I think the GDC Advisory Board is meeting today to decide what talks we’ll get to see at the next GDC. I really hope that someone from Blizzard submitted a talk about the design of StarCraft 2. Specifically, I’d like to see hear how they dealt with the design challenge of creating something that was both a videogame product ie. a chunk of media that people buy and consume, and something like Baseball – an institution that’s a multi-million dollar industry unto itself with professional players, a large audience, peripheral media, and thousands of people whose lives and livelihoods revolve around it.

I’m curious about the practical aspects of, for example, whether Blizzard as a company makes money from the Koren e-sports scene. But more than that there’s just something fascinating about how SC2 straddles that line, not just for Korean pro-gamers, but for all of us. On the one hand we have what is, basically, a sort of Chess variant, a complex strategy game with a highly technical timing/skill component and, on the other hand, an experience, an interactive romp through a vivid cartoon dreamscape of mythic archetypes. It’s a perfect expression of the deep (and irresovable?) conflict at the heart of videogames, and I’d love to hear what the folks at Blizzard think about as they weave through it.