Project 4 Proposal
Bobby Baldino
I am proposing for project four that I examine the discourse community of the highly popular and competitive computer game Starcraft II and its rapidly growing player community. Nationwide, the game Starcraft II is starting to finally become well known among Americans or “foreigners” as the community calls anyone who is not from Korea. My friends and I have been a member of this community ever since we heard about the $10 Million dollar game release two summers ago. For a game developer, Blizzard Entertainment, to put the amount of time and money into the making of this game, we had to check it out.
The release of Starcraft II was highly anticipated due to the huge success of Starcraft Brood war. The first Starcraft game was released in March of 1998 and changed the way real time strategy (RTS) games were made and played. It was the first game of its kind to be so balanced and competitive that it instantly got a lot of attention. The most popular expansion set of Starcraft was Starcraft Brood war, which was released November of 1998. From 1998 until 2009, countless hours of unique competitive game play has occurred recreationally and in professional tournaments. With the rate of change in technology, for a game to remain extremely popular for more than 2 years is extremely difficult and Starcraft did it for over 10.
The Starcraft community has always been relatively large for a computer game, but has been exponentially increasing since the release of Starcraft II in 2009. Anyone is welcome to join and participate in the community through online play, online forums, game casts, and even live tournaments. Live tournaments used to be primarily hosted in South Korea and televised on one of their two 24hr gaming channels, but are becoming increasingly popular in America. IGN, a popular site for videogame reviews, hosts IGN Professional League (IPL) competitions with a prize pool of $100,000 and first place prize of $30,000. The tournament play is streamed live on the internet with popular game casters from the community calling the games. An already established videogame tournament hosting organization, Major League Gaming (MLG) only adopted professional Starcraft to their competitive ESports tournaments a few years ago. Now as the main event of all MLG tournaments, Starcraft II has proved its popularity and entertainment. The tournaments are attracting big sponsors like Mountain Dew, Samsung, Visine, Sony, Dr Pepper, Stride, Bic, Hot Pockets, and Alienware just to name a few. Every month MLG hosts a professional tournament in a different location and attracts thousands of people. For this month, November, MLG Providence is from the 18th to the 20th and held in Providence, Rhode Island. The tournament games are Call of Duty: Black Ops, Halo: Reach, and Starcraft II. Starcraft has four separate live streams covering the matches of the World’s best players and is advertised as the main event on the MLG website.
A lot of my friends and I are members of the Starcraft II community, however compared to console games like Halo and Call of Duty our community is relatively small on a college campus like this. I want to analyze the community to help raise awareness of Starcraft and ESports and how competitive and cool they really are.
In my paper I plan to use Gee’s 6 characteristics to define the shape and details of the community. I also plan to use Wardle’s way of illustrating “mode of belonging” to how players and fans are accepted into the Starcraft community. I am defiantly planning on using the specific lexis section from Swale’s article, because speaking in Starcraft terms sounds basically like speaking Latin to someone who is not an experienced member of the community.
Refrences
http://www.teamliquid.net/
WAW articles by Swales, Wardle, and Gee
You are obviously knowledgeable about this topic and I think that's a good thing. You can provide some background in the introduction. However, I think your stated purpose-- "to analyze the community to help raise awareness of Starcraft and ESports and how competitive and cool they really are"--needs to be more directly connected to the goals of the project. Your examination should add something to the discussion of discourse communities and language use. This could be as simple as talking about how there is little research on online game communities as discourse communities and examinations of such groups can help us understand how new initiates become members in a discourse community and how a lexis is formed and used. You might look at my comment on Tom's blog as he's also examining an online community. Of course, You can also raise awareness by doing this. AND you can tackle some of the stereotypes out there about video games. Make a move similar to Mirabelli and show how complex these video game worlds are. There are TONS OF POSSIBILITIES obviously-just make sure you stay anchored on the goals of the assignment and the concepts we've discussed in class.
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