I confess to being bewildered, still, by what is often said to be the greatest game of StarCraft II ever played. Fall, 2013. New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom. Scarlett vs. Bomber. Third game in a best-of-three series, a quarter-final in a tournament sponsored by Red Bull. It lasted about forty minutes, although I gathered, from the live commentary on the video that I have watched many times, that it nearly ended far sooner. A couple of minutes in, there came this exchange:
“Uh-oh. Oh, my God! Scarlett is going gas!”
“Oh—oh, God!”
“Gas pool! And it’s a double proxy. Bomber is walking into the worst possible situation.”
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. But the analogy breaks down in countless ways. The map changes from game to game. (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. 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. 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. Academic researchers now use StarCraft II—the “drosophila” of brain science, as one paper suggested—when studying people who expertly perform cognitively complex tasks. Chess may soon be eclipsed as the standard-bearer of competitive I.Q.
“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. “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.; an élite practitioner’s left hand, as it manipulates the keyboard, can appear almost to be playing Chopin. The right hand, meanwhile, darts and clicks with a mouse, contrapuntally, so frantic that carpal-tunnel syndrome and tendinitis are common side effects.
But that’s not what I was seeing as I reviewed the historic footage. 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. Occasionally, the marines were flanked by friends (reapers) who appeared to be wearing jet packs. With time, the red bugs received assistance from winged dragons flying in formation—mutalisks, or “mutas.” Red was fast. Blue was heavily armed. 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.
There is no definitive scoreboard, just a variety of economic indicators, which describe potential rather than success. Comebacks are not as straightforward as in, say, baseball, where a run is a run and play starts anew each inning. Economic advantages compound, and an early lead is more likely to be extended than merely clung to, let alone overcome. 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. When the situation grows dire, the weaker player is expected to type “gg,” meaning “Good game”—a white flag.
Back 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. 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. Past the half-hour mark now, and a poll of the audience indicated a fifty-fifty split: anyone’s game.
Scarlett began dropping domed pods near land bridges and other choke points, while fending off Bomber’s steady marine assaults. This was a patient strategy with, as it turned out, an explosive payoff. The pods were “burrowed banelings”—suicidal fluorescent creatures, lying in wait, like land mines. Bomber couldn’t see them, and his marines marched right into her trap, lured by the fleeing bugs.
Gg.
At last, the camera pulled back and showed human beings, on a stage. Scarlett, whose real name is Sasha Hostyn, leaped out of her seat—for the first time in her career—and took a bow before a standing ovation from the two thousand paying customers (and, perhaps, from the fifty thousand viewers watching online). Bomber, or Choi Ji Sung, hustled off without a handshake. Soon, the victor—lean, blinking, with a frizzy blond ponytail—was draping the flag of her native Canada around her green hoodie, while the besuited postgame analysts continued to look agog at their desks, as though the moon had just rained candy. Two reasons for everyone’s astonishment: Scarlett was neither from South Korea, where StarCraft has rivalled baseball in popularity, nor a young man, like all the other top players. Korean Kryptonite, she has been called. The most accomplished woman in the young history of electronic sports.
“It’s not a sport,” John Skipper, the president of ESPN and, by extension, the emperor of contemporary sports, has declared, referring to gaming in general. “It’s a competition.” He added, “Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports.” That “mostly” was an acknowledgment that the network has nonetheless begun hedging its bet against a cyber-athlete insurgency. In July, ESPN2 aired a half-hour program previewing an annual tournament for a game called Defense of the Ancients 2, or Dota 2, thereby enraging football and basketball fans who would have preferred round-the-clock speculation about off-season roster moves, and who vented on Twitter: “None of these people are anywhere near athletic,” “Wtf man. This is our society now,” “WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING ON ESPN2?,” and so on. Meanwhile, the winners of the Dota 2 tournament took home a total of five million dollars.
A month earlier, in June, I had my own first exposure to gaming-as-sport, at an ESPN event: the X Games, in Austin. It was an inadvertent discovery. I had gone to see the skateboarders and BMXers, so-called action-sports stars, and found that many of them were incredulous at being asked to keep company with joystick jockeys. For the first time, X Games medals were being awarded for Xbox proficiency. There was a pleasing irony in the circularity of the kvetching. Here were traditional outsiders, some of them outspoken victims of childhood bullying, who, twenty years ago, were dismissed by the jock establishment for bringing their alternative fashion sense and disaffected miens to an Olympic-style competition. And now, secure with their corporate sponsors and honorary square jaws, they, in turn, were sneering at a new breed of outsider arrivistes: nerds!
The federal government disagrees with ESPN’s Skipper. As of last year, gamers of international renown are eligible for P1-A exemptions, otherwise known as “athlete visas.” Robert Morris University, in Illinois, has added League of Legends, a “multiplayer online battle arena” game, as a varsity team sport, and this semester the program began awarding athletic scholarships. Last month, Major League Gaming, a New York-based organization, opened a small arena in Columbus, Ohio, with bleacher seating and broadcast booths, to capitalize on the region’s college demographic.
The X Gamesmen played Call of Duty, which I’ve come to understand as the most conventionally sporty of the genre, judging partly by its contestants’ appearance. These were nerds who could pass for bros on a dorm-room sofa—not an accident, given that CoD, as insiders call it, is typically played on a console (Xbox, PlayStation, etc.) rather than on a personal computer. It’s a fraternity staple. The CoD stars bumped fists and popped their jerseys, like basketball players. (Unlike StarCraft, CoD’s competitive circuit functions as a team game, with four on a side, working in concert to shoot bad guys.) My subsequent investigation leads me to believe that CoD players are the most likely to post muscly pictures of themselves on Instagram—they’re the proudest of their guns. Among the leading e-sports, this is the game at which Americans generally perform the best.
CoD is a first-person shooter, a category of game whose defining characteristic is its point of view: that of an individual looking down the barrel of an assault rifle. It also includes titles like Halo, Counter-Strike, Doom, and Quake—the last responsible for a seminal moment in the evolution of gaming from antisocial diversion to gainful employment. This occurred in 1997, during a Quake tournament called Red Annihilation, by some accounts the first video-game competition to be held on a national scale. The winner, a nineteen-year-old Californian named Dennis Fong, was rewarded with a Ferrari that belonged to one of the game’s creators, John Carmack. More than any cash prize, Carmack’s Ferrari lingered in prospective gamers’ imaginations, a sign that a quick virtual trigger finger was a transferrable skill with IRL perks. It even impressed Mom and Dad: “The biggest value was in getting my parents off my back,” Fong recalled recently. Fong, whose Quake handle was Thresh (short for “threshold of pain”), is credited by Guinness with being the world’s first professional gamer.
The drawback of first-person shooters, from a sports fan’s perspective, is their “observability.” The graphics are often cinematic, but it’s difficult for a spectator to have any sense of the competition—to impose narrative drama—if he can see the battlefield through the eyes of only one soldier at a time. StarCraft, which is classified as a real-time strategy game, or R.T.S., was released in 1998, and avoided that problem with its top-down perspective. Its graphics were modest, but, in a way, that, too, was a virtue, because the game could be played on any old computer, regardless of processing power. It quickly grew popular in South Korea, where the government was investing heavily in broadband as part of a modernizing push in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. Gaming cafés, known as PC bangs, had become the default after-school hangout for teen-agers in Seoul, and StarCraft was the new pickup hoops or sandlot ball.
No jock chauvinists, the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism legitimatized the new pastime, in 2000, with the formation of an official organization to nurture and provide structure for the burgeoning scene: KeSPA, the Korea e-Sports Association. Professional leagues were established. The country’s biggest corporations sponsored teams (as they do in baseball) and provided houses for players to live and train in. Two television channels were dedicated to broadcasting and analyzing games, and the Proleague final in 2004 drew a crowd of a hundred thousand to the beach in Busan. By the end of the decade, the surest sign of success had arrived, in the form of gamblers, and e-sports had their first match-fixing controversy.
Unlike, say, baseball, StarCraft was also a commercial product, the intellectual property of Blizzard Entertainment, based in Southern California. Blizzard wasn’t making money off professional broadcasts in an already saturated Korean market, so it produced a sequel, arguably the first video game designed specifically with its potential as a sport in mind. StarCraft II launched in 2010, around the same time that streaming technology was becoming fast enough to allow enthusiasts in Kansas and Stockholm to watch, and learn from, the heroes of Seoul. The utopian promise of e-sports as a global meritocracy, open to anyone with an Internet connection, no matter your weight, your scoliosis, or your gender, suddenly seemed within reach. Who needs ESPN, anyway? You can find nearly any match or tournament you want to see on the game-streaming site Twitch.tv, which Amazon acquired three months ago for just shy of a billion dollars.
The front-desk clerk at my hotel in Kingston, Ontario, asked what had brought me to town, and when I said that I’d come to interview a pro gamer she didn’t look bemused, as I’d thought she might. “Don’t tell that to my son,” she said. “He’s ranked fifty-sixth in Call of Duty. I just want him to finish school.”
Kingston, a city of a hundred and twenty thousand, is where Sasha Hostyn, a.k.a. Scarlett, grew up. Her father, Rob Harrap, is a geology professor at Queen’s University; her mother, Joyce Hostyn, a committed Xeriscapist, has worked in public radio, politics, and software design. Sasha is now twenty. She and her older brother, Sean, who is twenty-two and studying math and computer science, refer to their parents as Rob and Joyce. It’s a progressive family in a number of ways. Sasha uses her mother’s last name; Sean uses his father’s. Rob and Joyce practiced what they call “unbundled parenting,” with respect to their children’s education, beginning at the age of twelve. “You treat kids like infants all their lives, and then one day, when they turn eighteen, you expect them to leave the house and act like adults?” Rob said. “That doesn’t make any sense.” He said that he’d never seen Sasha’s high-school transcript and, therefore, could only guess about her best subjects. Joyce told me that last year, when Sasha was nineteen and already the most highly regarded StarCraft II player in North America, she mentioned, in passing, that one of her teachers in junior high had recommended that she get involved in extracurricular math competitions. It was the first Joyce had heard of it.
Not that they didn’t know that Sasha was analytically inclined. The family played card games (Magic: The Gathering, not Go Fish) and board games (Carcassonne, not Monopoly) obsessively—and “pretty much since birth,” Rob said. Sasha was a predictable winner, and the three others competed for second place. When the kids were six and eight, respectively, they expressed a desire to learn Mandarin, and when they were eleven and thirteen their parents rewarded their efforts with a family trip to China. Shortly after arriving, Sasha took an interest in xiangqi, or Chinese chess, whose pieces and rules are different from those of the Western game. They got a travel set, and one day, at a restaurant in Lijiang, Sasha challenged the waiter. A crowd gathered to watch as the eleven-year-old foreigner dominated. For local pride’s sake, a native expert had to be summoned from nearby to eke out a victory over the kid.
Rob was an old-time gamer, with roots in the text-based computer games of the nineteen-seventies, like Adventure and Star Trek. “It was considered the cultural kiss of death to admit that you were a role player,” he said, referring to games like Dungeons & Dragons, which he also enjoyed. “But computer games were O.K., as long as you didn’t talk about them too much.” He and Joyce introduced the kids gradually: no more than half an hour a day, at first, and then an hour. First-person shooters were forbidden. (Sasha played them anyway, when Rob and Joyce weren’t home.) “I’m not sure why I can defend StarCraft,” Rob said, and began trying to articulate a moral justification having to do with the abstraction of the bird’s-eye view and the obviously fictional presence of aliens and super-bugs. In 1998, after the original StarCraft came out, Rob created a local network using the family’s three computers, so that he and the kids could play together. Rob blew up one of Sasha’s bases, and the wounded five-year-old went running down the hall yelling, “He nuked my base! He nuked my base!” Joyce scolded Rob for bringing violence into the household.
Sasha wasn’t much interested in traditional sports—only skiing. The family did notice an early propensity to zip straight down the mountain, without stopping, using a kind of tunnel-vision focus that proved beneficial in young adulthood. While bored in high school, Sasha played the stock market, day-trading surreptitiously on an iPod Touch. Sean was the first in the family to get interested in following the professional StarCraft scene in Korea, and also the first to play it seriously. Sasha took up StarCraft II six months after Sean—and beat him within two weeks. Sean, Sasha told me, is quite a good gamer, but he stopped playing StarCraft II regularly a while ago. Rob plays StarCraft II several hours a week, and estimates his A.P.M. at fifty-five: solidly mediocre.
I mention all this because Sasha faced little of the usual parental skepticism as she began to contemplate postponing college in favor of a video game. “I don’t believe that kids have to do a traditional career,” Joyce said. Rob said, “I don’t see this as any different from somebody going backpacking for two years after high school.” Nonetheless, he was concerned about competitive gaming on two counts. “You can play basketball in a local league, and that’s a legitimate thing,” he said. “But I don’t see as much of that in e-sports. It’s, like, you went out to play basketball on the playground, and everybody laughs at you because you’re not Michael Jordan. People mock anybody who’s sort of second tier.” The ruthless objectivity—a mother referring to her son as “fifty-sixth in Call of Duty,” rather than as very good, perhaps even better than anyone for miles around—seemed a recipe for ego destruction.
Perhaps more important, as an academic Rob had been a longtime observer of online communities, with their anonymous sniping and trolling. He was one of the first few hundred people to create an account on the social-networking site Reddit, and still recalled the coarsening of the site’s tone as its user base expanded beyond programmer geeks. “I knew that small communities are pretty good, and big ones get toxic,” he said. Twitch, the streaming site, is notorious for its chat function, a perpetually updating sidebar to the Zerg-on-Protoss action; it’s a window into the id of e-sports fandom. “The Twitch chat is toxic,” Rob told me. “The little I’ve watched is horrific.” He added, “I was talking to a baseball fan, and he said baseball fans were just as nasty. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t want to look under that rock.”
The toxicity of gaming culture, with its adolescent sexuality and its tendency toward misogyny, was of particular relevance in Scarlett’s case. Shortly after she turned pro, word got out on the Internet that she was a transgender woman. (She won’t discuss the subject with journalists, as she feels that it has no bearing on her role in gaming.)
That was in early April of 2012, about a year after she began playing the game casually, and about a month after a controversy arose in a coarser corner of the e-sports world, when a prominent Street Fighter personality named Aris Bakhtanians was asked by a Twitch employee, Jared Rea, whether the fighting-game community’s habits of using vulgar and, in some cases, hostile language toward women could be tamped down. As Rea put it, “Can I get my Street Fighter without sexual harassment?”
Bakhtanians replied, “You can’t, because they’re one and the same thing. This is a community that’s, you know, fifteen or twenty years old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture, and if you remove that from the fighting-game community it’s not the fighting-game community—it’s StarCraft.”
Scarlett’s previous experience with StarCraft had been strictly online, with a weak laptop and a slow connection, though a lifetime of playing games had hardened her to “people saying stupid stuff,” as she told me.
Lately, some of that stupid stuff has escalated into what is known as GamerGate. This controversy arose after a jilted gamer wrote an online screed accusing his ex-girlfriend, a game designer, of trading sex for favorable press coverage. Hordes of angry young men turned their pitchforks on women (and feminist supporters) throughout the gaming industry, in some cases threatening them. A bomb threat was sent to organizers of the Game Developers Choice Awards, because they planned to honor Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist media critic.
When I met Sue Lee, a.k.a. Smix, a Korean-American friend of Scarlett’s, who is a frequent translator and liaison to players at StarCraft tournaments, she described her anxieties about getting involved in such a male-dominated genre. “I definitely felt that I had to be very conscious of the things I wore, especially in the beginning,” Lee said. “Because I feel like when there’s a new girl that enters the picture people are immediately skeptical. They immediately doubt the girl’s intentions. They always wonder, Is this girl here because she actually likes the game, or is she doing this because she is an attention—O.K., I was going to say ‘attention whore,’ but . . .” Lee mentioned that she would always wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, and resisted dancing at tournament after-parties. “It’s been three years now,” she said. “So hopefully people can’t question my love for the game.”
Scarlett first proved herself in March of 2012, when she won an amateur online tournament, the prize being an all-expenses-paid trip to an invitational in Las Vegas. And there, at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, she made her in-person début, advancing to the sixth round. Along the way, she upset some known professionals, and even took a game against a Korean stud named Oz, sparking a global e-sports frenzy:
In the rush to discover more about this new sensation, a few people noticed that the previous fall she’d entered—and won, easily—a couple of Iron Lady events, women-only tournaments organized online by the Electronic Sports League. No fair, some argued, apparently believing that StarCraft players, like sprinters, should be segregated by degrees of testosterone. The tournaments’ director, pHaRSiDE, wasn’t buying it. “Transgender girls have been competing in Iron Lady since the start of the tournament series,” he wrote. “No one seemed to care until Scarlett started winning. So it’s kinda funny how people only want to ban transgender girls who are incredibly good.”
Scarlett’s star continued to rise. She was awarded a new nickname: the Queen of Blades, a reference to Sarah Kerrigan, the fictional heroine turned villain at the heart of StarCraft’s backstory. Scarlett didn’t like the nickname, however flattering its intentions, because it felt too obvious. Kerrigan is the only female character associated with Zerg, Scarlett’s race of choice, and the association reminded her of the way she was too often perceived: as the token female, the outsider, not as a fierce competitor with a kick-ass creep spread.
By September, she was the North American champion and competing against élite Scandinavians and Ukrainians for a different sort of outsider mantle: that of the best “foreigner,” the word StarCraft fans use to describe anyone who is not Korean.
I had my first live Scarlett sighting a couple of months ago, in Washington, D.C. It was the conclusion of the Red Bull Battle Grounds series, this year’s version of the tournament at which Scarlett’s burrowed banelings gg’d Bomber to such momentous effect. (After winning that game, she’d finished third, receiving six thousand dollars.) Her hair was dyed magenta, matching the paint on her fingernails, and cut asymmetrically short, with heavy bangs landing in front of her blue-gray eyes. This was a relatively new do, and I’d seen it discussed amply on the Web. Verdict: thumbs-up! Tall and slim, she was dressed in cutoff jeans, Chuck Taylors, a shirt bearing the logo of Team Acer (her sponsor), and a studded black infantry cap that she’d bought in Seoul a few weeks earlier, near the end of a five-month residency there—her second such stint abroad. This, I gathered, was one of the ironies of e-sports: because fractions of a second matter, so does your physical location. Connection speeds vary. Geography is destiny. From eastern Canada, Scarlett was able to play on the game’s North American and European servers, but not on the Korean server, where she might meet the most worthy practice opponents. So in order to get better she had to pack her bags.
We were at a noisy D.C. bar, for an official pre-tournament meet and greet. The commentator (or “caster”) Sean Plott, who is better known as Day9, and is arguably the most beloved figure in StarCraft, if not all of e-sports, introduced us. (We’d been in touch over the computer.) “I’m very shy, usually—or I used to be shy,” she said, and agreed to meet me again later on in the tournament.
After that brief conversation, other people in the bar began looking at me with newfound respect. A consultation with Scarlett, I was told, is “as rare as a unicorn spotting in the wild.” She is not just introverted (like many gamers) and shy (more than most); she sometimes pauses for what seems like ten seconds before answering even a basic question, and brings her left hand instinctively to her mouth, as if to catch any words that might threaten to escape. This gives her mystique, and she seems to know it. (“She’s sort of playfully rude,” Day9 told me.) The less she says, the more people want to hear.
It has always been thus. Her mother, Joyce, told me that kids used to tease Sasha on the school bus for inexplicably “powering down”: eyes closed, chin to chest, for minutes at a time. Joyce said that Sean, Sasha’s older brother, came up with the idea that this was instead powering up, because Sasha would inevitably snap out of it with something insightful to say. “I’ve always been pretty good at solving problems,” Sean told Joyce. “But Sasha’s really good at identifying what the problems are.”
When I told an old friend who follows professional StarCraft that I might be writing about Scarlett, he sent me a precautionary video link. It shows Day9 interrupting an interview with Scarlett to provide some lighthearted coaching. “Make her give long answers,” he says. “I’m always, like, ‘Scarlett, this is an important match, how do you feel?’ ‘I feel fine.’ ‘Do you have anything to say? This person just called you a piece of shit.’ ‘Oh, well, good luck.’ ” Occasionally, the camera pans over to Scarlett, who is seated and seems amused by his frustration. At one point, Day9 says, “Don’t you want to do this for a living, Scarlett?”
The economics of e-sports remain minor-league for all but a few lucky individuals. Players sign contracts with teams, which pay barista-like wages, in the sense that they are meant to be supplemented by tips for performance, or, in this case, by cash prizes. The odds of winning major tournaments are long, and many players also busk, by streaming their practice matches on Twitch and providing live commentary over their Webcams. Fans not only turn up in large enough numbers to generate advertising revenue (which Twitch shares with the talent) but sometimes donate cash. It’s an athletic—digitally athletic, anyway—Kickstarter campaign. The appeal is partly educational, a chance for mortal talents to learn the tricks of the trade (or for rival professionals to scout tendencies and tactics). It’s also interactive, offering an opportunity, via the chat window, for fans to communicate directly with their heroes. A few weeks ago, three hundred and twenty thousand people tuned in to watch a live stream of the Chinese Dota 2 star Zhang (Xiao8) Ning’s wedding.
Twitch streams also attract aspiring casters, envious of Day9’s celebrity. Like young Tim McCarvers showing up at the neighborhood ball field with a mic and an amp, they befriend some players, suggest a scrimmage, and send word that they’ll be narrating the action.
Streaming naturally encourages exhibitionism, whether in the form of comic hostility, coquettish vulnerability, or outright titillation. Professional gaming is about as sedentary and inexpressive as live entertainment gets, and yet here is an opportunity to flash some personality—or more. Before Scarlett, the female gamers most young men were likely to have encountered online were not necessarily the best players but the showiest ones. Gamer Girls is a magazine that has more in common with Playboy than with Sports Illustrated. The stereotype was patently unfair to women who took gaming seriously. (One early poster to Scarlett’s online fan club appreciated the fact that “she made all those well advertised gamer girls look dumb.”) Three weeks ago, Amazon, in its new role of Twitch parent, banned shirtless and other “sexually suggestive” streams. That goes for men, too, like Arteezy, a Dota 2 player for the formidable Evil Geniuses team, who had made a profitable habit of torso exposure; his Twitch channel has been viewed more than fourteen million times.
Scarlett once streamed to an audience of thirteen thousand from Cologne, but the practice generally holds little appeal for her. “Broadcasting to thousands and thousands of people what you’re doing at home—that can be kind of difficult,” she told me. When she’s at home, in Kingston, it’s a moot point. In her part of town, the Internet isn’t fast enough to stream from. Her father looked into getting a commercial line installed, but found that it might cost a hundred thousand dollars. Many teams encourage, or even require, streaming, as a means of publicity, but Scarlett’s success has so far enabled her to avoid such pressure.
Salaries are not public, but a player of Scarlett’s skill and visibility might expect to earn two or three thousand dollars a month. In the two and a half years since she began, she has also won a hundred and eleven thousand dollars in tournaments, and thousands more while playing in a team league. Her tournament winnings put her ten thousand dollars shy of Mystik (Kat Gunn), the competitive gamer at the top of esportsearnings.com’s all-time female standings, but that’s a little misleading, because a hundred thousand of Gunn’s earnings came from winning a Syfy channel reality-show competition. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The next-closest woman StarCraft II player, Aphrodite (Kim Ga Young), has won fifty-seven hundred dollars.
It’s a living. A good one, in fact—especially for a twenty-year-old. Scarlett, in her first year as a pro, made more than her father did at his job. “I’ve never had to pay for my own plane ticket,” she said.
E-sports partisans like to point out that the rules of football are baffling, too, if you don’t grow up with them, and I sometimes wondered, as I mirrored Twitch streams on our family TV screen, whether my struggles to make sense of creep spread and proxy reapers were all that different from the experience of my wife, who was brought up in a sports-free household, sitting through the Jets vs. the Steelers. Our two-year-old son has been running around the house for weeks chanting “Scar-lett! Scar-lett!,” in imitation of the crowd at a tournament in Toronto that we once watched. Scarlett is, in a sense, his first introduction to fandom. He doesn’t think it’s unusual.
The notion, put forth at conferences and panels devoted to this sort of thing, that it is only a matter of time before e-sports surpass football is based on the idea that the term “gamer” itself is fast becoming meaningless, now that more people play games than go to movies. In another generation, the argument goes, this won’t be a subculture; it’ll be the culture (however balkanized). Yet, at the very moment when casual gamers might be venturing onto Twitch, the most mainstream e-sports platform, the founding denizens seem to be waving “Do Not Enter” flags, by flooding the chat window with rivers of insider memes and aggression. Consider the following exchange, which occurred around the time my son became a Scarlett fan, and also within seconds of someone with the username Protossed writing, “Let’s all give a warm Twitch chat welcome to Jeff Bezos”:
“Grill,” btw, is code-speak for girl—a reference, presumably, to Scarlett. (I’ve omitted a more derogatory remark.) The MC referred to is another StarCraft pro who was playing in the same tournament. Several of these items were accompanied by images of faces, each of which has a different meaning to devotees. The most common such face, known as kappa, belongs to a former employee of the site that became Twitch. It’s a smug mug, goes the idea, and you post it to indicate sarcasm or trolling. One kappa begets another, and pretty soon we’re in meta-trolling territory, where the discussion seems to be acknowledging its own stupidity. “It may not seem like it, but there are a lot of mature viewers watching this right now, they just don’t have anything retarded to say about scarlett,” someone else wrote.
This is not the digital equivalent of sports-talk radio. These guys are hardly talking about the game; they’re expressing sentiments about what it’s like to be one of the people who knew how to talk about the game before everyone else showed up. “It’s a subculture within a subculture,” the games journalist Rob Zacny told me, and he advised me to look away, likening the “creepy hive mind” at work to the GamerGate phenomenon, in the sense that it seemed to be driven by conflicted feelings about accommodating outsiders. What most subcultures want, after all, is to expand their influence while retaining their identity. You can’t have both.
The mainstreaming of e-sports presents additional challenges particular to StarCraft. Bigger money has lately been fleeing to the multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs), like Dota 2 and League of Legends (LoL), where there is greater international parity (although the field is still tilted heavily in Asia’s favor), and where the casual player base is broader and ever growing. The MOBAs borrowed some essential characteristics of StarCraft, like the bird’s-eye perspective, but they are free to play (whereas StarCraft costs twenty dollars), and, more important, they are not nearly as difficult for beginners to pick up. Amid all this growth, StarCraft has become a connoisseur’s taste rather than a mass spectacle. The Red Bull event in Washington was taking place at the Lincoln Theatre, with a capacity of slightly more than a thousand, while the League of Legends world championship would soon be played at the World Cup stadium in Seoul.
“For the future of StarCraft, Scarlett has to win,” a journalist named Rod (Slasher) Breslau, whom I like to think of as the Bill Simmons of e-sports, told me, shortly before the tournament began. (“Fuck Slasher” is a meme on Twitch chat, incidentally, and Breslau told me, with surprising equanimity, that a day hasn’t gone by in the past three years when he hasn’t encountered that message anew.) Viewing Scarlett as a savior is a decidedly Western perspective, but it had the ring of truth. Blizzard, in an attempt to make its world-championship series truly “global,” set up Asian, European, and North American qualifying brackets. But Korean players, finding their own bracket overstuffed with talent, began establishing temporary residency in the United States, or in Germany, so that they could qualify more easily. “To allow the rest of the world to develop, we needed to make some changes,” Mike Morhaime, the C.E.O. of Blizzard, told me recently, in defense of what amounts to an affirmative-action-for-white-people plan, called “region locking.” Beginning next year, contestants will have to declare a continent of residency and stick to it.
Blizzard, according to the conventional wisdom, has made so much money from another game it sells, World of Warcraft, that, as Scarlett’s father joked, “it can afford to throw gold checks out of airplanes indefinitely,” and Morhaime is thought to be committed to keeping StarCraft, the founding e-sport, alive as a passion project, if nothing else. But, like classical music, say, it threatens to wither if no new talent enters the scene. South Korea has compulsory military service, and men in their twenties (like Bomber, who is twenty-six) can postpone it only for so long. Meanwhile, League of Legends, as the new glamour sport, was attracting more of Korea’s most talented teens.
Inside the Lincoln Theatre, enormous painted portraits of the eight finalists hung high on the walls flanking the stage. They showed seven Asian men, most with glasses and Bieberish haircuts, and then Scarlett. On the stage were two computer terminals side by side, separated by an opaque divider. Before the matches, the players arrived at their stations carrying backpacks that held earbuds, keyboards, and mice. Given the speed of the game, familiarity with your keys’ sensitivity (to double-typing, say) and distance from one another is crucial. The mouse, too: you don’t want a fancy commercial brand, with built-in acceleration. If you’re counting on muscle memory, only a rudimentary mouse will do.
In go the earbuds, and then, over those, an aircraft-grade set of headphones, pumping white noise, to drown out the commentary and the crowd, watching the game projected onto a screen. Still, there are occasional roaring eruptions, from deep in the balcony, that can’t help being discerned by the players onstage. Late in the game, this is no big deal to a contestant. You’ve done your scouting, and have a pretty good sense of your opponent’s “build,” or strategy. Cheering accompanies bloodshed: what else is new? But what if the noise invades your headspace in the first few minutes? It takes an iron will not to become anxious that the audience knows something important that you don’t. Players call this the mind game.
In addition to the casters, StarCraft tournaments make use of a kind of cinematographer, known as the observer, whose job it is to decide which regions of the larger map to zoom in on and pan over, for dramatic effect on the giant projector screen. The observer’s vision, which is also the spectator’s, requires no advance scouting. He sees all—even “cheese.”
I got my first introduction to the concept of cheesing during the opening game of Scarlett’s first match, against PartinG, the self-styled bad boy of an otherwise staid scene. (“He makes sweatpants look good,” one young woman said at the meet and greet, while gathering courage to ask him to pose with her for a picture.) Scarlett had told me that she was nervous about this pairing. Not only had PartinG won the world championship in 2012, and finished first last year at the Hammerstein Ballroom, but she had never taken a single game off him. As they sat at their keyboards, waiting to be introduced, he typed her a private message, using what little English he knew, asking if she’d seen his recent stream. (She hadn’t, but she figured that it involved a fair amount of trash talk.) “If I beat you, please don’t hate me,” he added. Three minutes later, the crowd roared, as it saw Scarlett plant a hatchery—a pulsing, cloudy blue blob—down in the corner, next to PartinG’s home base. This was cheese—an all-in sneak attack, in essence a cheesy play—and it worked. Roaches hatched before PartinG had time to prepare an adequate defense, and, with them, Scarlett began dismantling his economic production. Gg. Time elapsed: six minutes, twenty-nine seconds.
As with baseball’s hidden-ball trick and football’s fake punts, the unwritten etiquette of cheesing is complicated. Do it too often, and not only will its efficacy diminish but you’ll be seen as annoying—disrespectful, even, if your over-all skill is of a lower calibre. It’s like the Picasso rule of painting: you have to know the basics before you can abandon them. But when cheese is deployed selectively, against the right opponent, it can be a lot of fun. Buoyed by the early success, Scarlett went on to win the second game, too, this one a drawn-out, forty-minute affair. Another standing ovation. Later, Day9 said, “I think she might be the most entertaining player to watch in the history of StarCraft II.”
How much of Scarlett’s reputation for thrilling play can be attributed to projection on the part of e-sports enthusiasts who want to see, in this mysteriously shy girl from Canada, a Jackie Robinson figure to redeem them? Does it make a difference? Mike Morhaime, the Blizzard C.E.O., reminded me of another highlight from the Scarlett reel, in which, for a single game, she played as Protoss instead of Zerg, confounding—and defeating—her opponent. A switch-hitter! “I don’t think anyone else has ever done that in tournament play before,” Morhaime said.
During breaks between matches at the Lincoln, the producers aired personalizing video interviews with the contestants, mostly using subtitles, and it was easy, for an American raised on Mike Tyson and Neon Deion, to see why Scarlett’s differentiation seemed to matter. Here was Bomber: “Every single loss is a life lesson.” And last year’s world champion, sOs: “In my opinion, I don’t have the strongest mind-set as a professional player.” (He noted, “I think we’re all equally handsome.”) A relative newcomer named Trap: “When I was a rookie, I had the wrong mind-set toward losses. . . . I was overwhelmed with pessimism. I think that’s what kept me from coming out of my shell.” DongRaeGu: “I can utilize Red Bull Battle Grounds as potent fertilizer for a rich harvest next season.” He added, “I can’t stand being smacked around any longer.” Scarlett (whose reticence, in this instance, was pretty much the norm): “Mostly, success for me would be about being happy.” Only PartinG diverted from the humble messaging. “I am one of the gods,” he said.
The fans, young and male, for the most part, clapped Thundersticks and waved handwritten signs, many of them mash notes to Scarlett. I saw one appealingly awkward teen with chin-length red hair give an interview to a TV camera, in which he declared that he was rooting for Scarlett, “of course.” Asked why, he blushed at first, and then said, “Well, because she’s—she’s awesome!”
For a while, I found myself sitting next to a slick-haired, barrel-chested man in an untucked button-down, pressed jeans, and black loafers who was drinking beer at a football fan’s pace. I’d guess that he was in his thirties. “I equate it to poker,” he said. “Fifteen years ago, if you mentioned Texas Hold ’Em, you were considered a degenerate gambler.” He seemed to know his stuff. “Gg right there, bro,” he called out, during a game between two players named Polt and Cure, in which Cure had staked a sizable lead. “You don’t come back from a forty-supply deficit, T v. T.” (That’s Terran v. Terran. I knew that much.) My seatmate got around in the course of the weekend, and someone later speculated that he was a promoter of “show matches,” a Don King figure who arranges grudge matches between prominent StarCraft players and then sells advertising against them.
In the third game of that Polt-Cure match, the crowd began chanting, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!,” in support of Polt, whose nickname is Captain America, because he is taking English classes at the University of Texas. Polt, who received his athlete visa from the State Department last year, will be grandfathered in as a North American under Blizzard’s new terms.
It was Captain America, incidentally, who eliminated our Canadian hero, in a hard-fought three-game series during which the “U.S.A.!” chants were in scant evidence. The future of StarCraft seemed to pass anticlimactically, with a handshake and a head nod. Scarlett unplugged her keyboard and her mouse, and was quickly gone.
On Day Two, I ventured backstage. A semifinal match was going on, so the players’ lounge was occupied by the five other Koreans, a translator, a player “manager,” and Scarlett, who sat in front of a computer, reading message boards, instead of watching the action on a TV screen, like the others. “No one else is speaking English, unless they’re speaking to me, pretty much,” she said. “It’s just kind of a little bit lonely when I’m back here.” After nearly a year’s worth of living in Seoul, she speaks some Korean, but only enough to get by. “We can’t have, like, deep conversations,” she said.
We retreated to a black leather couch in the neighboring room, near a snack table, and she reclined halfway, hugging a small pillow against her midsection. She had spent the previous night, back at the hotel, re-watching all of her games, alone, to see what went wrong. “If it’s a really bad defeat, you just get crushed,” she said. “It’s really depressing. Like, you feel like this is what you do, and you feel like you’re not good at it, so why are you playing?” Her feeling here was different, however. “Game Three versus Polt, I had four bases, about to get a fifth base, and he was stuck on three bases, and he wasn’t getting any more economy,” she said. “Soon, he was going to run out of resources. So if I had just defended, or even counterattacked . . .” Instead, she engaged in an all-out battle, one that her instincts inclined her to think would turn out in her favor. But those instincts were outdated. “Every once in a while, Blizzard changes the game,” she explained.
Now we were talking about what’s called the meta game, an inevitable result of the StarCraft designers’ decision to create three distinct races (for variety’s sake) and nonetheless run a fair competition. They aim for equality, but a collective intelligence takes over, in the form of all the games being played worldwide on a daily basis, among all the race combinations. One élite Zerg player’s inventive approach to countering a Protoss maneuver at around the five-minute mark, say, quickly becomes a new tactical convention, and over time the established conventions reveal unanticipated strengths and weaknesses: imbalance. Every so often, the coders go back to work, attempting to make amends, and release “patches” for the software. Another reshuffling necessarily occurs. After a recent patch, a few months ago, Terran players seemed to have emerged with new muscles. (Pro tip: if you want to insult your Terran-playing friend, call him a “patch Terran,” implying that his recent success is artificial.) “Right now, my race is a little bit on the weak side against Terran,” Scarlett said. Lending credence to her theory: the top three finishers at the Lincoln Theatre were all Terran players. Bomber took the crown.
Scarlett also said that she had “executed” poorly at times, and I, thinking of Sean Plott’s concerto analogy, wondered if she had lost battles owing to clumsy fingering. “No, no, no,” she said, and suppressed a chuckle. “We’re at the point where we don’t, like, mis-click on the keyboard. That’s not an issue.” The execution mistakes were all in the timing, she explained. It was a matter of being out of step with the orchestra. “There’s this one unit that Terran has”—a widow mine—“that takes a long time to recharge between attacks, like forty seconds. But it does a massive amount of damage in a small area. So I’m trying to send my cheap units that move really fast out in front, to take those hits. I’m trying to split my other units into small groups first, so they don’t get wasted on his units with high hit-points and low damage. So I’m trying to control those all, to run past his strong units in the front, and I’m also trying to use my flying units—I have to make sure they don’t get clumped up too much, because he has another unit that does area damage to those.”
I’d been surprised to see her reading fan commentary. She long ago swore off looking at Twitch chat (“I just don’t think about it, because it’s not worth thinking about,” she said), but she indulges in Reddit, which has been described as “the scene’s gossipy cyber town square,” and she visits the forums at teamliquid.net, a kind of StarCraft clearing house, sometimes even onstage between games, to see how people are reacting to the show she’s putting on. “I think I’m the only player that does that,” she added. (Online, her focus is narrow, and does not extend to broader gaming subjects beyond e-sports. When, on a different occasion, I asked her about GamerGate, she answered, “I don’t follow any of that.”)
She even posts herself, helping to clarify the interpretation of play in events she isn’t participating in. “And sometimes I’ll go and complain about things to blow off steam,” she said. These complaints usually take the form of “balance whines,” or meta-game grumbling about the effects of software patches. Balance whines are a little like manager-umpire confrontations, in the sense that they’re largely cathartic, because what’s done is done, but they are also performed in the hope that the ump might think he owes you one.
As we continued speaking, it became clear that she credited StarCraft with bringing out her inner extrovert. The teen years were difficult, and included bouts of depression and periods of time that, as she once put it, “I’d rather not remember.” At the start of her pro career, she was terrified at the prospect of standing on a stage, in front of thousands of people. It was a mediated public life, to be sure: in a booth, wearing headphones, enveloped in white noise, eyes transfixed on a screen. But everyone—face to face, at least—had been nothing but warm. “Nowadays, most of my friends are from StarCraft,” she said. “Having to go to all the events, meeting all the fans, talking to a bunch of people—it really opened me up, and it motivated me to become more social, to work on my life. Like, I started exercising now, versus not at all, a few years ago.” When she’s in Kingston, she and her father practice Niten Ichi-ryū, a school of Japanese swordsmanship, in the back garden.
I mentioned Slasher’s remark, that the future of StarCraft was riding on her performance. “Wow, so much pressure,” she said, flashing a coy smile. “That’s kind of daunting.” She didn’t look especially daunted, and, in any event, she felt that she had done well enough to keep hope alive. “The games were close, the games were exciting,” she said. “Because it’s a North American event, with the crowd here, I was just doing crazy things!” It occurred to me that she could retire now in peace, assured that she had transcended all the identity politics—going from the great female hope to the great white hope to, simply, the hope.
Before Scarlett, the most prominent foreigner was a left-handed Swede named Johan (Naniwa) Lucchesi, a brilliant but hotheaded player, who had a reputation for lashing out at fans and tournament organizers, and for showing emotion onstage, before and after matches. Some fans coined the term “Naniwalk” to describe his slightly goofy swagger. Korean players, Day9 told me, used to “view it as a badge of honor to eliminate Naniwa, because he was so disrespectful.”
Naniwa played Protoss, because, as he Skyped me, “I was sure that they were the most creative race,” owing to an ability called “chrono boost,” which facilitates switching strategies mid-game. (By contrast, he believes that Terran is “the most perfect race for people who like to do the same thing.”) He fell in love with real-time strategy games at the age of ten, while playing Warcraft III, another Blizzard title. The complexity of R.T.S. games was such, he felt, that boredom was inconceivable. No two contests were alike, not even after years of playing. “Basically, it’s art,” he said, and mentioned that he finds players “graceful” when they execute basic strategies so cleanly that even knowing those strategies in advance won’t help you beat them.
Last December, Naniwa and Scarlett played head to head in a show match for fourteen bitcoins—virtual currency for a virtual sport. (Bitcoins, like StarCraft II, were trending higher then, and that purse, when it was announced, was worth more than fourteen thousand dollars, the highest amount in the sport’s history.) They played from their respective continents, online. Best of seven, with games alternating on the European and North American servers, to negate connectivity advantages. Naniwa won, four games to two.
Then, not long afterward, he quit the sport. He was at a tournament in Poland, and playing against Polt*, when he grew annoyed that the crowd’s reactions seemed to be aiding his opponent. Blaming the soundproofing, he walked offstage, to thousands of boos. He never returned.
He was twenty-three, and had been playing StarCraft II as much as fourteen hours a day since the end of high school. “Every night, I dreamed about the game,” he told me. “Every time I ate, I thought about the game. When you do this for a few years without a break, it wears you down.” He also found living in Korea “extremely lonely,” he said. “I basically felt I couldn’t be at my best if I didn’t go to Korea. And I didn’t want to go to Korea.”
“StarCraft II is declining,” Naniwa added. “Let’s face it. It’s very hard to get into. You play one on one and you get owned probably twenty games in a row, until you learn stuff. Most people can’t handle that.” Earlier this month, he returned to public life at BlizzCon, Blizzard’s annual convention and championship series, where he was beta-testing the company’s new team game Heroes of the Storm, an attempt to cash in on the MOBA fad.
Scarlett told me that she can’t recall ever having dreamed about StarCraft. “It’s kind of a weird thing to be dreaming,” she said. She chose her race, Zerg, somewhat arbitrarily, based on “the look of how it played,” when she first started watching her brother (a Terran), and has come to appreciate the Zerg race for its “reactive” qualities. Figuring out what her opponent is doing, and then countering it, as in a puzzle, is what appeals most to her about the game.
Her habits, like those of many gamers, are sometimes nocturnal. She plays when she feels like it, and although she never drinks coffee (“It makes you shaky and less precise,” she told me), she can stay alert for long stretches, communicating with friends all over the world. Once, while crashing at the end of such a run, she slept for almost forty-eight hours, with only water and bathroom breaks interrupting her recovery.
Yet she rarely plays StarCraft more than three or four hours in a day, both because she suffers from painful tendinitis in her right wrist and because she finds the Korean tradition of relentless practice unnecessary, and even counterproductive: rote but without mindfulness. She learns almost as much from watching others’ games as from playing her own. Doctors have advised her that she’ll need to take six months off to give her wrist a chance to heal, and, at that point, she figures, she might as well retire and get on with her life. She is unlikely to follow the path of many e-sports pioneers as they age out, becoming casters or working on the production side of tournaments. Computer programming interests her as a possibility, and for that she assumes she will need to go back to school.
She is contemplating going to Seoul again next year. “I really enjoy living there,” she said. “It’s a very big change. It’s a big city with a subway. Also, it’s away from home. I like, at least half the time, not being here.”
Not long ago, she sat down at a desk in her bedroom, in Kingston, where she was breaking in a new, smaller keyboard that would be easier to travel with. Kingston is at least two hours from any major airport; for a globe-trotting athlete, it really is the sticks. She was barefoot, dressed in skinny jeans and a T-shirt. The walls of her room were painted purple. Clothes were strewn about, along with science-fiction and fantasy novels. (“I like going into a different world and not thinking about life for a while,” she once told me.) Her monitor sat on top of a cookbook, so that its height matched her eyes, which seldom wavered from the screen. She had turned the volume off. “I don’t like the sound, anyway,” she said. “I don’t like anything bugging me when I’m playing.”
It was a little after 4 P.M., and she had decided to engage in some “laddering,” or seeking opponents online through Blizzard’s algorithmic matching system. Instead of signing in to the North American server, she’d opted for Europe, where it would be nighttime and more people would be online, having already finished their dinner.
Rob appeared in the doorway, and said that he was planning to make fajitas. “Do we have cilantro?” she asked.
“Yeah, I got you cilantro.”
“I use lots of cilantro when I make salsa,” she said. “I don’t like store-bought salsa.”
She was logged in not as herself but as a “bar code,” a sequence of vertical lines that she’d chosen as an alter ego, in order to practice anonymously. Many élite players use them: the first several players atop the ladder’s rankings were all bar codes. “I won’t play for more than an hour,” she said.
The games began and ended without ceremony. Suddenly, she’d be typing rapidly, and her screen would be strobing as she flitted around the map, dispatching scouts and attending to her economic production. “I don’t actually know how it looks to another person, because I’m used to the speed,” she said. It was dizzying. “A lot of when I’m moving my screen around at the start of the game, it’s not actually doing anything useful,” she added. “It’s just to get warmed up.”
Her preference for playing in a vacuum, without distraction, was complicated by the presence of an intruder (me), and occasionally she let out a restrained “Ah!,” indicating surprise at having forgotten to take care of something basic. At one point, playing a bar-code Terran, she let out a string of four “Ah!”s, such that Rob responded from down the hall.
“You’re losing?” he teased.
“No, it’s O.K.,” she said. “I think this is Bunny, actually. He’s playing exactly like Bunny plays.” Bunny, a Danish pro whose real name is Patrick Brix, is among the three best foreigners at the moment. “Two-base tank push,” she continued, describing her opponent’s strategy.
“You going muta-ling-bane, or what?” Rob asked, now standing in the doorway.
“Well, I guess he’s not Bunny, because this guy’s not very good,” she said, as her opponent collapsed and bowed out. The algorithm delivered another Terran, a Ukrainian named Kas, and she began again.
“I’m going to start the salsa,” Rob said. “Do you want me to drain the tomatoes or just put ’em in as is?”
“You can make the salsa,” she said, without breaking concentration.
“You’ll do the spice level,” Rob said. “I’ll do everything else.” Scarlett’s tolerance for spicy food exceeds that of anyone else in the family. At Indian restaurants, she asks politely, using Hindi phrases, for the spiciest off-menu items.
“This guy plays the most of anyone in the world,” she said, turning her thoughts back to Kas. “At least a thousand games a month. He’s known for that. He’s one of the better Terran players in Europe. He’s professional-ish.”
She lost the first game, and began stretching her right wrist. Then she struggled again in a rematch. “Ah!”
“You’re losing?”
“Yes! I’m losing to Kas!” She mentioned, more than once, that this was a problem she had with streaming, too. “Talking and not focussing,” she said. “I’ve lost a tournament because I didn’t see a dot for a few seconds. Like, I lost thousands of dollars because I didn’t see a single red dot. It’s a big deal.”
Kas took the second, and they began a third. She typed “glhf,” for “good luck, have fun,” a bit of gaming-café etiquette.
“You need to come finish the salsa!” Rob yelled. The allotted hour had passed. The fajitas were done. “So finish this game.” He paused a moment, and then asked, “Who are you playing now?”
It was Kas again. Game Four. She’d won the last one, and was back in a groove. “So, he just took a risk, and ran behind my mineral line,” she said. “And if I cared I could’ve probably just killed it with my workers, but I didn’t.” She wasn’t interested in winning quickly. Her troubles against Terran had been occurring in the middle to late ranges of games. She was determined to come up with a solution to the patch, and so she’d keep drawing Kas out, stalling if she had to.
“Come on!”
She was pushing ninety minutes, eyes on the screen. ♦
*An earlier version of this article misidentified Naniwa’s opponent.
