Gaming
21 public collections on Loreline.
Documentaries
- StarCraftStarCraft was laughed at when Blizzard first showed it in 1996, "orcs in space", so they threw the build away and started again. What shipped on 31 March 1998, and what the Brood War expansion finished that November, was a strategy game with three races that shared almost nothing, balanced so finely that people were still discovering it twenty-five years later. In South Korea it became something no game had been before: televised, with its own channels, its own leagues, its own stars. Lim Yo-hwan filled arenas. Teams lived in houses and practised like athletes, and a generation of players, BoxeR, NaDa, iloveoov, Savior, Bisu, Jaedong, Flash, worked out what the game actually was. Then came a match-fixing scandal, a licensing war with Blizzard, and StarCraft II, which took the crown and the crowds with it. Brood War refused to die: the old pros came back on Afreeca, and the Starleague started again in 2017. Along the way the game became a laboratory, the hardest thing anyone had asked a machine to play, until DeepMind's AlphaStar reached Grandmaster in 2019. This is all of it, the making, the fiction, the matches, the scene and the machines.
- World of WarcraftWorld of Warcraft as a real thing that happened: a game that fell over on launch night in 2004, held twelve million subscribers at its peak, produced its own accidental epidemic and its own peer-reviewed epidemiology, and supported an economy of several hundred thousand gold farmers whose largest broker was run by Steve Bannon. Twenty-two years of raids, machinima, funerals, walkouts and one line about what players think they want.