I got home about an hour ago from one of the best weekends I've had in a long time. I was one of the few, the happy few, that got a ticket to Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational in Paris. A full weekend of almost nonstop geekery and gaming. I'm not going to spend a lot of space here talking about what went on there - there are lots of websites who's job it is to do that. But I do want to talk about some of the issues that the WWI brought up.
One of the biggest and for me most fun events at the WWI was the tournaments. There were community tournies and some lucky devils even got to play (and beat!) Blizz devs at Starcraft II. But there were also the 'Pro-gamer' tournaments featuring some of the world's highest ranked players beating each other down in Warcraft III, Starcraft, and WoW Arena. I'm not sure all the WoW teams were actually sponsored players - some were actually invited because they had distinguished themselves in the in-game tournaments now running. But there were some, and I'm thinking specifically of the Korean invitees who really are professionals.
The Starcraft players for example. One of the commentators on the Starcraft tournament games is a North American who lives in Korea and commentates on Starcraft matches on Korean TV. That's right - TV. Not just on a niche website. There are in fact two Korean TV stations that run 24hours coverage exclusively of Starcraft competitive play. And the players themselves do nothing but that - play Starcraft all day, every day. The aforementioned commentator informed us that professional Starcraft teams live together in large houses and practice for 10 hours a day. That's like from 9 in the morning until 7 in the evening doing nothing but play Starcraft.
There were short delays between each round of one match I watched because one of the players is contracted to watch replays of every round he plays. The kid is 17 years old, plays Starcraft 10 hours a day in a house full of other teenagers doing the same thing, and must watch the replay of every round he plays or he doesn't get paid.
The results of this Communist-style approach (think Soviet child-gymnasts of the 80's or the Chinese ones you'll see later this year) are impressive. These kids at peak performance make 300 actions per minute when playing each other. Watching them multi-task and micro and macro-manage multiple fights, fronts, and factories, is stunning.
But imagine if you learnt that Blizzard used child-labour to make its games. That each patch, or the next Diablo game is made by children in sweatshops. Would you still want to buy it?
Blizzard don't use children to make their games of course. But they were prepared to put these mechanised teens up on stage as entertainment, even ideals, for this weekend.
One of the tips you might see on loading screens for WoW says something like 'bring your friends to Azeroth, but take them to other places too'. The point being don't just have virtual friends in WoW, do things outside the game. But when they need something to fill a schedule they are still quite happy to give thousands of dollars to a parade of kids with the look of old lags, just released from prison after decades. On stage they looked almost too stunned by the bright lights of the outside world and too atrophied to lift the outsize cheques they had just won. When do these boys ever get to take their friends somewhere? Wait, when do they get to make friends?
Ex-soviet athletes often come to hate sport once they are adults. Those that were conditioned by their governments to be stars, to win Gold medals, rarely stay in sport once they have escaped. We envy them the glory and the prestige they earned while we sat in front of our TV's. But they envy us for having had lives, childhoods. We cheered and clapped for the Korean's that dominated the games this weekend. But how much will they come to despise the games they play now?
