StarCraft: The Craft of War

My dad once taught me to play Chess. It's a genius game that teaches you, well, the craft of war. It involves strategy. Each piece has its own properties, and they're allowed to do different things on the map. You have to carefully plan your moves, and attack sneakily so you don't lose your king and queen right away. 

If there is a modern computer game that is analogous to Chess, I believe it is StarCraft (the original). It was published in 1998 and is still available to play via Blizzard Entertainment's Battle.net application for a very low price. In fact, it's still well-supported, and many people play the game online today.  

Image from StarCraft by Blizzard Entertainment

The basic premise of the game is, well, war. You have three races (teams) in space who, for whatever reason, cannot resort to diplomacy and must do battle! They are the Terrans (humans), Zerg and Protoss. Each race has it's own unique qualities. The Zerg are terrifying bug-like creatures who can re-produce at a rapid rate, but they're an intelligent species that can attack with speed and efficiency. The Protoss, are extremely intelligent humanoid creatures that take a while to get going but create the best technology for sneak attacks. The Terrans are about a middle ground in that equation, balanced in strategy and technology. Being good at the game requires you to master all three races, and their techniques. 

The game is so difficult! I've barely beaten the computer once. And, when I play Online I get crushed even quicker by real people. Koreans are really good at this game, by the way!, so shoutout to the wonderful country of Korea. But even though I get crushed, people are generally polite. Basically, the only messages I get are something like: "Sorry, guys... have to go home now." 

A battle between Zerg and Terran flying stuff

The main technique is, first-and-foremost, speed; you have to be extraordinarily quick on the keyboard and the best players have all kinds of hotkeys (saved little codes) on their keyboard to make things happen way faster than pointing and clicking with the mouse. The second is creating FLYING THINGS, anything that can fly: planes, spaceships, horrible dragons, etc. Once you have the flying stuff you can raid your enemies quickly without giving them a hope of survival; "death from above," they say. 

The thing about getting the flying things is that you need to invest time, resources and research into having them. And, they cost A LOT. But sending in the flying stuff is a heck of a lot better than having all your great young Marines massacred by a swarm of angry Zerg.        

When I play against the computer I like to pretend I'm Dwight D. Eisenhower planning the great D-Day invasion of 1944: hundreds of ships, hundreds of planes, guys jumping out of ships, guys jumping out of planes, etc. That's kind of fun. But Online (and in real life, twenty-first century warfare), that strategy doesn't work so well. You always just get sucker-punched by a guy on another continent that's smarter and faster than you are. But, it's just a game, and we can have a good laugh afterward!

Mike Ybarra, Allen Adham et all. StarCraft. Blizzard Entertaining. 1998.