What is Starcraft?

Starcraft is like playing a game of Stratego using only your toes while you attempt to juggle a set of flaming clubs and gargle ginger ale to the tune of "Oh, Susanna". Every time you sing a note out of tune, you lose a turn, and if you drop a club, it lands on the board and burns up several of your pieces. After several minutes, if the game is still going, someone starts throwing water balloons at you, and someone else starts yelling random numbers into your ear. The only thing comforting you is the knowledge that the exact same thing is happening to your opponent, wherever he may be.

Seriously, though. Playing Starcraft reminds me of all those wacky multi-tasking flash games like this one. It can be stressful, but if you're in the right mindset, it's a blast. And when you manage to really pull things off, you feel like a god.

There is one key difference between Starcraft and those flash games, though--the strategy of Starcraft is deep. I am new to the game, so I can only peek down the rabbit hole, but it's a loooong way down and I can't see the bottom if there is one. When should you expand? When should you go for higher tech? When and how should you scout? What is the best counter for your opponent's strategy, provided you've scouted it? When are upgrades worth the cost? How valuable is time as a resource? When should you harass, and how can you evaluate how much damage the harassment needs to do to be worth it? When, if ever, does cheese become your best chance of winning? Which race is the best? How should you arrange your hotkeys? How should you arrange your buildings? Is APM important? How aggressive or defensive should you be? And on and on and on and on...

The distractions in the Stratego metaphor represent macro (short for macro-management), which is basically all the things you know you have to do but are constantly forgetting, like making sure you're constantly producing units and keeping your money low and building supply providers (e.g. ADDITIONAL PYLONS) early enough so that you don't max out. The thing is, even if you're good enough to remember to do all those things, that leaves very little time to make strategic decisions. So as Day[9] attested in his superb Starcraft autobiography, the game strongly rewards the ability to be immediately decisive. You might not be doing the right thing, but if you waffle, then you're definitely not doing the right thing. I hope Starcraft can be a vehicle for me to teach myself to apply that philosophy to my life.

Starcraft (along with RTS's in general) teaches you not to become enamored with your own actions. I always used to be terrible at RTS's (I've had Age of Empires II for a long time, but every time I tried to get into it, I failed terribly and felt that there was just something fundamental about the game that I wasn't grasping) because I had the natural tendency to narrowly focus on each of my actions. When I made a worker go and build a building, I wanted to watch my little person walk over and watch him build my little building and watch my little progress bar fill up as the construction animation moved through the different stages of built-ness, up to the final moments as I anticipated the satisfying "bloo-doo-oop" signifying completion. I feel that this tendency must be very widespread since all casual management games that I've played prey eagerly upon it.

But no! We Starcraft players have no time to watch units move to their destination nor buildings be built, and we care not for sound effects but for their informational value. We are concerned with wonderful, glorious strategy, and it is happening right now, in real time!