The Uptalk Menace

A week I attended a talk by Ellen Reeves, Senior Editor at Change.org.  She also happened to have studied irony and sarcasm at HGSE’s Project Zero and had trained with Second City, which did nothing but endear her to me with all my years attempting to create theatrical works of art with other clueless middle schoolers at various afterschool programs.  Her primary role at this event, though, was as author of Can I Wear My Nose Ring to the Interview?, a guide to business networking presented through the immediately compelling lens of going after your first job.

As a perennial people person, I understood much of what she was getting at with her tips on how to make instant and lasting connections with people who might be helpful to know in the job search process.  As a linguistics concentrator, though, something stuck out to me in her dizzying array of do’s and don’ts.  “Be careful not to use uptalk,” she instructed us.  “Uptalk is when you sound like all of your sentences are questions?  When you talk like this?  It’s very valley-girl and it doesn’t make a good impression.”  The lesson hammered home, she moved on.

This 10-second sound byte fascinated me because I’ve rarely heard the term “uptalk” used or the concept specifically addressed outside of the rarified atmosphere of a Harvard linguistics classroom.  A couple years ago I took a course called “Prosody and Intonation” as part of my concentration – it was the first course dealing with this particular subject, and in it I learned all about the voice’s various rises and falls in pitch during speech and what these undulations mean for the structure and the meaning of the utterances.  Here’s what our textbook (English Intonation: An Introduction by J.C. Wells) had to say about uptalk:

Since about 1980 a new use of a rising tone on statements has started to be heard in English.  It is used under circumstances in which a fall[ing tone] would have been used by an earlier generation (and a fall is still felt to be more appropriate by most native speakers of English … It is speculated that it originated in New Zealand, although other claimed sources are Australia, California, and British regional accents. (37)

Textbook contrast between “standard” and “uptalk” intonation: [sound file here]

Well, I never!  The slight consternation in Mr. Wells’ otherwise persistently objective tone raises some warning flags.  There is a generation gap here between the linguistically conservative vanguard and the young upstarts, whose rather scandalous way of imbuing statements with a rising intonation is a recent outbreak from the rapidly evolving, mongrelized speech of linguistic communities on the fringe.  New Zealand and Australia are not where proper English comes from; neither is California, with its valley girls and noveau riche, nor regional British accents (see, for example, the Cockney accent). 

If there’s any further doubt as to the venerated prosodic establishment’s take on youngsters’ lack of prosodic assertiveness,  watch a bit of this clip of British writer, actor/comedian, and language pundit (also, apparently, national treasure) Stephen Fry on the talk show 101:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hnABeM2I7c#t=7m55s

[Stephen Fry sounds off somewhat caustically on “Australian Question Intonation,” aka uptalk, calling it “the language of the Sunny Delight generation.”]

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no better way than this to get amazing press if you happen to be a young, fresh-faced sociophonetic phenomenon trying to get your name on people’s lips.  When acclaimed British culture-mongers and speakers at Harvard alumni events (not to mention J. C. Wells) denounce you as as pestilential influence on the genteel English of the upper middle class, you know you’ve hit the top.  Note also that Fry cites young adults in California (i.e. “valley girls”) as well as the offending Australians in his assessment of uptalk’s origins and attributes its spread to popular American and Australian television shows which appeal to those in their teens and twenties (Buffy, Neighbours, etc.).  Uptalk not only psycholinguistically irritates older and more literary/professional folk, it also has become in its own way emblematic of what the previous generation sees as superficial pop culture values in their children.  Wells’ book has very specific advice to those wishing to improve the fluency of their English with adjustments in tone and prosody:

What should the learner of EFL [English as Foreign Language] do about uptalk?

• If you were born before about 1980, do not use uptalk.
• If you were born later, you can imitate its use by native speakers but do not overdo it.  Uptalk is never essential.  Bear in mind that using uptalk may annoy older people listening to you. (38)

Uptalk is apparently the bratty youngest child who is only invited to weddings because the rest of his family has to be there and who does not understand the meaning of being seen but not heard.

But is uptalk truly limited to those born after 1980?  If there were adult public speakers who used the “pardon-question rise” instead of a default falling tone in making assertive statements, would these adults automatically become linguistic pariahs?  Apparently not – one such person was elected to the highest political office in America.  The Language Log, a collective blog edited by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman, reported in December of 2005 that then-President George W. Bush’s speeches on Iraq had been changing recently in an interesting way: the President was using more and more uptalk.  Here’s a sound clip of the beginning of his Dec 12, 2005 speech, which “leads with 18 seconds of phrases with final rises”:

http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/BushPhillyX1.wav

Why in the world would the most politically powerful man on Earth have to end his statements with a tonal pattern that sounds, at first glance, to indicate little more than insecurity?  Liberman provides an intriguing discussion with academic references in another post which questions the linguistic establishment’s dismissive conclusions on the significance of uptalk, appropriately titled “This is, like, such total crap?”

At any rate, it seems the only solid conclusions about uptalk are that it is a recent phenomenon, it is often perceived as having originated from certain linguistically marginal areas of the English-speaking world, and that it’s here to stay.  The Bush example shows, however, that as with many other linguistic phenomena, the connotations of uptalk may be mostly contextual.  If the President is giving a somber speech about a war, the prosodic patterns he uses may – upon analysis – be phonetically identical to those a valley girl talking on the phone with her friends, but would anyone aside from a phonetician say they are the same phenomenon?

EPIC PHOTO DROP: Mass Madness 15 (SSBM)

April 19th, 2009

It started off kinda quiet, with about 20 people around at 1pm.

 

Chairs?  We don’t need no chairs.

 

 

We do, however, need TOs – thanks MattDotZeb and Questor!

Game Universe wall of fame with SSBM “winners” from 06?  What?

 

KevinM and HaileyM in matching blue shirts team up for glory.

Irish Mafia (standing), soon to be Mango fanboy.

The two of them match so nicely!  Poor Bowser’s feeling neglected.

Still waiting for the SPOC crew to get there.

Doubles tournament bracket at the very start of the event … who will win???

 

FINALLY the SPOC crew arrives!  Sadly no Philadelphians in tow, but at least the teams tournament can start.

 

Alukard and JMan in matching red hoodies chillin after a hectic drive.

Whaddya know … it’s MANGO!  Gmoney I liked your haircut.

Awwww DJN showing some bunny ears love.

G$ is sketchy, Mango is … sketched out?

Playing some SF4 during downtime.

MattDotZeb may seem to like his oreos, but it’s really all about the gallon jug of whole milk.

KevinM’s looking mad – probably because his bowser likes Mango better.

Gamer bondage?

JMan rockin the DOUBLE CONTROLLERS OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!

JMan’s watching me play so he can get some tips.

This is what Mango does when you ask him to pose for a picture.  Be forewarned.

Alukard in da HOWWWWWWSE!

DJN with his dog tags and Kwan with his … Popeye face?

The NYT – Back on My Good Side

As anybody who follows me on twitter or Facebook or gchat or AIM or MSN (or talks to me in real life, but who does that if they can just talk to me on the internets?) could probably guess by now, I’m pretty pleased with the recent article in the New York Times on my favorite up-and-coming eSports phenomenon – the Collegiate StarLeague (CSL).  The CSL, which is the brainchild of Mona "Hazel" Zhang (recent second-place winner in the SC2GG Commentator Idol), a freshman at Princeton University, recently held a showmatch between the Princeton CSL team and a StarCraft team at Qinghua University in China.  Qinghua is a pretty big name – think of it as the Yale of China to Beijing University’s Harvard.  I’m not sure how they organized the showmatch, which was broadcast semi-live off of replays by Cholera on ustream, but I’m sure Hazel has friends there or something.

Anyway, the Princeton folks took it upon themselves to make the showmatch into a spectator event – they found space in a building on campus and had a projector showing the games on a screen with commentators sitting in front of the audience MSL-style. 

Props to Jack Gang at Princeton for the pictures.

Anyhow, a reporter from the New York Times had taken an interest in the CSL recently and attended the showmatch to get a sense for what eSports events are like.  The resulting article was a commendable piece of work and I recommend you go check it out if you haven’t already. 

 

The interesting part to me was the reporter’s focus on the "C" of the CSL via various academically-themed references to StarCraft and gratuitous prestigious school name-dropping.

"In recent months, 27 colleges — including Harvard, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State, Texas, Cal-Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Oberlin — have joined the league to play StarCraft … Ke Wan, a graduate student from China who is studying operations research, detailed each world’s character traits: Zergs are prolific and fast, Terrans are sophisticated strategists, and individual Protoss units are extremely powerful. Wan drew a geopolitical analogy. ‘Zerg is like China,’ he said. ‘It depends a lot on its large population. The U.S. is Protoss because it emphasizes the value of the individual. And Terran is Russia or the former Soviet Union, a huge high-tech war machine.’"

I’m not sure if I’d actually agree with Ke Wan’s analysis, but its validity is definitely arguable and it helps people who don’t know what StarCraft is relate to the game. 

The article also has the requisite paragraph on South Korea’s StarCraft scene, again with references to American sports figures that give the non-gamer audience a better idea of what it’s like across the ocean.  Seems like she’s taking a page from my book, but I highly doubt anyone at the New York Times has read my editorials.

While I applaud the way the reporter captures the hopefulness and ambition of the CSL in its dream to make eSports a permanent part of the college scene, the last two sentences of the article are a little iffy to me.

"’It’s definitely a very beautiful game,’ Liu told the crowd, keeping up the standard between-game banter. ‘We’re looking to get more people off the athletic field and into the gaming room.’"

Is that really what college eSports is about?  This quotation makes it seem like eSports has to compete with traditional sports for players and fans, whereas I’ve always maintained that the two can appeal to different populations and thereby get more people involved in competitive activities on the college level.  The beauty of eSports is partly that humans everywhere have an unquenchable fascination with competition, and not just of the athletic variety, and bringing competitive gaming to the fore allows many people who never considered themselves into sports spectatorship to enjoy a kind of competition they connect with in a more satisfying way.

Regardless, between the press in the Daily Princetonian, the Harvard Crimson, and the New York Times as well as the new initiatives which WCG USA is taking on (Ultimate Gamer, the WCG Fighter Club), I say fie on those who claim American eSports is dead (also apparently MLG is bringing on a new game – wonder what that might be?).  We’re entering a new era, and it’s looking pretty bright and shiny in spite (or perhaps partly because of) the disheartening economic backdrop worldwide.

The NY Times Knows Nothing (about eSports)

I saw this little gem of an article a few days ago (actually it was pointed out to me by several people), and I’m pretty irate about it.  Let’s go through the reasons why this is terrible reporting, shall we?  First the nitty-gritty, and then the more substantial philosophical bits.

First off, the title: “Virtual Leagues Fold, Forcing Gamers to Find Actual Jobs.”  This sounds like something out of The Onion.  “Actual jobs”?  Would they say that if the NFL folded suddenly and a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys had to work in an electronics factory to bring home the bacon?  Would they say that if the World Series of Poker folded and some mustachioed straight-faced card shark had to start selling Xerox machines for a living?  Why this implication that professional video game players create nothing of cultural or economic value when they ply their trade?  Are gamers somehow cheating the American people out of their hard-earned dollars by getting paid to do something they’re good at?

Second, the “s” at the end of “Leagues.”  As far as this article goes (and as far as the major American eSports industry goes), the only league that has folded in recent memory has been the CGS, which the reporter does take pains to point out in this piece.  The World Series of Video Games also folded … in late 2007.  So since plural nouns usually indicate that more than one instance of the entity under discussion exists, where is the other “virtual league” that would legitimize that wayward “s”?  “Major companies have pulled sponsorships and several tournaments have folded” – great, but a couple sponsorships and a few tournaments do not constitute a league.  Tournaments especially can range from your big-budget $100k affairs to a bunch of kids pitching in $5 each on Saturday afternoon in front of a TV and an Xbox. 

Let’s also talk about the alt-text of the page itself: “Economy Takes the Controls from Some Video-Game Pros.”  This title all but bashes the reader over the head with the implication that the CGS (and whatever other eSports leagues have, apparently, gone bust) went under just because of the recession.  This “fact” is not supported anywhere in the article besides via Craig Levine’s very general statement on the effect of the recession with regards to eSports.  Nowhere in the article does it say that the CGS folded for economic reasons.  It does say that the league shut down unexpectedly after only two years of operation (out of a three year plan, not five), and it does say that DirecTV officials declined to comment, and so of course that means the league folded for financial reasons.  There couldn’t be any other possible reason why a large and very well-funded organization that was garnering decent TV ratings would just suddenly shut down.

It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that DirecTV, who was running the CGS, suddenly changed hands from News Corporation to Liberty Media late last year, would it?  Of course not.  Everyone knows that when corporate subsidiaries get suddenly handed over from one media giant to another, everything just keeps on trucking like nothing ever happened.  Also it makes no difference that News Corporation was even reported in the article to have started the league along with DirecTV.  Therefore, the only possible reason why an internationally acclaimed eSports league with 18 divisions worldwide would fail would be because of an economic downturn.  Of course.

And just to bring the point home, in case you netizens can’t read between the lines, let’s just stick in a poster child sob story about a guy who was making $30k a year just to play video games and is instead probably making more money at Sam’s Club now:

Until recently, Emmanuel Rodriguez worked on a stage, under bright lights, amid intense competition and before cheering fans. He was a professional video-game player, and a world champion.

Enlarge This Image

Now he works at the customer service desk of a Sam’s Club in Dallas.

Look at how unglamorous his new, “actual” job is!  He can’t win any pretty trophies and $5,000 prizes!  What a fall from grace!  Obviously a perfect parallel to the white-collar analysts on Wall Street who are now useless to society after their collective efforts introduced the term “sub-prime” into all of our vocabularies in a most unwelcome and unexpected way.

“The professional sport of gaming has nearly collapsed,” the reporter moans.  Tell that to the World Cyber Games, which has a fairly successful reality TV show on the SciFi channel right now.  Tell that to the MLG, whose CEO Matthew Bromberg boasts in the very same article that his league has “driven everybody else out of the business” (you keep thinking that about the CGS, Mr. Bromberg).  Tell that to Germany, Sweden, China, and South Korea, whose eSports scenes are still doing pretty darn well, and South Africa, where eSports is starting to gain a major foothold.  Yes, because one America-based eSports league has gone under, for reasons that are purely economic, eSports in the entire world is taking its last gasps of air.

Please forgive my heavy sarcasm, gentle readers.  It is not often that I’ll come out so strongly against mainstream media coverage of eSports.  We need as much of that as we can get.  But I strongly object to the poor quality of reporting in this article – the lack of concrete facts, the inaccuracy of reported facts, and the heavily-biased perspective the reporter takes on the issue.  It is as though the reporter went in looking for yet another story on how the recession has strangled the hopes of entire industries, and eSports just happened to wander into his sights.  Add to this fallacy the idea that being a pro gamer isn’t an “actual job,” and you have a definite recipe for getting up in Peanut’s grill.  I only ask that the New York Times and other such historically reputable news outlets take the time and effort to do their jobs – bringing accurate, unbiased (well, when it’s not political) news to the public.  Esports is enough of a black sheep in the eyes of the American mainstream: we don’t need you muddying the waters with your dire implications and stealing hope away from those who look to competitive and pro gaming to more accurately reflect the changes in the world entertainment landscape.

On the plus side, this article was in the Sports section.  Esports fighting!

The Greatest (Gamer) Generation

“The old gameboy Pokemon has made a comeback in our suite,” my friend Devon said over lunch.  I assumed for an ignorant moment that he meant he’d found an old gameboy and decided to fire up Red or Blue or Yellow or Crystal or Gold or Taupe again for nostalgia’s sake.  “We found a ROM and started playing on emulator.”

“And didn’t you figure out how to battle each other over wireless?” one of his (non-Pokemon playing) suitemates chimed in.

“Yeah,” Devon confirmed.  “We’re 90% there.  The computers are clearly connecting, but the game requires you to use in-game save before you do certain things, and since there’s no actual hardware to save to we’re trying to figure that out.”  He paused to recall more details of the process.  “We found an emulator that specifically allows for network connectivity and everything.”

His partner in crime in the Pokemon experiment added his two cents.  “Hey, do you think this only works over a network or could it happen over the internet?  Like if you know IP addresses?”

Devon paused again to consider.  “It could work.  Who’d be interested?  Maybe Ben … Chris …”

At this point my eyes were as wide as Jigglypuff’s as the possibilities started flooding in.  I’m no stranger to emulators myself, and this past year I’ve played through a couple SNES Final Fantasy and Zelda games on my laptop.  There were definitely some nights I stayed up until 6 or 7am fighting through strange caverns of monsters so all the members of my party could expend precious MP on X-Zone and Meteor and the other awesome Espr attacks.  Then I remembered the days when I had a lime green Gameboy Color back in 1999 or so, the only piece of video game-specific equipment my mom ever let me buy, and logged endless hundreds of hours working methodically through the different flavors of Pokemon long after my little sister gave up on Ash’s adventures.  Give me 10 minutes and I’d be able to come up with almost all of the original 151 Pokemon. 

And how many others like me are there out there?  Wikipedia says the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color combined have sold 118.69 million units worldwide and the Pokemon franchise is the second most successful and lucrative video game-based franchise in the world (behind the Mario series).  Cumulative sales of Pokemon video games, again according to Wikipedia, have reached more than 186 million copies.  It’s not a stretch to assume that a very significant chunk of those sales were for the first and second generation Gameboy games – Red, Blue, Yellow, Gold, Silver, and Crystal.  There are millions of people out there who were preteens in the late 90’s and know what it means to get down to your very last Super Potion fighting for a badge.  The frustration of seeing that Charmeleon you traded and traded back fall asleep on the front lines because it doesn’t think you’re good enough to give it orders.  The calculations involved in deciding exactly when to offer your Eevee a life-changing Evolution Stone so that it keeps its most useful Normal attacks while developing its more powerful Special attacks (and that’s all in addition to the agony of deciding what sort of form you want it to take).  Millions of people who were probably bored by the ease of beating the NPC “trainers” but never got a chance to battle as many live human beings as they wanted to because of the limitations of time, equipment, and strict parents.  And they all (or almost all) own a personal computer and have access to the internet.  Nostalgia by itself is compelling, but having a second chance to become the Pokemon trainer you always knew you could be and proving yourself to other like-minded people out there is unbelievably seductive.

Then it hit me – the ability to have this kind of second chance is completely unprecedented in the history of interactive entertainment.  Of course people revisited their favorite childhood games before video games came around – that’s how corporate softball leagues became a cliche, and parents have a time-honored duty to play Monopoly with their kids at some point in their lives.  But sports favor the endless physical energy of youth, and board games are too constrained by the roll of the dice and the limited possibilities for game play.  There’s only so many times you can build a hotel on Park Street and feel a rush from knowing you’ll have tons of fake money coming in over the next few turns.  The best video games – those that grow with you and are fun to play no matter what stage of cognitive development the players are in – don’t lose their appeal over time in the way traditional games do. 

And this is not just any genre of classic video games we’re talking about, but those with good multiplayer functionality.  When you have a good multiplayer game like StarCraft or Super Smash Bros. that’s been around for ages, as long as there are other people in the world who are still interested in the game, there is no end to the challenge and discovery that makes games fun.  A 10-year-old can pick up Street Fighter and have a blast playing against his 10-year-old friends, and then a decade later walk into an arcade and light up at the prospect of playing that exact same version of Street Fighter again with a buddy because there are still new and exciting possibilities to explore when you’re smarter and more dexterous than your 10-year-old self.  There is (little or) no fear of muscle strain or not being able to perform as well as you did years ago because you’re more concerned about how your jeans will look if you slide to first base.  There’s no frustration with losing key cards or dice or game pieces when you open up your dusty old game of Risk.  The quarters still fit in the machine’s slots, and although you may have to dig out more of them from your wallet than you remember, the clink that the coins make as they fall into the hidden recesses of the big metal box in front of you is the same.  That sound is the promise of a new challenge wrapped up in wonderful memories.  That sound is unlike anything the world has ever seen.

The phenomenon that I’m discussing is limited in a certain way to a very particular generation.  We’re in college, now, or we’ve been out of college for a few years, or maybe we’re at the tail end of high school.  We grew up in a world where video games were just starting to proliferate, and so there are hordes and hordes of us who saw the development of a new age of entertainment and were able to share it in a special way.  Everyone played Tetris.  Everyone played Mario Kart.  Everyone had a SNES.  Video games were not the province of a select few who had the foresight to pick up a black box called an Atari, and yet they were not so commonplace that everyone was playing something different.  Games were not so simple that you had to be content with a couple white pixels on a black screen that represented a ping-pong ball, and games were not so complicated that you had to read endless documentation and buy a completely new system just to sit down and play. 

This was the beginning of games that were really fun, that had the graphics and the storyline to engage people for weeks on end and remain in our memories for decades.  This was the beginning of true multiplayer functionality where having a great afternoon with a friend could begin and end with an on button in front of a TV.  People of this generation were the first to adapt this new entertainment medium to the concept of being social – we were the first to integrate gaming into the way we made friends and interacted with each other.  For us, video games were not just a new pastime to become obsessed with but a foundation of our collective social and psychological makeup.  The Columbine shootings were blamed on video games, sparking a whole debate about how games affect the way people think that has only recently died down a bit.  The legacy of these formative experiences is still extraordinarily powerful for all its subtlety: I’d say at least a quarter of my 400-person dorm would play a game of Smash if given the chance, and most of them would only play the N64 version.  The games we played when we were 8-14 years old have stayed with us and evoke powerful responses in a way that few other childhood interests do.

To those of us who are fascinated by the phenomenon of international competitive and professional gaming, it sometimes seems that ages and ages have passed without any improvement in the scene.  Leagues like the Championship Gaming Series and the World Series of Video Games have come and gone, and many people wonder whether this means that gaming is not viable for competition and spectatorship in the same way that traditional sports are.  But step back a second and take a more comprehensive perspective on the evolution of gaming as entertainment.  The generation that I keep talking about is the one that forms the bedrock of competitive gaming – players and spectators, journalists and fans, entrepreneurs and developers.  We’re only now entering the workforce in a big way and seeing the possibilities for tapping into our collective gamer childhoods.  It will take a few years before we’re solid enough on our feet to demand that competitive gaming be given its rightful place in the way our grown-up selves engage with the world.  Soon, all of us who smile when we hear the phrase “do a barrel roll!” and can sing the Zelda theme for 3 minutes straight will be the ones in charge.  Soon, we won’t have to worry about authority figures telling us to stop wasting our time on video games because we’ll be the ones who make the rules and define what is a waste of time and what is worthwhile.  We are the generation on the bleeding edge of a worldwide gaming consciousness, and there are so many of us that when we start making the big bucks and becoming the core of society we will not be ignored.  Even now it’s remarkable enough when parents make playing Halo with their kids a regular recreational activity that it can inspire “gee whiz” news articles wondering at how the entertainment landscape of the civilized world has changed.  In a few years, these articles won’t be around anymore because this behavior will be normal.

Getting back to my conversation at lunch, I immediately told Devon that he should send his ideas about internet-based multiplayer Pokemon over an email list where a bunch of my friends and I discuss interesting things happening in the world today.  It is amazing and wonderful to me that innovative ideas like this can go from concept to reality to mass awareness in such little time compared to earlier eras.  The key is not to underestimate the appeal that these kinds of ideas have in the larger scheme of things.  I’m sure there are tons and tons of people out there who would love to be able to revisit Pokemon trainer battles and see if their skills at building well-rounded teams and using certain attack sequences work against peers who have grown older and wiser in the meantime.  Then someone might set up a server where people can play and forums where enthusiasts can discuss strategies, and lo and behold college students across the world can play against each other and share a passion they never knew could be reawakened in such a satisfying way.  It might not produce a real competitive scene – it might be popular for a few months and then vanish without a trace.  It might take the world by storm and produce a professional gaming league.  You just never know, and the cost of failure is so low that it would be a crime not to try to find out.  It’s all about taking chances, whether it’s trying out a new build order or taking a course on art history or putting a down payment on a house or believing in a world that doesn’t exist yet.  I don’t mean at all to belittle the high stakes of reality when I say life is a game, because, for me, in so many ways, the games we play are life.

Epic Photo Drop: Mass Madness 14

At the beginning of the tournament (or a couple hours into it, since Kwan and I arrived around 1:30) there were TONS of people.  Mostly brawlers.

 

 

As seems apparent to Mattdotzeb, tournament organization can seem a little overwhelming at times, especially when 100 people show up to play Brawl and there aren’t enough setups to go around.

 

And now … the Melee corner!

PC Chris plays some friendlies (above) while sitting in the psuedo-futuristic yet surprisingly uncomfortable gaming chairs.  That tv was ghetto.

 

 

 

 

Are you kidding me?  Kwan can totally take on the Scar-Wife team!

 

 

 

 

 

Epic 2v2 matchups deserve equally epic audience spectatorship. 

Yeah I see you there DJ Nintendo.

 

PC Chris making “the face” against various opponents.

 

 

 

MOAR 2v2 iNtEnSItY!

 

 

 

 

 

Wife battles KDJ one on one for a pulse-raising tournament match!

 

 They may not have returned triumphant, but these two get my vote for “sexiest team.”  Don’t gloat, guys, you didn’t have that much competition …

Getting Your Game On, Offline

This past weekend I hung out at the G.I.M.P.E.D. 1 melee/brawl tournament at NYU Polytechnic in New York City, not as a competitor but as a photographer, journalist, and eSports scene analyst. While I’m very interested in the Smash scene, I’m primarily associated with the StarCraft community, and therefore it may not be surprising that the number of tournaments I’ve attended in person in the States is different for each game. What may be surprising is which number is higher: I’ve been to three live Smash tournaments so far and only two StarCraft ones. If I’m so obsessed with StarCraft and getting involved in the SC scene, why is this the case? There’s a lot of factors which influence the situation, and none more salient than the nature of the two platforms themselves, and how such fundamental differences affect the purposes of the live events they inspire.

The scene at GIMPED was, I think, pretty common for a tournament of its kind. There were lots of people milling around, almost entirely male and between the ages of 15 and 25, controllers in hand. TVs were set up in rows and on tables – about 15, I’d say – and players sat in front of them while spectators mostly stood behind. KnightMare, the head organizer, walked around with a piece of paper and a microphone calling out matchups while the folks behind the registration desks looked on. It was almost impossible to distinguish between “friendlies” and actual tournament matches. Although there were some very well-known players at the event, the distribution of spectators for their games and for others’ games wasn’t that imbalanced. It was a very friendly, low key atmosphere, with people joking and trash talking and occasionally yelling “WOMBO COMBO!”

The most striking thing to me, though, was the fact that the tournament wasn’t really about having a tournament. Sure, there was money and glory on the line, but it was obvious that the primary purpose of the tournament was to serve as a social gathering. People went there to hang out with their friends and play each other in Smash – to spend an afternoon away from the daily grind of work and school and immerse themselves in a social world centered around playing a game. There was no distinction between players and spectators, except possibly for me, since I was one of the only people (if not the only person) who didn’t play at all during the four or so hours I was there. Calling it a “tournament” seemed like a misnomer or a clever cover-up for something much more genial and community-oriented than competitive. The “stars” who were there were not treated differently from other people from a social perspective, although they were somewhat limited in the people they chose to play friendlies with (due to playing ability, I’d guess).

This is not the case at all for major StarCraft tournaments (except for those in Southern California), and to a lesser extent for PC game tournaments in general. Although it’s possible to play Brawl online, there’s always the issue of lag and the impossibility of playing Melee online which encourage the live tournament scene. In StarCraft and other competitive PC games that aren’t heavily team-based, 90% of the tournaments that happen occur online. This means that there tend to be very few offline tournaments, since the hassles of bringing equipment or finding a computer lab and other hardware problems make organizing a live tournament rather unappetizing. It’s so easy to figure out brackets on iCCup and have a tournament online in one afternoon – as long as everyone shows up – that calling for an offline tournament has to offer other advantages than just being able to compete. If you’re just trying to find out who’ll get the money and the glory, why not choose a venue where the setup costs are minimal to none and participation is open to people around the world instead of just those within a 50 mile radius? It certainly makes for a higher level of play, overall, and with YouTube and live streaming anybody can see the games as they are happening or afterwards (not that this doesn’t also happen with Smash, although I think to a lesser extent).

Additionally, there’s the money issue. People in Smash are used to paying a small fee upfront to participate in a tournament, and that money is used for both venue fees and prizes. The same is not true for StarCraft tournaments unless the potential for fame and prize money is huge. After all, it’s free to play online and tournament administration online is usually the same or even better than administration at live events. Essentially, StarCraft live (or “offline”) tournaments in the States fall into two categories: small events on college campuses or large, expensive events with potential for national exposure (not the Janet Jackson Superbowl kind). Inevitably, only the latter tend to involve cash prizes.

So what happens at a big StarCraft tournament where the stakes are higher and the trappings are glitzier? Well, in comparison to the way Smash tournaments seem to blur the line between competitors and spectators during competition, at SC tournaments there’s a very clear separation. There is tension in the air and there is silence during tournament matches. People often come just to watch. The socializing largely happens at times and places separated from the tournament itself.

What sort of consequences do these differences create for the larger online community? Well, it certainly means that “amateurs” are more likely to compete in live events alongside those at a “pro” skill level in Smash. It seems the Smash scene is separated more along geographic lines than skill lines for reasons of practicality – it’s hard to get across the country or the world to play melee friendlies. High-level StarCraft players, on the other hand, compete against similarly-minded folks from any number of different countries or regions. International Smash tournaments are fairly rare, but for StarCraft it’s practically normal. It also means that Smash players have more opportunities to bond in-person with other players and become “real life” friends. I haven’t researched the language on Smashboard posts extensively, but it’s probably the case that Smash people are nicer to each other than StarCraft people because they often actually encounter each other face to face. The anonymity of online play and interaction often encourages pretty offensive behavior from StarCraft enthusiasts above and beyond your friendly trash-talk. However, the regionalism of Smash is a double-edged sword – it promotes an enormous amount of community, but if you happen to live in an area without many Smashers around you have little opportunity to hone your skills to a highly-competitive level.

In the end, both scenes have their advantages and disadvantages. Smash players may get to play in more tournaments and win more money overall, but StarCraft players can practice at a high level much more frequently even if the matches aren’t of very much consequence in terms of “rankings” (iCCup aside). The StarCraft community is cohesive across geographic boundaries of state and country, but the Smash community is more likely to produce friendly interaction unrelated to the game itself and/or face-to-face. Smash’s vibrant offline culture is a fascinating counterpoint to StarCraft’s intense online fan-based culture. I consider myself very lucky in that I get to experience both worlds although I don’t play competitively (that is, in tournaments) in either game. The moral of the story is that gaming communities are not all alike and cannot be considered as such when talking about building or expanding a competitive scene. People also shouldn’t judge other gaming communities as better or worse than their own without understanding the whole story and why the community dynamics are the way they are. At heart, we’re all gamers, but everything else is up for debate – and I find that kind of diversity beautiful.

Thanks for reading, and please leave some feedback!

smashboards link

sc2gg link

starfeeder link

G.I.M.P.E.D. in NYC!

This weekend I thought “to hell with school, I’ll go down to NYC and check out this awesome smash tournament!”  Props to KnightMare and the NYU Poly gaming club PAGE for organizing the event.  Check out the results thread to see how it all panned out!

Epic picture drop:

 

My life is a little crazy right now so I can’t write a full news article, but I hope to get something up soon!

The PeaPod – Episode 2

Hi all, Peanut here with another installment of the PeaPod, my podcast! In this episode I let loose with some of the stuff that simmers in my head whenever I think about StarCraft, and I hope you find the results interesting and informative. The mp3 version is here.

 

 

Thanks for listening, and please give me feedback! The discussion thread is here.

Terminal Eclipse for WC3

Shockwaves ran through the eSports world today as MYM announced it would cut its superstar-laden Warcraft III and StarCraft teams. The StarCraft team – featuring ace foreign players DinOt, IefNaij, and recent ESL finalist White-Ra, among others – will certainly be missed, as its stellar lineup was one of the best sources for top StarCraft play outside of Korea.

The folks at influential StarCraft fansite TeamLiquid will definitely mourn this team’s passing, as IefNaij was a frequent victor in the site’s popular Liquibition series which features top foreign players duking it out in best-of-seven 1v1s every week with live casting. It’s not a complete shock that MYM would cut its SC team, as it’s proved very difficult to maintain profitability in StarCraft outside of Korea.

It is the loss of the WarCraft III team, however, which truly resonates throughout the eSports scene – particularly the non-Korean RTS scene – because of the pure shock of seeing two of WC3’s biggest names stripped of their prestigious tag. Grubby and Moon, listed as #10 and #2 on GosuGamers’ WC3 rankings respectively, are tremendous players with genre-crossing name recognition and star power. The consequences of this seemingly abrupt decision by MYM’s parent company ESNation couldn’t be more disparate between the two, however.

Dutch Orc player Grubby, 22 years old, is second worldwide among WC3 players when it comes to the amount of prize money he’s earned during his career (almost $165,000 from 2004-2009, according to SK Gaming). According to girlfriend Cassandra’s blog, the news that the entire WC3 squad would be cut was a complete surprise to Grubby and it seems he is currently considering retiring from WC3 altogether. Moon, on the other hand, is rumored to be moving to well-known Korean StarCraft team Wemade Fox, home to the much-beloved SC pro NaDa, perhaps to prepare for a career as a pro StarCraft II player. This switch would not be completely unexpected, since it was reported a year ago at SK that Korean SC teams were already "courting" Moon after finding out that "he won more money in 2007 than any of the StarCraft pros" that year.

What’s a WarCraft III pro to do? Gravitas Gaming unexpectedly cut its WC3 division a little over a month ago even though top players ToD and HoT had brought the organization new growth and popularity in Europe, but also at that time the WC3L announced new tournament rules that many predicted would breathe new life into the league and the WC3 scene in general. The outlook seemed, on balance, cautiously positive. But if Moon and Grubby aren’t safe from the new hack-and-slash approach in vogue among teams boasting top WC3 players, who is? And with Grubby and other top WC3 pros now rumored to be seriously considering retirement while still arguably in their prime, the short list of international fan favorites will only dwindle further. If the disbanding of the legendary 4K WC3 team heralded the beginning of the end of pro WC3’s golden age, the news from MYM seems to sound its death knell.

There is certainly no shortage of up-and-coming players to fill the rosters of eSports teams, but it takes time for great players to become stars, especially with the kind of poster-child pull Moon and Grubby developed. What other European eSports stars get mobbed on the street outside high schools in China? MYM’s decision may have been fiscally responsible, as the WC3 team’s expenses were astronomical, but the lack of warning and the shock to the WC3 community may be far worse in the long run.

The RTS crowd has one more disappointing reason to just hunker down and wait for the arrival of StarCraft II.

Pictures in courtesy of GGL.com

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