Day[9]'s bright idea to grow the StarCraft 2 eSports scene: high school leagues

StarCraft 2's longtime player/commentator/ambassador Sean " Day[9] " Plott is one of the best interviews in gaming. He's universally candid, positive, relatable, and unlike some game developers, he's got nothing to hide. He's also full of good ideas—another one of which was mentioned last weekend to GameSpot during the Battle.net World Championship in Shanghai. In that interview, Mr. 9 was asked to look into the long, six- or seven-year future of StarCraft, and tell us what he'd like to see in such a crystal ball. His response: StarCraft in high schools.

Plott: "I've given this answer many times before, and I'm gonna give it again: High. School. Leagues. I think that is the prime example of cultural embeddedness. You think of something like football—American football, sorry Europe. 'American hand egg,' you know the thing with like the leather coney dude. I'm great at descriptions, oh yeah. Occasionally, but not always. Okay, so American football is stupidly complicated in terms of rules. Just, the concept of downs and kickoffs and onside kicks and what off-sides is—all that is quite complicated. But no one's looked at a manual ever. I've never opened the rule book to football, and yet I know all the rules to football because my friends and my family acted as the manual. It was a cultural manual. And high school I think is a huge part of that—that you go into high school sports, you see it, it's all around you, and I'd want that for StarCraft. Even something like chess—not a lot of people invest in chess or play a lot, but they know about it, a lot of people know the rules of it, they know how the pieces move, that the knight moves in a little 'L.' And if that carried over to StarCraft with high school leagues then I think that would be the biggest sign of success."

It's a nice thought, letterman jackets with stitched-on patches of Banelings and Siege Tanks. Blizzard agrees, apparently; Plott's comments directly echo those of Ilja Rotelli , Blizzard's Director of Global Community & eSports. Watch GameSpot's full interview below.

Evan's a hardcore FPS enthusiast who joined PC Gamer way back in 2008. After an era spent publishing reviews, news, and cover features, he now oversees editorial operations for PC Gamer worldwide, including setting policy, training, and editing stories written by the wider team. His most-played FPSes are Hunt: Showdown, Team Fortress 2, Team Fortress Classic, Rainbow Six Siege, and Counter-Strike. His first multiplayer FPS was Quake 2, played on serial LAN in his uncle's basement, the ideal conditions for instilling a lifelong fondness for fragging.