his entire life. “I started watching when I was three or two years old because my mother had introduced it to me and I was automatically entertained.” His initial introduction to wrestling was during the Attitude Era, a period of wrestling for the WWE—then the WWF—from the latter half of the 1990s to the early 2000s that was marked by a shift to more adult content. Rhashan has attended an extraordinary number of wrestling shows live: “3 house shows, 8 Raws, 4 Smackdowns, 2 Pay Per Views, and 4 Wrestlemanias.” Despite his family’s support of his interest, Rhashan has no local community to discuss wrestling with. “In my hometown there are scattered wrestling fans here and there, nothing intense for people my age. However, children seem to be all watching it.” Because of this, Rhashan has become guarded about sharing his interest outside the Wrestling Boards. “Some of my friends have an interest in WWE and I’ve made friends on this site, but I don’t know these guys in real life. I haven’t introduced my friends to WWE. WWE is not something that’s like amazing to show around, it’s just something I like.”
Through Rhashan’s long history with wrestling, he has developed a detailed method that he uses to choose which wrestlers to support.
Daniel Bryan is my favorite wrestler at the moment. I choose wrestlers to support based on who’s not in the top tier, like Cena & CM Punk. I like to go for fresher guys and people who haven’t gotten that shot yet. However that’s the least important aspect. I think that a wrestler must, of course, be able to wrestle a good match, and I’ve seen some that can’t. The last aspect is mic skills, which is the ability to captivate an audience just by using a mic. It seems worthless, but it’s the mic that builds up the hype for every match.
His interest in the total package, including the theatricality of a wrestler’s performance on the microphone, stems from his long history with wrestling, as well as from his interest in the creative pursuit of filmmaking and his understanding that it takes many elements to create a great dramatic scene.
Rhashan is an expert in his interest, with a long memory of its history, story lines, and wrestlers. If you ask him about his favorite wrestlers, you get answers that span a decade. He is also a heavy technology user when it comes to participating in his interest, using social media, YouTube, wrestling news sites, and forums. Rhashan has developed a web series on YouTube in which he creates analysis videos of the weekly show RAW and the annual pay-per-view event WrestleMania. He displays technical skill in video and audio editing, splicing together segments of the television broadcasts with shots of himself talking, and the audio runs seamlessly throughout each video. He enjoys the Wrestling Boards because it offers varied perspectives on wrestling through its diverse international community, and because it gives him access to a steady stream of people who are interested in his filmmaking. Rhashan uses his digital skills in video and audio editing to enhance his participation in Over the Ropes. “No one else really does Over the Ropes like I do, to the extent of shooting real promos.” With feedback from the community, he improves his video scripts as well as his video and audio production. He thinks that the videography skills he is developing in the Over the Ropes role-playing community are helping him to hone his career in filmmaking. Rhashan is interested in building a larger following and connections to future opportunity, using the Wrestling Boards as a site to develop and launch his future career as a filmmaker.
CASE 1.2
StarCraft II
Yong Ming Kow, Amanda Wortman, and Timothy Young
You know your opponent is coming even before you can see his or her forces.1 As soon as gameplay starts, you balance resource collection and unit creation to build your own army (as seen in figure C.1.2). Each decision you make has ramifications for the entire match and is made at the expense of something else. Did you build enough medics? What about base defense? The game is all about strategy and speed. Efficiency is the key. And just as in chess, different strategies can be employed to defeat your opponent. The strategies differ based on the map you are playing, the race you are competing against, and the play-style of your opponent. But like any good chess player, you go to the match with a variety of versatile strategies in your back pocket so you can change your strategy no matter what situation arises.
StarCraft II is one of the most popular PC-based real-time strategy games and is labeled by many of its participants as the chess of the 21st century. It is part of a franchise of games, with the first of its series, StarCraft, released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998. StarCraft’s well-designed and balanced competitive gameplay encouraged droves of youth to pit their skills against each other, a practice that eventually became what is now known as esports, or the practice of regulated competition with video games. The population of StarCraft II gamers is fairly homogenous, consisting mostly of college and high school students, as well as a significant number of young working adults. The interviewees in our study ranged in age from 15 to 30 years old and were predominantly male, though we interviewed a handful of females. About 90 percent of our interviewees were either white or Asian American. In the early years, StarCraft events were mostly self-organized by youth interest groups. But in 2011 and 2012, these competitive events saw rapid growth, with international tournaments awarding $2.5 million and $4 million, respectively, to winners.
Figure C.1.2. A StarCraft II match tests players’ ability to manage a battlefield in real time.
Image courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment.
The lore and backstory of the game flesh out an engaging and rich content world for players to explore during narrative-driven single-player games. In a StarCraft II competitive match, players control armies to engage in intergalactic warfare. The army units that players control, the maps that players compete on, and the art surrounding the world all contribute to the epic StarCraft II story line. Players control one of three factions—Terrans (human), Zerg (swarm insectoid creatures), or Protoss (futuristic alien race)—building bases, managing their economy, and raising an army to defeat their opponents. The game and community present a unique environment in which competition and professional play become a platform for self-directed learning and improvement, as well as inspiring various initiatives for community growth.
At the core of participants’ discourses about StarCraft II is the “metagame,” or “any planning, preparation, or maneuvering that a player does outside of actual gameplay to gain an advantage” (Team Liquid 2013b). In other words, it is the analysis of game mechanics and shifting social discourses of strategies within the community—which comes from deep analysis of high-level gameplay and active participation in online forums and video commentaries. While the metagame often refers more widely to any game-related activities that take place outside a game’s formal play space (Salen and Zimmerman 2004), the term, as used by StarCraft players, captures the robust way in which the game connects shared purpose in an interest-driven activity to learning and expertise development around that activity.
Driven by a common interest in the metagame, StarCraft II players both consume and create a range of media content, such as videos and articles, which they often link to one or several of the StarCraft community hubs, such as Day[9]TV (day9.tv) or Team Liquid (teamliquid.net). Day[9]TV features web shows revolving around high-level analysis of StarCraft gameplay. Day[9]TV is extremely popular among community members for its mix of high-level strategy analysis, humor, and approachability for players of all levels. Other hubs, such as Team Liquid, have been built through the efforts of volunteer fans who contribute their time to write articles, produce videos, and organize online and offline events, such as tournaments. These practices demonstrate how a game such as StarCraft II can enable players to anchor their interests to develop strategic and systemic thinking as well as contribute to a community and shared culture.
Although StarCraft II supports single-player play, the dominant
