The soso column #13: 'Two weeks is an eternity'

For the last two weeks, I was travelling around South America. I visited Iguazu Falls, went trekking on a glacier, and crawled within spitting distance of a colony of King Penguins. It was awesome. But it was also two weeks during which my access to StarCraft II content consisted of logging onto various sketchy wi-fi connections on my iPad Mini (that’s what I call my iPod touch - I find it strange that the iPad is the only technological advancement where they took something that already existed and made it bigger rather than smaller). So outside of reading a few impassioned tweets (“OMG Thorzain is my hero!!1 #TSL3”), I really had no idea what was going on.

In the eSports world, two weeks is an eternity. It’s not like other sports where only a few games are played each week and catching up on the action is as easy as tuning into Sports Center or reading the headlines on ESPN. Think about it. In the NFL, players can’t play more than one game per week because their bodies just can’t take it. They’ll suffer career ending injuries or life altering brain trauma. Basketball is a little more forgiving but it’s still impossible for players to even consider playing an entire best of seven series in one evening. So after watching some highlights on an airport TV, I felt mostly caught up on all the major traditional sports that I follow.

On the other hand, in StarCraft II there’s virtually no limit to how many action-packed games, tournaments, or show matches players can be a part of. It simply doesn’t have the same kind of physical restrictions of other sports. You can basically compete 24/7, maybe with brief 90 second breaks to microwave hot pockets. And maybe another 90 second break after you take the first bite of the hot pocket and realize that the inside is inexplicably 14 thousand degrees hotter than the outside and you have to fan the inside of you mouth with your hand while molten cheese wreaks havoc on your taste-buds. In any case, during the two weeks I was away, I missed a ton of cool stuff: the first few rounds of the new GSL season, the epic round of eight in TSL, a billion NASL games, and the entire freaking first season of the IPL. In what other sport is it possible to miss the start and end of an entirely new league in just two short weeks? Let alone multiple critical games in the final rounds of major tournaments?

Having so many different leagues and tournaments is great for helping refine professional eSports. I’m doubtful about the extended series rule in MLG, and I question the group stage format of the GSL, but rather than just speaking hypothetically about what should be done instead, we have several other professional leagues to use for comparison. And I don’t mean that in a “this league is better than that league” kind of way. I mean that the multiple professional leagues can all benefit from each other. They can learn from each others mistakes, emulate the things that work and avoid the things that don’t. And while they’re doing so, we can sit back as fans and enjoy the countless hours of entertainment that they provide.

I love watching almost any sport, but nothing else offers the staggering amount of content at basically anytime of day and any day of the week that we get from StarCraft. Sundays during football season come close, when I can sit down in the morning and watch games all day while I gorge on nachos and beer, but again, that’s just one day of the week, a few weeks out of the year. There’s so much StarCraft content out there, that if I maintained my nacho and beer consumption with my usual Sunday football fervor, I’d be the first person to end up on both The Biggest Loser, and Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew.

In the time it’ll take me to watch the best games from the short time I was away, there will have already been the next set of epic battles and unforgettable matches. Really, I need one of those things Hermione had in the third Harry Potter book that let her travel through time in order to attend multiple classes that were held at the same time. Only instead or learning witchcraft and wizardry at an accelerated pace, I’d be watching an obscene amount of StarCraft II. And anytime you need a magical time-travelling device in order to watch everything a sport has to offer, you’re in a fan’s paradise. Until I find that magical device, I’ll just have to rely on the next best thing, VODs. And first up on the agenda: Thorzain vs MC in the TSL round of eight. I heard it was kind of a big deal.




Woody "soso" Favinger is the author of The soso column, published every Wednesday on GosuGamers.net. You can contact him via email at [email protected] or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/wfavinger