The soso column #17: What if there was no GG?

Last night I was watching game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals (that’s hockey by the way, not some new StarCraft tournament hosted by a dude named Stanley). The series was amazing, but Boston finished it off pretty decisively with a 4-0 win. They were up 3-0 in the closing minutes of the third period when Vancouver pulled their goalie as a last ditch effort. Boston scored moments later and the game was essentially over, they just had to skate around for a couple more minutes to make it official. The two minutes or so of garbage time when everyone knew who had won and the fans in downtown Vancouver began flipping over cars and lighting them on fire got me thinking. First, what the heck did the cars do to spark such rage? I can understand looting during a riot, at least you’re gaining something out of it. But just destroying some random car is exceedingly idiotic. Second, what would StarCraft be like if there was no gg-ing? What if players actually played out every single game until one player lost all their buildings?

In traditional sports, there’s almost always a point when it’s all but certain who has won and who has lost. Like when Boston went up 4-0 with under three minutes to play. However, neither team just surrenders and walks away, they still play out the final minutes. And 99 times out of 100 -- maybe 999 out of 1000 -- nothing spectacular happens. The team that should win wins, and the team that should lose loses. But not always. Sometimes the impossible happens. One of those legendary comebacks or freak plays that will be talked about for generations to come.

In the 1995 NBA playoffs, the Indiana Pacers were down by six with 18.7 seconds left against the New York Knicks. The game was basically over. But then Reggie Miller miraculously scored eight points in the span of 8.9 seconds and the Pacers won. Now I’m sure there’s no way Indiana would have gg’d if they’d had the option (okay, maybe if IdrA was their coach), but the events that transpired were once-in-a-life-time kind of stuff. Miller hit a three, stole the inbound pass and hit another, New York botched a couple free throws, and Miller won the game with two free throws of his own. If you played those final 18.7 seconds another 100 times, how many of those would Indiana win? One? Maybe?

Or how about the 1992 AFC Wild Card game when the Buffalo Bills were losing to the 3-28 at halftime and started the second half by throwing an interception that was returned for a touchdown? That’s a situation where a lot of players would have gg’d. However, the Bills ended up taking the game to overtime and ultimately winning in one of the greatest comebacks in sports history.

How many of these once-in-a-lifetime sort of comebacks have we missed in StarCraft II because players surrendered before even giving the impossible a chance to become merely improbable? Probably not very many. Odds are we’ve saved ourselves hours and hours of painfully boring game play where players just shift click every structure in their opponent’s base and alt+tab to eat a hot-pocket. StarCraft is different from traditional sports, there aren’t fouls, timeouts, or any of the other myriad of rules that traditional sports have to artificially extend a game in order to give the losing team a slim glimmer of hope that they might comeback. But just like traditional sports, crazy shit does happen. Even the world’s best players make asinine mistakes and open up windows for their opponents to get back in the game

At MLG, IdrA gg’d out of a game against MMA that most would agree he probably would have won. I know this might not be the best example because IdrA has gotten a lot of flack lately for gg-ing out of games that he would have won, not just games that he could have won. But part of the reason that IdrA was in a position to win was because MMA had accidentally destroyed his own command center at one of his expansions. MMA, one of the best players in the world mis-clicked and killed his own base. That’s the kind of crazy stuff that can spark impossible comebacks. As a player, you’d never think “well, the only way I can win this is if my opponent kills his own base”, instead you’d simply think “well, there’s no way I can win this”. But that’s why it’s crazy -- it does, very rarely, happen.

You can’t predict something like Reggie Miller scoring eight points in 8.9 seconds, or the Bills coming back from a 3-28 deficit at halftime. Ridiculous comebacks rely on skill, a little luck, and even some unlikely blunders by your opponent. But if you tap out before even trying to accomplish the impossible, then you’ll miss those career defining moments that come around once in a lifetime. I’m not advocating for the removal of the surrender button, just wondering what unbelievable stuff we’ve missed by having it around.

Woody "soso" Favinger is the author of The soso column, published weekly(ish) on GosuGamers.net. To contact him, visit his website at www.eSportsGuy.com or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/wfavinger