Yes, This Is Where I Weigh In On the Big Issues Of 2009: No LAN Multiplayer In Starcraft 2.

Starcraft 2, the sequel to possibly the most important videogame of my childhood, unless there is a seismic change in Blizzard Entertainment's design philosophy, will not have LAN enabled multiplayer. You will have to connect through Battle.net (Blizzard's free matchmaking online multiplayer service) to play the game with friends. It is because of this quirk that I am entertaining the serious possibility of not purchasing Starcraft 2.

(Pro tip: I am probably going to buy Starcraft 2.)

Blizzard is revamping (rebuilding is probably closer to what they're trying) Battle.net to integrate ideas like a marketplace, friends list functionality, achievements and becoming an overarching platform for Blizzard games into the long-standing service. (In a recent interview, [see below] it sounds like they're trying to synthesize Xbox Live, Apple's App Store and Steam into one platform, dedicated, solely, to the online experience of Blizzard properties.)



So, understandably, they're excited about the service and with the growth and evolution of multiplayer gaming, they're looking to make the multiplayer and singleplayer experiences as seamless as possible, via an online, off-computer cloud of data, giving players a reason to stay connected to the internet, if only for the new features and occasional authentication.

I don't like this, to be honest. And I recognize it's probably pretty silly for me to dislike it. I'm old (in videogame terms), and am part of pretty obscure and hard to reach market.

I have never bought Xbox Live (the new standard for multiplayer gaming) or even owned an Xbox, despite the fact that I'm a primarily a console gamer. I don't use Steam, despite the fact that I'm very much in the market for independent, quirky, off the beaten trail games and occasionally, I play PC and was extremely proud of myself for beating the last mission in Starcraft: Brood War, without cheat codes.

I am a very, very peculiar case and it would be fiscally irresponsible for Blizzard to seriously consider what I have to say when making their sequel. In short, this is my reckoning for not keeping up with the times.

I think my tastes in strategy games calcified after 2005 and unless Blizzard released it, I don't bother with PC games. That's not me being a snob, either. It's me being primarily a console gamer and having less and less time to fuck around with cracks, .exe files and "it'll just be another fifteen minutes". More than that, it might be wanting to jump to something I already am intimately familiar with, owing to the fact that it takes a lot longer to get to the point where I can shed responsibility and play games.

Now that I am no longer within a close physical proximity of Eleven Names writers and irregulars deputized to cover Anonymous protests, when I do play PC games, it's usually with a very good friend of mine at his house maybe twice a month and I ultimately end up insisting we play Starcraft or Diablo II together as opposed to Sins of A Solar Empire or Dawn of War and the fastest way to leverage this is through LAN connectivity.

Shit, the last digital matchmaking service I used was Battle.net, to play Warcraft III: the Frozen Throne, the last non-World of Warcraft game Blizzard has released.

I'm a Blizzard fanboy evangelical and the question is not whether I am going to keep the faith, but instead the question is am I willing to move with the company into the future? My view on human interaction changed dramatically after the third and final campaign in the original Starcraft, so I'd be leaving behind a significant amount of my intellectual history by not experiencing the single player game on its own. The multiplayer, which has been a vehicle for more fun times than I can count or remember, carries with it too many memories to count.

(Oh, and I'm not sure my laptop will be able to run Starcraft 2. But that's a money problem rather than an intellectual one, with a clear way to solve that conundrum.)

And here's where I go from carefully constructed argument to emotional plea for a way to express my unease with the change.

Aesthetically, LAN multiplayer is a lot cleaner than Battle.net. When I use LAN multiplayer, it's just my friend and I, going through no channels or lobbies in which other people and bots shriek for your attention. That LAN option was like going to an old hideout, that despite dust was clean and uncluttered. That's a finer point and not one that ought to hold much water, but it felt like ours, damnit.



It felt like that little place I could come to play with my friends. It felt like something shared no matter where I went. I got used to playing LAN multiplayer games in high school, something that feels very far away, in a dirty basement, with four or seven of my friends. We were then confused, figuring out how we feel about big ideas and those feelings are hard to separate from the balance of six zergling rush versus everything else.

This continued through college, around different people just looking at Starcraft as a joy to play and as an escape from our lives and the house around us. That feeling would have been broken by having to connect to a service and those channels, if only momentarily.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I don't want to be connected to millions of people automatically. I think I want to preserve that little private place where just my friends and I can go without interference. I don't know how hard it would be to preserve in the new architecture of the game and online service, but for this target market, it would feel like a personal (if anachronistic) touch.

And at the end of the day, that would be the big victory, that a game who'se development is likely larger than the combined GDP of three sub-Saharan countries chosen at random and has the imagination of a stable of gamers worldwide feels personal.