Crossing the streams

I’ve been watching a lot of SC2 Livestreams recently because I’m curious about how top players approach the game. It turns out that basically they’re just really damn fast, have excellent game awareness, scout well, and build the right counters. They pretty much just do everything that you can theoretically imagine you ought to do and do it very well.

On Sunday night I was watching a top Protoss player, Orb, doing his thing and nerd raging about losing, when I noticed that Wicked, a Zerg player who also has a stream, was in the chat. Wicked ended up challenging Orb to a best of three and it was a really compelling viewing experience. Because both had streams, you could watch the action simultaneously from both their perspectives, along with a running commentary from the chat rooms of both players, who supported and heckled their respective stream owners. The games were very evenly matched, with Orb’s amazing psi-storm skills battling Wicked’s slightly better macro technique. It was, in short, an excellent Zerg vs Protoss exhbition match, which really showed off the strengths and weaknesses of both races. The dramatic tension that came from seeing both players’ perspectives and knowing crucial things about the game that the players were unaware of was actually breathtaking. There were nail-biting moments such as when Orb came so close to scouting Wicked’s expansion, which would have led to him destroying it and winning, or Wicked’s decision not to counterattack with mutalisks after a big win, whilst we knew Orb had absolutely nothing to defend with and may have been knocked out then and there. It made for great viewing!

This kind of spontaneous match up, viewed from a first person perspective for both players, is something which as far as I know is completely new to the Internet and makes for great entertainment. I hope to see similar organized events emerge in the community as streaming becomes more prevalent. I feel like a caught a glimpse of the future on Sunday.