The Martlet

I stay up late at night to watch androgynous Korean boys battle each other in space, and it costs me $9.99 a month.

Consider this a public confession — one that, barring further explanation, may or may not warrant my immediate castration by the Internet police.

Don’t call the cops. Allow me to explain. For roughly the same price as a beer at Bard & Banker, anybody with an Internet connection can tune into the Global Star League (GSL), South Korea’s premiere competitive Starcraft II organization, to watch professional Korean video gamers fight for the supremacy of a distant, digitally rendered galaxy.

It’s like playoff football for nerds — the kind of high-octane, sci-fi entertainment that would make Ridley Scott shit himself with envy.

In the GSL, gamers compete against one another on the virtual battlefield of Starcraft II, a real-time military strategy game released in the summer of 2010 by PC gaming juggernaut Blizzard Entertainment.

“It’s a game of economy and army management where one player has to eliminate the opposing player’s forces,” explains Timothy Tang, second-year writing student and member of the UVic Starcraft Club. “The strategy revolves around three different races, their strengths and weaknesses and how they interact with each other.”

Sponsored by companies including Pepsi and Sony, the league broadcasts monthly one-on-one tournaments on Korean national TV, which are streamed live on the Internet to an international audience that has reached over one million viewers.

Every month, 64 of the world’s most dominant alpha-nerds duke it out for prize pools worth upwards of $150 000 USD. Since its first tournament in September 2010, the GSL has awarded millions of dollars to its top players, who train with teammates and coaches for hours a day in secluded houses dedicated entirely to gaming.

Yes, these people play video games for a living.

In South Korea, Starcraft is celebrated as a legitimate sport. Pro-gamers ranging in age from 16 to 30 are given celebrity status in the same vein as Canadian Gretzkydom, playing in front of capacity stadium crowds that watch the players control their armies, obtain resources and maneuver into winning positions.

The game exploded in Korea shortly after its 1998 launch, garnering a viewership large enough to dedicate several cable television channels entirely to competitive play.

“It was televised; nothing like that had ever been done before, [the players] basically became movie stars,” says Tang, who has been following the Korean pro-scene for several years.

Until the release of its sequel in 2010, Koreans played the older version of Starcraft that was less graphically appealing, but just as competitive as the updated game. Many of the original version’s top Korean pros continue to post winning records in the newer instalment.

“They changed the game completely, except for the three main races and their core units,” he says. “Though the graphics have changed drastically, it’s a lot better now.”

While South Korea’s professional scene provides for great spectator entertainment, the game of Starcraft stretches beyond the arenas reserved for the best of the best. On the streets of Seoul, one can walk into an Internet cafe, or “PC Bang”, on any day of the week and see men and women of all ages sitting behind their monitors playing the game.

Starcraft is part of Korean culture — a gamer’s utopia some North Americans hope will eventually rub off on the Western world.

Korean Starcraft players have asserted their dominance in the competitive gaming community with an iron fist. Since the game’s release, only a handful of Westerners have been able to survive the intense competition of the world’s top league.

In the United States, organizations like the North American Starcraft League (NASL), IGN Proleague (IPL) and Major League Gaming (MLG) circuit run tournaments similar in format to GSL, though the Canadian and American players are regularly thrashed by even the lower-tier pros sent over by Korean teams.

However, the Western pro-gaming community has grown substantially in the last year. As tournaments continue to bolster their prize pools and receive higher-profile sponsorships, the drive for a competitive gaming scene brought to a mainstream audience has started to gain momentum.

Back at UVic, Tang and his teammate Bobby Li are part of a growing movement that hopes Starcraft will follow in the footsteps of professional poker, which in the last decade has exploded into popular culture. As members of the UVic Starcraft Club, they compete in the CSL, an online collegiate league that includes schools like McGill, UBC, Harvard and Columbia.

“We started sometime in 2009, when there were 26 teams, two of them were Canadian,” says Li, a third-year Biochemistry student who captains the UVic team. “Back then we weren’t very good; we had about six players that gathered around in my friend’s basement to practice because he had the best WiFi.”

“In the second season we went undefeated, but unfortunately we got knocked out in second round of the playoffs by the University of Arizona,” says Li.

UVic is currently 34th out of 54 teams in its Western division, while UBC, the highest ranked Canadian school, sits at 5th. Li believes that North American culture has been shaped by the information age, becoming more tolerant of gaming as it gets more tech-savvy.

Because of this, both he and his teammate Tang share the view that the competitive games like Starcraft II have the potential to establish themselves in the Western world as legitimate spectator sports.