StarCraft: The past, present and future

If we follow this rabbit hole too far, we'll end up trying to answer questions like "What is a game?" and "What is art?"

But what you're describing is what I want. I want more immersion, I want the focus to be on the what the gamer experiences and giving them something meaningful to do.

But when you plug your brain into the NeuralCube4000 two decades from now, what are you going to get?

What I want: You're in a tilled field at the edge of a forest. Beyond the forest, you see the peak of a mountain escaping from the trees. You look to your left and see a farmhouse, and the farmer is starting his day at work. A fawn leaps across the field and birds take flight as the deer breaks the treeline.

At this point, you're going to want to do something. Chase the deer, climb the mountain, beat up the farmer and take his gold, whatever it is you want to do, the game should encourage and reward your action with feedback.

What the games industry is likely to give me:

You're dropped into a dark room. A disembodied voice speaks: "You are Reginald Brisbane, a young farmer from Bastogne in the 14th century. Your father perished at the hands of brigands when you were seven and you were sent to live on your uncle's farm, but you've never stopped nursing the need to avenge your father's death, and you're now ready to seek it." Then, you're in a tilled field at the edge of a forest...

Now, clearly both of these scenarios were written by me, but one was written to encourage interaction, and the other was written to tell a story.

Which one do you want games to be? I think I've made my desires clear.

Two interesting exceptions to the win-or-fail linear narrative:

Kentucky Route Zero — Player choice affects the flavor of narrative but not the direction of the story, so that the story is linear but the experience is wildly different for everyone who plays it. Absolutely brilliant. Player choices that both do not matter and, at the same time, matter more than anything else.

Black Ops 2: I know, I know, and yeah the first one is probably in the top 5 worst games I've ever played, and this one's got a ton of issues, but what it gets right are a huge number of opportunities to fail forward—losses, big and small, that affect the story rather than showing a game over screen. More dumb action games should do this, it would make them suck less. It's also got the best local multiplayer I've seen in an FPS since Perfect Dark (though still not as good) but that's another topic.

I would say that Dark Souls is still fundamentally driven by mechanics, as most of the gameplay stems from you adapting to various enemies/AI patterns and physically learning to overcome them, while the depth of the story is mostly up to you to piece together.

The best way to run original Starcraft these days is Wine (implementing windows XP behavior), on OS X or linux. I've done both, it works pretty well.

IIRC the mouse acceleration was sometimes problematic in OS X, you might need one of the many third-party utilities for OS X that let you disable or tweak it, e.g. USB Overdrive, or maybe Smoothmouse would work.

I have been a starcraft player for almost 2 decades now and I never really cared about the story or background to it. What I cared about is that it combines elements of some of my favorite strategy games into a single medium. I often say that it has elements of chess, poker and reaction based games like first person shooters.

It is like chess in that it is a game of strategy and board control, army movement, identifying what your opponent is planning and actively countering it, identifying weaknesses and exploiting them.

It is like poker in that is a game of imperfect information. Unlike chess I cannot ever see the entire board in starcraft, only the pieces I have scouted and as soon as my scout leaves that information is now outdated and assumptions have to be made about the actions of the opponent since I last had accurate information. Poker is similar in that you can never have 100% certainty of what your opponent may be holding, there is always that knowledge gap and great players can exploit it.

It is like first person shooters in that is it reaction based, the person who is able to more efficiently process the information they are receiving and make correct decisions about their course of action can execute faster and have an exponential return in terms of tipping the scales in their favor. This applies to many things such as base building, army building and micro mechanics during army engagement.

I've been a fan for so long precicely because these fine strategy details and forced decision making make an excellent filter between the good and the great, the great and the elite. Watching the elite play is comparable in my mind to watching chess grandmasters battle only in real time and not turn based where their perceived life is on the line and one slip up can cause instant death. It's that great adrenaline high, not the background story, that has kept me so engaged for so long.