PRINCETON, N.J. — “Go Tigers!” someone in the crowd shouted, hoisting a placard with Princeton spelled out in orange and black. The enthusiastic fan was one of about 60 who had gathered on a recent Friday night to watch the first international exhibition match for the newly created Collegiate Star League, the latest addition to the university’s roster of sports.
“We’re helping bring StarCraft to the United States as a spectator sport,” Mona Zhang, a freshman, said of the competition.
The game involves humans, aliens and alien humanoids.
Bowen Zhou putting on his game face as he prepared for a match in the Collegiate Star League.
The face-off between Princeton and Tsinghua University, which is in Beijing, was not happening on a field or a court, but in a residential hall lounge on a large screen, where the science-fiction video game StarCraft was being projected from an online stream. As Mona Zhang, a freshman, offered play-by-play, Princeton’s player, hunched over his computer, was cordoned off in a separate room, his opponent 6,800 miles away.
Welcome to the next generation of collegiate competition: electronic sports.
In recent months, 27 colleges — including Harvard, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State, Texas, Cal-Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Oberlin — have joined the league to play StarCraft. Four made it to the semifinals, which take place this weekend. The finals should happen by the end of this month.
Although Princeton’s 13-member team, SmashCraft Heroes, was knocked out in an earlier round, Zhang, the driving force behind the new league, seems buoyant about the prospects of competitive gaming. “We’re helping bring StarCraft to the United States as a spectator sport,” she said.
StarCraft, developed by Blizzard Entertainment and introduced in 1998, involves a three-way galactic war among Terran (human beings), Zerg (alien insectoids) and Protoss (alien humanoids). Each race has specific characteristics, weapons and technology. Gamers choose one, then build up an economy, research and military capabilities for every battle.
In the college league, matches are composed of five rounds.
Although video games make up an estimated $20 billion industry in the United States, the scene is nothing like in South Korea, where professional StarCraft teams have corporate sponsors and e-sports generate millions of dollars. Top players, who can draw tens of thousands of fans to tournament finals, are as familiar to South Korean audiences as Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning are to Americans.
Zhang, 18, is a Chinese-American born in Maryland who became hooked on the game after watching Korean matches with English commentary on YouTube. “It really introduced a whole new world of strategic depth,” she said.
Ke Wan, a graduate student from China who is studying operations research, detailed each world’s character traits: Zergs are prolific and fast, Terrans are sophisticated strategists, and individual Protoss units are extremely powerful. Wan drew a geopolitical analogy. “Zerg is like China,” he said. “It depends a lot on its large population. The U.S. is Protoss because it emphasizes the value of the individual. And Terran is Russia or the former Soviet Union, a huge high-tech war machine.” He plays as Terran.
Zhang is Zerg. “You pick one most suited to your personality,” she said.
When Zhang first brought up the idea of a StarCraft league at Princeton, she was laughed at. But she managed to find other gamers — mostly engineering students — here and elsewhere.
“What really did it was the Princeton versus M.I.T. show-match that we organized and broadcasted,” she said of the league’s kickoff match in February. Zhang set up the contest with a friend from elementary school, Yang Yang, who was at M.I.T.
“Princeton and M.I.T. both made promotional videos for hype, and we all advertised the event on YouTube, StarCraft communities, and campus news,” Zhang said.
For this exhibition match, spectators — mostly Asian, mostly male — snacked on chips and doughnuts; about a dozen brought their laptops to follow the action or play their own games. Peter Liu, a junior and chemistry major who was doing live commentary with Zhang, said he could manage 200 A.P.M., or actions per minute (an action is any keyboard or mouse click). “My fingers get sore,” said Liu, a Protoss. Professional South Korean players have 400 to 500 A.P.M.’s.
Yang Mou, 20, a junior and economics major from Houston, is the team’s coach. “There’s a lot of mental preparation,” said Mou, a Protoss, who estimated he spent 5 to 10 hours preparing for his game that night. Each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. It’s like “rock, paper, scissors.”
Zhang, the only woman on the Princeton team, was going up against the sole woman on Tsinghua’s team. Mou took over the mike. “It’s going to be a battle for female dominance,” he said.
The match began as green (Princeton) and beige (Tsinghua) drones, fluttering triangles with tails, and jellylike spawning pools, started filling up the screen.
“Here we go, here we go,” Liu said excitedly as Princeton’s legions of green-winged Zerglings started attacking Tsinghua’s half-built defenses. Flames shot up from Tsinghua’s bases. Standing now, the audience hooted and clapped. It was Princeton’s first win of the evening. A few moments later, Zhang came back in, a broad smile on her face, and double high-fived a few teammates.
Of course, compared to, say, the Princeton football team, the group is small; fans and players could probably easily fit into the Tigers’ locker room. But the club has big ambitions.
“It’s definitely a very beautiful game,” Liu told the crowd, keeping up the standard between-game banter. “We’re looking to get more people off the athletic field and into the gaming room.”
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