As anybody who follows me on twitter or Facebook or gchat or AIM or MSN (or talks to me in real life, but who does that if they can just talk to me on the internets?) could probably guess by now, I’m pretty pleased with the recent article in the New York Times on my favorite up-and-coming eSports phenomenon – the Collegiate StarLeague (CSL). The CSL, which is the brainchild of Mona “Hazel” Zhang (recent second-place winner in the SC2GG Commentator Idol), a freshman at Princeton University, recently held a showmatch between the Princeton CSL team and a StarCraft team at Qinghua University in China. Qinghua is a pretty big name – think of it as the Yale of China to Beijing University’s Harvard. I’m not sure how they organized the showmatch, which was broadcast semi-live off of replays by Cholera on ustream, but I’m sure Hazel has friends there or something.


In recent months, 27 colleges — including Harvard, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ohio State, Texas, Cal-Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Oberlin — have joined the league to play StarCraft … Ke Wan, a graduate student from China who is studying operations research, detailed each world’s character traits: Zergs are prolific and fast, Terrans are sophisticated strategists, and individual Protoss units are extremely powerful. Wan drew a geopolitical analogy. “Zerg is like China,” he said. “It depends a lot on its large population. The U.S. is Protoss because it emphasizes the value of the individual. And Terran is Russia or the former Soviet Union, a huge high-tech war machine.”
“It’s definitely a very beautiful game,” Liu told the crowd, keeping up the standard between-game banter. “We’re looking to get more people off the athletic field and into the gaming room.”>