerg, and I had ladder anxiety. However, after hovering over the find match button for about ten minutes one day, I had this revolutionary thought cross my mind -- I suck at StarCraft. I'm in Bronze league because I'm a Bronze-level player. If I lose to somebody, that's fine; it simply means they out-played me in a manner that I need to learn to counter. I can learn from my mistakes and watch the replay. I started actively looking to get better, and I stumbled across Apollo's Zerg Tutorials, and began to focus primarily on macro and scouting. Every time I lost a game, I'd accept it, and hit find match immediately afterwards if I knew what went wrong. I would go on ladder runs that were forty games per day, and I was promoted into Silver, then Gold, then Platinum.
Now, around this time, it was the end of eighth grade. In the school district I lived in, there was a magnet high school dedicated to STEM learning and was rank one in the nation. I easily got in because of my prior dedication to studying, but I began questioning -- do I really want to go here? Do I have any intention of going into a STEM-oriented field, and is it worth narrowing the focus of my secondary school education like this?
I had a friend who was rejected from the school, and suddenly I remembered the sight of her crying over the letter as I contemplated this. Thinking of that, I refused the invitation to attend TJHSST.
After I refused the invitation, I was at a bit of an odds with my parents, but when I really thought about it, I realized this was arguably the first active decision I've made my entire life centralized around how I felt about something, aside from the convincing of my mother to buy StarCraft.
What an incredibly empowering realization that was.
Aside from Arden, I also grew incredibly close with his friends -- especially one in particular, named Gabriel. He was also a fellow Zerg player (now Gold!), and for the beginning part of my trek into StarCraft, he taught me the very basics of how to play. He had this dream of creating a StarCraft club, and in participating in a tournament he had found known as the High School StarLeague (HSL -- it always bothered me that it was called HSL; shouldn't it be HSSL? I know that as "HSL" it fits better with "CSL", but I always winced in the beginning every time I saw the acronym.)
I was zoned to a different high school, but my parents, upon seeing my desire to go to his school, bought a house in the district (they invest in houses as an alternative to the incredibly low interest rates of banks these days) and they send me to school everyday at six in the morning, and are willing to do so for the rest of my high school career. I am incredibly thankful for my parents and how they go out of their way to do this for me.
So, we started a StarCraft club and we entered the HSL. We aren't exactly the best team on the HSL (cough cough -- we're actually the worst), but the members of our club have grown to be my closest friends and have evolved into a closely-knit community. I've also gotten over Arden especially after I reconsidered my priorities and took a closer look at his personality (and to this day, he has absolutely no clue how I ever felt about him -- also, we're still very close).
Today, I no longer play StarCraft actively due to wrist issues and because I've realized that although I may love StarCraft, my academics must come first if I want to achieve my dream of being accepted into Stanford University. I still follow professional StarCraft closely and dragged my family to watch Jaedong in last weekend's Dreamhack, and we're holding our first club tournament throughout the next month (we've been playing preliminary rounds throughout all of April to establish seeds for lower and upper brackets).
TL;DR/Conclusion: I was browsing through an old notebook I had scribbled full of build orders and strategies from a long time ago, and it suddenly brought this realization that the introduction of StarCraft into my life and summoning the guts to talk to my middle school crush as a shy, nerdy Asian girl has changed my life fundamentally.
Thank you, to my family, for being so incredibly supportive of me through anything and everything I attempt to do.
Thank you, to Arden, for your friendship and guidance into StarCraft.
Thank you, to the TL community, because it was thanks to all of you that I began to really develop my interest in this beautiful game.
Thank you, to StarCraft. For teaching me how to be truly passionate, and for teaching me how to prioritize the things that truly matter.
From this, I've grown out of that melodramatic teenage mentality I once had, and I've learned to balance my life between family and friends, and between school and leisure. Thank you.
Sorry, idle thoughts:
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When I was in Bronze league, I used to do this REALLY weird build copied from Spanishiwa where you go hatchery first into spawning pool and take a fast third, and you don't get gas until like the fucking nine minute mark and instead just litter spine crawlers EVERYWHERE. Spanishiwa could pull it off, but being a Bronze leaguer, it's needless to say that it didn't work nearly as well for me. However, playing like this taught me macro what with you essentially only making drones and overlords after you have your static defense up.
However, I did crack up a bit when I found this build order scribbled into my old notebook. I believe it's called the Icefisher build.
However, I did crack up a bit when I found this build order scribbled into my old notebook. I believe it's called the Icefisher build.
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I'm looking to get promoted to Diamond soon as a Zerg player, but I'm also considering switching to Terran. Any tips for this? This switch is partly influenced by the fact that I've been exposed to a large amount of just incredible Terran players, and I'm started to really admire the game play style of the race.
(I used to hate Terran players. I used to get so mad whenever I lost a base race scenario because the guy flew his CC into a corner. T-T)
(I used to hate Terran players. I used to get so mad whenever I lost a base race scenario because the guy flew his CC into a corner. T-T)
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Bomber is my all-time favorite player. Followed closely by Life and Jaedong, and I also like KawaiiRice. I don't really know why I do, but I do enjoy watching his streams when I can, even though when he does turn his stream on it's usually ~two in the morning for me. as;flskwe
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My brother goes to UVA, so every once in a while when we visit him on campus we see a couple of cars with "UVA vs. VT: Family Feud" stickers on them. My brother thinks that we should find a "League of Legends vs. StarCraft: Family Feud" sticker for the hell of it. I think it would be funny. Do these exist?
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