Competitive Starcraft: why it's totally fucking awesome

The final major tournament for Starcraft: Brood War took place recently. This game has been the top competitive video game for over a decade. People have made hundreds of thousands of dollars playing it. South Korea has 2 television stations dedicated to airing professional matches. Starcraft changed everything as far as how seriously video game competition can be taken.

There will never again be a competitive video game with such a high skill ceiling. I love Starcraft 2, and I think it has the potential to be more fun and interesting than Brood War after the expansions, but Brood War is by far the more mechanically demanding game. The average actions per minute needed for Starcraft 2 seems to be around 120 at minimum. Starcraft: Brood War required twice that. 

What makes a game worthy of competition? What makes someone who is good at a game worthy of making a serious amount of money playing it well? To me, it comes down to three things.

1. The game has to have an extremely high skill ceiling.
2. The game has to allow enough strategic variation for a deep metagame to develop.
3. The game has to be enjoyable to watch, so companies that put on competitions can make money selling tickets, or getting people to pay to watch on television or online.

There aren't many games that fulfill these criteria. There are plenty that fulfill 1 and 2 easily, but fall short with 3. In order to be marketable, it has to be enjoyable for people who don't play it, who basically don't know anything about it. Sports are much easier to market. Basketball is a spectator sport because the skill it takes to play is obvious to anyone who watches it; professional players run extremely fast, jump extremely high, and make incredible shots. You really don't have to be a basketball player to enjoy watching a game. Golf is a spectator sport because it doesn't take a genius to see that hitting a small ball with a club over such long distances and avoiding hazards to get it into a tiny hole requires a tremendous amount of precision. The skill required to play video games competitively is usually only obvious to other players, and in order for a game to be taken seriously and for players to be able to make a living off of competition, it has to appeal to people who don't really know anything about it. I think the skill required to play Starcraft 2 will be obvious to anyone who has even tried to play a single ladder game. But what about those who have never touched a real-time strategy game before? It's basically South Korea's national sport at this point, but whether or not it will catch on like that in the United States remains to be seen.

Seeing people make a living playing a video game that I started playing as a kid and instantly fell in love with is just awesome to me. I remember when I was young and all I had was an NES. I would often think to myself while playing, "man, if there was such a thing as playing video games professionally, that would just be the absolute best." These people are making a living doing exactly what they want to do, just like any professional athlete or musician. Ya, it's nerdy. So what? Anyone who makes fun of people making a living playing a video game is fucking jelly.

For anyone who might read this and want to see what high level Starcraft 2 looks like, here's the conclusion to an MLG series between a high-level Korean player, Bomber, and America's Zerg hero and my favorite player, Idra.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaAHU4EFWGQ