The world's best StarCraft II players have each been
introduced to the WCS Global Finals stage, but one of them is about to get
special treatment. As the huge auditorium in the center of Shanghai goes dark,
a video plays, introducing the tournament's only Chinese player, Comm. We see
him throwing a baseball with friends, playing basketball, and talking about how
much he appreciates his fans. The crowd, mostly Chinese men holding signs with
"WON!!!!" written on, look uninterested. By the end of the day, Comm
has been knocked out of the tournament. Bye the end of the following day,
Korean Lee-Sak 'PartinG' Won has won the right to call himself the best
StarCraft II player in the world. The crowd looks pleased. PartinG's victory
marked the endo of a tournament that included regional finals across five
continents, and was the perfect cap to a Global final in which Korean players
demonstrated thier total domination on StarCraft II e-sports. The semi-finals
contained only one non-Korean player, Taiwanese Yang 'Sen' Chia Cheng, who
finished fourth
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| StarCraft II |
This wasn't a surprise. At a press conference early on day
one, StarCraft players from across Europe and America all said the same thing:
the Korean players are the best. The tournament also demonstrated the strange
mixture of excitement and awkwardness the embodies e-sports. A team of eight traditional
Chinese drummers opened the competition with a dramatic performance, but this
was followed by men in pandered and Murloc costumes mincing around on stage as
if at a children's party. When each of the competitors was brought on stage,
they were led by their nation's flag and followed by television crews, but when
they got there, they stood uncomfortably, and then shuffled off again without
fanfare when the local presenters resumed talking. For PartinGand Bizzard, the
WCS Global Finals were a big success, but they remain a strange spectacle
