Past the half-hour mark now, and a poll of the audience indicated a fifty-fifty split: anyone’s game. During our recent conversation, Plott explained to me that Scarlett is notorious for “carefully sneaking around these huge, possibly game-ending mistakes, and she’s so close, and you want to yell at her, like, ‘Stop it! Either attack or don’t!’ But she’s utterly patient.” Watching the game unfold, I couldn’t discern what those mistakes might be, but I detected a ratcheting up of anticipation in the crowd’s reactions, and in the commentators’ tone, and gathered that she had skirted danger successfully. When the situation grows dire, the weaker player is expected to type “gg,” meaning “Good game”-a white flag.īack to the broadcast: “This is looking increasingly excellent for Bomber right now.” We were a little more than a dozen minutes deep, and the momentum had reversed completely, such that the commentators would soon be discussing Scarlett’s “terrible situation.” So much for that vaunted gas pool. The ultimate goal, of course, is to annihilate one’s opponent, yet tradition and courtesy frown on drawing out the inevitable, and a loser who fights to the last is not being courageous but wasting everyone’s time. Economic advantages compound, and an early lead is more likely to be extended than merely clung to, let alone overcome. Comebacks are not as straightforward as in, say, baseball, where a run is a run and play starts anew each inning. There is no definitive scoreboard, just a variety of economic indicators, which describe potential rather than success. Firefights broke out every so often, seldom lasting more than five or ten seconds before one side retreated to focus efforts elsewhere and keep its army intact-the micro game ceding to the macro, in the parlance. With time, the red bugs received assistance from winged dragons flying in formation-mutalisks, or “mutas.” Red was fast. Occasionally, the marines were flanked by friends (reapers) who appeared to be wearing jet packs. I saw blue robo-soldiers (Bomber’s Terran marines) and red, buglike creatures (Scarlett’s Zerglings) scurrying around an apocalyptic space station-which seemed, despite the absence of any natural light, to be sprouting green shrubbery. The right hand, meanwhile, darts and clicks with a mouse, contrapuntally, so frantic that carpal-tunnel syndrome and tendinitis are common side effects.īut that’s not what I was seeing as I reviewed the historic footage. an élite practitioner’s left hand, as it manipulates the keyboard, can appear almost to be playing Chopin. “That’s what this is like.” The piano reference was not arbitrary top-level StarCraft requires as many as three hundred actions per minute, or A.P.M. “Imagine playing a concerto on a piano, and if you miss one note the entire orchestra stops playing and you’re kicked off and you lose your job,” Sean Plott, one of the official commentators on the Scarlett-Bomber match, told me recently. Chess may soon be eclipsed as the standard-bearer of competitive I.Q. Academic researchers now use StarCraft II-the “drosophila” of brain science, as one paper suggested-when studying people who expertly perform cognitively complex tasks. It’s as if Garry Kasparov had to plot a pawnless endgame while simultaneously harvesting minerals, building fuel extractors, and searching in vain for Spassky’s queen. In the early stages, players cannot see one another’s armies, and must dispatch scouts to illuminate darkened corners they must also develop economies, with which to fund the inevitable battles. (In this instance, it was called Habitation Station, and shaped somewhat like a butterfly.) Instead of black or white, players choose from among three “races,” called Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, with different strengths and vulnerabilities. But the analogy breaks down in countless ways.
![scarlett starcraft scarlett starcraft](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095ee06552fa0be682dfba/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/141124_r25799.jpg)
![scarlett starcraft scarlett starcraft](https://www.gamereactor.eu/media/59/scarlettbecomesfirst_2355953b.jpg)
StarCraft, a video game, is often compared to chess: it is strategic and extremely difficult, requiring a mathematical cast of mind, and, unlike many other video games, with their scrolling or first-person vantages, it affords a bird’s-eye perspective of the board, or map. Bomber is walking into the worst possible situation.” Scarlett, the most accomplished woman in e-sports, is known for her macro mutalisk style and kick-ass creep spread.