Game Over, or the End of Fun

I turned 12 and an uncle gave me the hot new computer game: Tomb Raider. On the cover was a voluptuous woman in mini-shorts holding two large-caliber pistols in a seductive pose: Lara Croft. I learned to be prejudiced; or rather, to follow my own intuition. The cover looked like crap to me, which made me suspect the game would be too. I installed it. Double-clicked the desktop icon. Black screen and then back to the desktop. I couldn't play it. The Pentium 166 that my father's meager salary had managed to buy in installments didn't have the capacity to run it. Suspicion confirmed: a game you can't play is crap.

I had the same feeling about soccer. I was born without enough skill to play it in even a remotely decent way. That's why I always thought soccer was crap, because I couldn't play it. I never said it out loud for fear of being lynched in a country where people literally kill each other over the ball.

I took the Tomb Raider CD and went to the video game shop where it had been bought for me, to exchange it. A place where they'd sell you Resident Evil telling you: "This one's about aliens, bro." Browsing through a binder of PC game covers, I chose one titled StarCraft (SC). Because of the cover, obviously. Prejudice confirmed, once again. I waited for the guy at the shop to go get the bootleg CD and that was it. Transaction complete.

I got home. Installed the game. Double-click, a few seconds of uncertainty and boom!, the Pentium 166 ran it without issues. It opened with an excessively high-quality cinematic. Almost movie-grade. I played twelve hours straight.

StarCraft: RTS perfection

Created the same year Zidane schooled Ronaldo's Brazil, 1998, by Blizzard Entertainment (a massive online games company), SC is an RTS (Real Time Strategy) video game. When it came out, we just called it "strategy," period. The difference between an RTS and a classic strategy game is that the latter is turn-based, like Risk or chess. In RTS games, gameplay is continuous; it doesn't stop; there are no turns. SC is a strategy game in which you basically need to do three things to achieve the final objective: defeat your opponent.

1) Gather resources.
2) Build a base.
3) Construct an army.

In the SC universe, three races of living beings compete for territory: Protoss, Terran, and Zerg. The galaxy is too small for them, so they must exterminate one another. The species are interrelated in a rock-paper-scissors triad. The three factors that make up the interrelation are: speed, strength, and cost. Terrans are faster than Protoss but slower than Zerg. Terrans are more "expensive" to produce than Zerg but cheaper than Protoss, and in turn they are stronger than Zerg but weaker than Protoss. Battles take place on specific maps with limited amounts of space and resources, which determines the difficulty level of a specific map and the number of players it can support. The game could be played against the artificial intelligence or in multiplayer.

Second encounter: June 2002

Around the time I was 15, the vast majority of people my age went out clubbing. Not me. I wore sweatpants until I was 17. So my nights out had little to nothing to do with going to clubs.

The novelty that year in the neighborhood was Tera's cyber cafe. It was open almost all night. It was run by its owner, Tera, a rather grimy Korean who spent twenty-four hours a day at the place. He bathed with a faucet in the yard, out in the open, and lived on a mezzanine in the shop whose only furniture was a wrecked mattress. A mattress he used to screw hookers, depending on the time of night.

The first time I went with two friends. We paid four pesos and played for two hours on LAN. It was the first time I played Counter-Strike. Bored, I started chatting with Tera's employee, a scrawny being who looked like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and went by Galford. I told him I played SC; he said he played with Tera. We played for eight minutes. He destroyed me.

While my body was still warm, Galford told me it was impossible to beat Tera. That day I stayed late waiting to see him play. It was impressive; he barely used the mouse and gave all the orders to his units using the keyboard. His fingers reached grotesque speeds. It seemed like the Korean had some kind of biological superiority when it came to gaming.

Third encounter: 2011

I bought the online version of StarCraft II. Updated my Battle.net account (Blizzard's multiplayer platform that enables online play and is the largest in the world), lit a joint, and got ready to play. I was interested in the multiplayer option. I wanted to measure my skills against human opponents. I logged in with the nickname "JuanPeron."

I played the first match. Lost miserably. Played the second. Lost again, embarrassingly. Played the third. Lost. The fourth. Lost. The fifth. Lost. The sixth. A-N-N-I-H-I-L-A-T-I-O-N. The seventh. Lost. The eighth. Lost. I got frustrated. Lit the second joint of the night and tried to coolly analyze how I'd reached such a deplorable state of existential anguish. I considered myself a good player. Even with the psychoactives working on my neurons, I told an acquaintance, Nacho, who was also playing SC II, about the experience.

The following week, we got together to play. As for getting laid, forget about it. We ordered Chinese food and Nacho started showing me how to play in Pro mode. He hammered the keyboard frantically with one hand while moving the mouse all over the place with the other. Focused. Not a second of distraction. In less than ten minutes, the enemy bases were under constant siege. The opponent surrendered and conceded the match. The same thing again, again, and again. By the time he finished, he was wiped out. We scarfed down what was left of the chow mein and Nacho left.

I couldn't quite understand what had just happened. My easygoing way of playing, savoring each match, seemed archaic. I had become an obsolete player. The constant repetition of finger movements on the keyboard constituted a new way of playing. It was no longer about enjoying the game. From the way Nacho played, I suspected that playing had become something very similar to working. Little remained of the joy of the game, of playing for the sake of playing. This was something else. I had seen this once before at Tera's. The Korean at the cyber cafe played the same way.

It's all the Koreans' fault

The abysmal difference between playing SC and SC II is strictly the responsibility of South Korea. Let me explain: by one of those random quirks of humanity, SC became a sensation in South Korea. As early as 2000, KeSPA (Korea e-Sports Association) was already operating, an association approved by the South Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism, created to promote the nascent e-sports industry. By 2002, the two main channels dedicated to e-games (Ongamenet and MBCGame) partnered with KeSPA and created two SC leagues featuring a select group of professional players. Matches would be broadcast live and prize money would be distributed to the winners. Between both leagues, they gave out 4 million dollars in prizes until last year, when they were discontinued to migrate to SC II.

The market exploded. Leagues multiplied, television broadcast schedules expanded, and thus a simple strategy game made in the United States became a national sport in Korea. Globalization, they call it. A league final once drew 50,000 people to watch it live and was viewed by several million across the country on television.

Tech brands like Samsung and Intel, and Korean telecom companies like SK Telecom and KT, were quick to support the new industry. In exchange for sponsorship, they got tons of advertising on the most-watched Korean programs. From these leagues would emerge a legion of players who constantly pushed SC to its limits, perpetually updating gameplay strategies and match competitiveness.

As a case in point, we can highlight Lim Yo-Hwan, one of the most iconic players of SC Brood War. Under his alias "SlayerS_BoxerS," he won over 500 televised league matches and two World Cyber Games Championships. He currently earns 400,000 dollars annually, plus an extra 90,000 from sponsors, according to esportsearnings.com.

The Koreans' great innovation in the game was using the keyboard for a very high percentage of army coordination. The game was originally designed to be played with mouse and keyboard, but most human beings played almost exclusively with the mouse. The Koreans exploited a secondary game function in an astonishing way: hotkeys. A hotkey is a shortcut that lets you give an order by pressing a single key on the keyboard instead of clicking the same order with the mouse on the game interface.

This allowed the Koreans to take coordination to a truly extreme level and develop frenetic playstyles. The game thus became attractive to a large audience, as match times shortened considerably and became much more exciting for spectators to watch.

To get an idea of how serious the prominent use of the keyboard became, a metric was created to calculate each player's actions per minute. The APM (Actions Per Minute) index. Based on this, it was calculated that a beginner player has an APM of 50 and a professional player at least 300. It's worth noting that professionals' APMs often contain repetitions of previously given orders. The phenomenon is called SPAM and refers to non-productive actions that repeat commands already issued.

What had started as an innocent form of entertainment was reaching the status of work.

The universalization of the Korean model

Almost ten years after SC's launch, Blizzard announced the development of StarCraft II (SC II) on May 19, 2007, at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational in Seoul, South Korea. The choice of location for the announcement was not innocent. Blizzard would attempt to replicate SC's success in Korea but on a global scale. In 2010, it released the new version of the video game. It was a hit: before that year was over, it had sold 4.5 million units.

The most important modifications to the game came in the experience. You can't play without an internet connection and a Battle.net account. The company created special servers for each continent and a separate one for South Korea. The multiplayer mode now features a league ranking system in which all players are immersed. Competition and rankings became a central part of the game. You can't play matches against other players that fall outside the ranking system. All players have a record of their wins and losses, and based on that they are placed in bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and diamond leagues. This innovation led Western players to emulate the Korean style in order to improve their own game and avoid being stuck in the lower leagues.

By 2012, Blizzard held the first SC II world league, the Battle.net World Championship Series, which turned SC II competition into a global affair, in the style of the ATP World Tour.

Some conclusions

The preceding exploration of SC makes clear the transformation it underwent, from a minor strategy game to a commercially successful experience on a global scale.

The fundamental consequence of universalizing the South Korean experience was transforming a game originally designed for entertainment into work. The globalization of rankings and the focus on multiplayer mode subsumed the game into a high-performance competitive dynamic in which a large majority is symbolically rewarded (through virtual rankings) and a minority is monetarily rewarded (through tournament prizes). A minority to which that large majority aspires to belong.

The boundary of play (free of all self-interest) blurs and one enters the terrain of competitiveness. The vast majority of players today focus much more on perfecting their game than on simply having fun. The current player is focused on climbing the rankings more than on enjoying the experience. They spend a large part of their time watching strategy videos, reading about different ways to build a more efficient army, or analyzing which maps are most advantageous for them. Their attitude toward the game is far from leisurely. It more closely resembles the maxim from the opening theme song of the cartoon series Pokemon: "I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was."

This mode subsumes the game into a logic more characteristic of capital, that is, using free time productively. You no longer play for the sake of playing (the principle of leisure is free action) but rather play to increase your ranking, to improve your win-loss ratio, or to ascend to the major leagues. The South-Korean StarCraft way of life.

However, the paradox of working at playing persists in a select group of players who are rewarded with money (or salaried?). At the same time, it functions as a model for millions of players whose only role in the industry is that of consumers.

Despite the apparent paradox of being paid to play, there is something very clear: anything that produces surplus value can be a job. Period. This is where the paradox ends. Capital allows you to do whatever you want, as long as it generates money.

Epilogue

Despite the globalization of the way of playing StarCraft that was forged in Korea, the Koreans still maintain hegemony in mastering the game. The last edition of the Battle.net World Championship Series was won by a Korean. And it seems this hegemony is not at any risk. These guys' capacity to process information is virtually limitless. In the not-so-distant future, a group of young South Koreans commanding an army of Samsung androids will take over the world, from their computers. It will all be over in fifteen minutes.

This piece was originally published on NAN on April 24, 2014.