It’s 7 p.m. on a Thursday in the first week of the winter semester
— prime-time drinking hours on any red-blooded American campus
— yet room C230 is packed to the doorjambs. Fanboys peak in
through the window at black furrows of rapt and primarily
Asian-American heads. They fill every seat in the room and spill into
the aisles. They are all here for total annihilation.
Total annihilation is what it feels like to play a good, real-time
strategy video game. You feel like you’re going to die, and that the
forces of doom are building and each second ticks off another missed
opportunity. Total annihilation has crashed-landed us all here in UC
Berkeley’s first-ever class on the real-time strategy video game
StarCraft, held tonight in the Haas School of Business.
The class is such an event that the marketer of Brawndo energy drink
is handing out tall cans. A producer and a cameraman from leading games
blog Gamespot.com focus on the
podium and record every second of the lecture from sophomore
undergraduate Alan Feng.
Even dressed in a long-sleeved, button-down shirt and necktie, Feng
looks more like a high school sophomore than a college one. But he is
craftier than most seniors. While many play beer pong, haze pledges,
and ignore the dire economic news, Feng has transformed his
StarCraft addiction into one of the hottest classes on campus.
Today, he’s got more shine than resident campus icon Michael Pollan.
He’s doing Internet-famous teaching while his peers ponder what major
to take.
Far, far away from Wall Street meltdowns and Pakistani
proliferation, Feng and friends will spend the next fourteen weeks
toying with total racial annihilation. The best-selling game
StarCraft, released in 1998, is a tense, ADD race against time.
Players get a God-like perspective over different maps of sci-fi
terrain. Your goal: pick a race and obliterate your opponent with
massive firepower. To do so, your forces must mine minerals and gas,
fabricate buildings, and then pump out vicious fighting machines.
Glittering, explosive hundred-tank battles will strain your attention
and mousing skills. Wins fuel euphoria. Losses feel as crushing and
disorienting as well — life.
And that’s Feng’s angle. Life is a resource battle. How you deploy
them separates the winners from the losers. He could hang out with Dick
Cheney.
“We’re going to be going over concepts that we talk about in
StarCraft terms with StarCraft architecture, but it will
definitely be applicable to life,” he says. “If you run a business and
you don’t know what your cash flow is, you don’t what your production
facilities are, you don’t know what your throughput is, you’re going to
have no clue how to run your business.”
In a way, Feng is the prime example of his own lessons. He has
turned wasted weeks of gaming into the grand prize of popularity,
academic achievement, maybe even a career. Feng is one of those game
junkies who channeled twelve years of piano lessons onto a keyboard,
and one day hoped to be a pro player. He played so many video games
that he lost the ability to read books. “During the time I played
seriously, my eyes got so used to tracking moving objects scrolling
across the screen, I couldn’t read books, because I couldn’t stare at
stationary objects.”
Feng was never good enough to make the pros, but he and his bros
discovered Cal’s Democratic Education program or “DECal.” There,
undergrads can teach a class, and he convinced a business professor
that StarCraft held vital life lessons.
The sophomore expected perhaps thirty multiplayer fiends to show the
first day, but quadruple that number arrived — even a few girls.
His Facebook page for the course went viral when it got picked up by a
few gaming blogs. Soon, social news aggregator Digg.com had news of StarCraft 101 on its
millions-served main page.
Feng’s e-mail inbox went nova. Now, he’s dissuading crashers of the
two-unit course.
“This is not easy,” he tells the class. “It’s not for the
weak-hearted, so consider that when you are taking this class. Also
consider you might fail. We’ll be dealing with concepts in derivatives,
calculus, analytic geometry, and differential equations.”
Like it or not, the future belongs to the world’s Fengs. MIT,
Carnegie Mellon, USC, Georgia Tech, and UCI all have game theory
classes and majors. America is becoming more like South Korea, the
capitol of the StarCraft universe, where more than four million
of its nine million copies sold. This doom simulator is a generational
touchstone on par with Lil Wayne or Harry Potter. Professional
gamers train ten hours a day, make six-figures, enjoy groupies, and
appear on dedicated gaming television channels. More than 120,000
StarCraft fans attended a 2005 man-on-man battle — the
biggest competitive gaming audience in human history.
Feng has a mere hobby club on academic steroids, but it goes right
up until the end of its 9 p.m. time slot, and ends with a bizarre, wild
round of applause.
Streams of nerds pour into the night — chatty and buzzed on
Brawndo. It’s dark and late, and we are back in the world of oil shocks
and toxic assets. Certain economic annihilation still looms. The clock
still ticks. We check cell phones and get going. Time is wasting.
