all right well we'll start kind of talking about the last bit of uh video games here i'm going to focus on the non-reflexive ones more kind of strategy video games um today and so hopefully we can get through that okay so here we go um so with strategy video games there's you'll see a bit more connection i think with board games with these particular kinds of games because they're supposed to be about intentionality about being careful uh skillful thinking and planning and so there's a lot of different levels of this but a lot of times you are given control of a number of uh and that are under your command and so i'm gonna talk quite a bit about league of legends later on which is probably the the most widely played a strategy game in the world if not the most widely played game in the world right now but before i do that there's another kind of strategy game which we can call simulation games so under this category you would find things like flight simulators you can also find simulators for things like cars or trains or a lot of different simulators or city simulators uh simcity being kind of the classic version that kind of got this started if what is it like to actually try and build and create a city now there's sim city like uh games for you could do build zoos you can build roller coasters you can do there's there's tons um and then there's simulations of life with the sims being kind of the uh the classic version of that right so sims standing in short for simulation but i want to primarily talk about strategy games so you can see here it's very very tiny print there are lots of different ways to kind of subdivide this and so the first setting here is called the 4x strategy game and the four x's stand for explore expand exploit and exterminate if i can get that out with sid meier civilization being basically the the classic example of this empire earth is as well but it's a turn-based strategy game where you have to do these four things in order to succeed uh artillery strategy games this is these were very very early on um kind of if you control a tank and you have to account for things like ballistics and arc and trajectory very simple physics engineer stuff going back to some of that stuff from that first lecture of like all right if i fire something at this angle and this speed where is it going to land am i going to hit my target kind of thing um there's also something called an auto battler battler and so the idea is here you have some units that you place on a board a gridded board kind of like a chess board and you tactically place them on the board and then you hit go and they kind of do their thing so there's a couple of uh examples of this like team fight tactics and hearthstone battlegrounds that would fall under this category there's mobas uh multiplayer online battle arenas so i'll talk league of legends is the prime primary example of this um but league of legends is in some ways you could argue a knockoff of uh dota or uh defense of the ancients and but there are other versions of this as well like smite and heroes of the storm that are also fairly popular so the idea is that you work as a team in an arena but you're fighting another team or working against another team so the other really major category here would be the rts category a real time strategy so in this case instead of a team you are working as an individual and you are trying to build up a fairly large force relatively quickly in order to conquer an enemy so starcraft being a primary competitive example this but things like age of empires and command and conquer uh company of heroes and pikmin would also probably fall under this category slightly different from real-time tactics but still a lot of a lot of overlap there tower defense games which are pretty much you'll see this a lot on mobile apps and simple computer games and stuff but um essentially you have some sort of base or tower that you're trying to defend and so you set up defenses and then enemy comes at you and waves and at the end of a wave you acquire some experience or goal to try and make your defenses better because the next wave is going to be stronger and it kind of keeps going then from that you have what's called turn-based strategy so i've listed here civilization and heroes of my magic so civilization would now be under two categories so turn-based strategy is really just to kind of differentiate it some from real time so real time means that reflexes are a bit involved so you have to be thinking and acting quickly whereas in something that's turn-based like civilization and heroes of might and magic you can take as long as you want uh to make your decisions so you can yeah so there's turn-based strategy or turn-based tactics something like final fantasy tactics or x-com then there are these larger scale kind of uh war game or grand strategy war game kind of things that are happening on a very very grand scale a lot of different a lot of different things here i'm gonna focus on um the three what i would maybe i'm being biased but i would say the three kind of major games that that define some of these major categories so civilization being one of them civilizations being sid meyer's civilization's been around for a long time it's now in its sixth iteration so civilization six um and this is actually a fairly good game in terms of they've made a board game out of it as well but even if you play it as you as a video game you'll notice the similarities to in the connections to a lot of things in board games and so there are actually people in the corporate world who will use civilization for training because it teaches things like strategic thinking resource allocation how to deal with competition time and priority management so there's a lot of different things you can do how do you know which to prioritize and how long you can plan for it and culture and people management so in your in the civilization that you're building you have to manage your people to keep them happy and so the game the game is fairly complicated this here i'm showing is a really simple screen grab basically from the game there's a lot going on there's a lot of different a lot of different uh diplomacy war social religious health uh kinds of things individual units uh it's a giant map there's tons of different it's it's very very complicated and you can get in over your head relatively quickly so the tutorials are really important if you're just kind of picking this up but because it's so complicated you could say that it it imitates a lot of things that are i mean it's a game but closer to reality than many other things because of the the degrees of complication that are are present in something like this all right so that brings me to rts or real-time strategy being starcraft starcraft 2 in particular had has massive amount of popularity in south korea where there are entire television channels that are dedicated just to showing starcraft stuff and people the people gamers who are really good at this win tons of money they're like celebrities and stuff like that so i'm going to show you a short video that talks a little bit about what starcraft is uh it's made by blizzard you're the same people who made warcraft and so but starcraft is probably there um and starcraft 2 in particular would be kind of the most up-to-date most complicated version and so you've got this balance of these three different races that are kind of competing against each other each has pluses and minuses i think um the video will actually help explain this uh for you let's see if we can get that going welcome to iaytv and welcome to what is starcraft this video is for people relatively unfamiliar with what that is in 1998 the video game developer blizzard released a game called starcraft before this they had released popular real-time strategy games warcraft warcraft 2 and the dungeon crawling adventure game diablo starcraft marked a shift in genre as they departed from the more fantastical genres and began to explore science fiction diving into a story that included various alien races as well as a human military let's dive into the mythology of starcraft we follow a story where humans now called terrans have colonized the outer reaches of space and there's a bit of internal conflict as a rebellion springs up among them the terrans have also come across two other alien species they've discovered that an alien race called the zerg have been secretly infiltrating and infecting human planets the other race a highly advanced species called the protoss have attacked a terran planet without any provocation as the story of the original starcraft plays out you rotate plane as the three races to discover what's really happening in terms of gameplay starcraft is a real time strategy game where you construct buildings and hire different units that act as soldiers for whatever race you're playing as they each play somewhat differently the terrans are the middle ground where they have decent pros cons but serve as an easy entry point to the game for beginners the zerg to represent the relentless desire to infect are the cheapest units to make and focus instead on quantity and speed to overwhelm their opponents a tactic known as the zerg rush was quickly adopted where a zerg player could produce many cheap units quickly and overwhelm their opponent almost immediately before they could build up much defense on the opposite end of the spectrum the protoss build fewer units while each one is more powerful but takes longer to produce the protoss also have access to high-tech abilities like shields and teleportation which make their costly and timely build times more attractive the original starcraft was one of the first games if not the first game to implement the idea of multiple factions that are vastly different as opposed to copy and paste factions of other games each has different strengths and weaknesses and they aren't mirrored versions of each other which at this point was pretty unheard of it surprisingly took 12 years for a sequel to arrive and even then its campaign single-player maps were split into thirds with the teared missions releasing in 2010 the zerg missions in 2013 and the protoss in 2015. much of starcraft revolves around the multiplayer game though in the 12 years that people waited for the sequel starcraft became one of the pioneer games in the esports arena it became an especially huge deal for south korea where its best players are now huge celebrities and starcraft games are aired on at least three dedicated television channels a term called bar craft was adopted in the us when a bar in seattle began showing professional starcraft games instead of traditional sports matches bars all over the world have started to do the same showing esports multiple times a week for packed crowds the united states air force also utilizes starcraft in some of its basic trainings to teach new airmen how to think under stress and how to implement untraditional battle tactics those are the basics of starcraft some of the basic mythology basic gameplay and some cool cultural impacts of the game check back next wednesday for another what is video okay so that is a little bit on real-time strategy and starcraft if you want to you can really get into it i think some of the original stuff is now available for free online um if you really want to find it or if you haven't heard of it or something like that so i want to talk about moba particularly league of legends which is arguably depending on how how you count numbers it may be the most played game in the world i don't know fortnite it's not it's not a battle that i want to fight about but um the prize money for the 2018 finals for it was more than six million dollars and it the finals had a higher viewership than the super bowl so part of what contributes to that is the fact that this is an international sport it's an international game whereas the nfl is just the u.s and so there's a huge um a huge following and so i've got here you there's a whole about 150 or so different champions or different players that you can play that are part of this so there's a huge amount of variability and also a lot of if you're interested in story and narrative there's a very deep story that's connected with this so similar to what i do with starcraft i'm going to show you a little video that hopefully helps to explain what's going on here and um it's it's hard to tell with starcraft and with league of legends if you haven't played them how difficult they actually are to get really good at and so if you begin to get a sense for this is really complicated the people who are good at this spend a long time at it it's not just about like oh i can press this button really fast there's actually quite a bit of tactical thinking uh anticipating what your enemy is going to do and how do we counter that and so on and so forth so let me show you this maybe i'll pause it at a couple of points if i think that's appropriate um let's give you to give you a sense the 10th anniversary of the league of legends world championship is just around the corner millions of people from across the globe will tune in to see the greatest teams on the planet battle it out on summoner's rift but what is summoner's rift what is league of legends a moba what the hell is a moba don't worry we've got you covered let's take a dive into the rules and basic strategy of one of the most popular esports in the world this is league of legends 101 classes in session you might be asking yourself what is a moba the technical definition is a multiplayer online battle arena but let's make it simple two teams of players each controlling their own characters play against each other on a single map for league of legends each team consists of five players and the map is known as summoner's rift this is summoner's rift the rift has six areas that we need to focus on two bases one for each team each contains a nexus more to come on that later three lanes top lane mid lane bottom lane and lastly the jungle point of the game to use these areas to pave a path to victory by destroying the opposing team's nexus easy right well if that was the case we'd all be faker who ah never mind let's get back to the basics in order to understand the areas of the rift we must take a look at how a league of legends team is structured each team is made up of five players and each player has a specific role the roles are broken out as follows top laner mid laner bot laner or ad carry jungler and support if you haven't figured it out yet each of these roles plays a certain part of the map but what about support nice work you're learning fast the support role is exactly what it sounds like the purpose is to support the team the support often starts in the bottom lane but ensures that all other teammates have the assistance they need to execute their jobs at the highest possible level among the support's role is gathering information about the enemy team and their position this is done through wards expendable items that provide vision within a small area this allows a team to see through the fog of war and gather that information so fog of war is a fairly common term in these kinds of games but essentially the idea is it's representative of the fact that in any given actual battlefield you don't have complete knowledge of the battlefield you only can know what you can see and so if there's any part of the map any part of the map that your team is on and can see then you can see as well so for example in this particular layout here right you've got the the blue team here and i don't actually know which side we're looking at but uh i think it's blue team side but you'll notice there's some dark patches here well that's because these the blue characters can't actually see into those dark patches they don't have people who have vision of that area so this would be considered fog of war and so it can be uh they'll you can place wards here that will give you temporary vision you can have people just travel to these areas to see what's there um but it creates pockets of unknown areas basically which is kind of simulating what you would find in a real battlefield right you don't unless you have someone or something watching for you you can't see it providing it to their team to both protect from enemies and attack them in these areas [Music] so how does a team win the game well they have to destroy the opposing team's nexus but while that sounds like an easy task it isn't many of these games will last 30 minutes or more as each team executes their strategy increases their strength and finally breaks through to victory let's dig into how all of that happens first off players can't simply walk to the enemy nexus and destroy it the moment the game begins before a team reaches the nexus they have to make their way through the opposing team's turrets each lane has a total of three turrets and one inhibitor that must be destroyed before advancing towards the enemy nexus turrets each nexus is protected by two enemy nexus turrets which cannot be attacked until at least one of the three inhibitors is destroyed destroy those last two turrets and the nexus is free game did we forget to mention that each turret can attack opposing players when they are within a certain distance well that happens but that isn't the only way a team can be attacked players can attack each other and then there's minions yeah minions each team has a set of minions that continue to populate so here you can see these little blue guys here so anything that's big with a giant blue bar here that's a person that's a character is controlled by a person so in this case it's uh what's that broken blade and uh beardson for uh team solomid or tsm their characters are here and uh the minions for their side are here and so the minions spawn so here's the you can see down here in the bottom right this is the whole map right so here's the blue base so the minions will spawn from this area and then just kind of walk down the lanes they'll walk down this lane they'll walk down this lane and walk down the bottom lane every so often and so the blue team spawned some minions and the red team or the opposing team in this side also spawn some minions articulate and attack enemy turrets and players through each lane players can destroy enemy minions to increase gold and experience throughout the game while minions are a small part of the game controlling minion waves and using them to your advantage becomes an important part of the road to victory one more thing to note on minions if a team destroys an inhibitor the minions for that particular lane become super minions they have capes they have capes now they don't have capes but they do cause more damage and are harder to kill during a match players will consistently fight against each other as well as with monster camps and objectives to earn the game's two main resources gold and experience experience allows players to level up their champions skills and stats to gain an edge over the opponent gold is used to buy items from the in-game shop that also improves the champion stats all of these things come down to one simple thing the more things you kill the stronger your team becomes there's no better place in summoner's rift to quickly gain an advantage over the opponent than the jungle the jungle makes up the remainder of the map and is not defended by towers or minions each side is allotted the same amount of jungle with a river serving as the division point the jungle is populated with monsters some small some large that can be destroyed by players who then gain gold and experience let's take a closer look at the large monsters the rift herald this monster will spawn on the top side of the map twice before the 20-minute mark of the game whichever team gets the final blow and destroys the rift herald will receive an item that can summon an ally rift herald which can attack the opponent's turrets and cause large amounts of damage dragons yes there's dragons on the bottom side of the map is the dragon pit starting at five minutes one of four elemental dragons also known as drakes will randomly spawn at this location for either team to fight each dragon provides the team who defeats it a stats benefit dragons will continue to spawn until the end of the game with additional factors deciding which dragon will appear if one team gets four dragons they'll gain an additional stat bonus based off whichever element the game decides then an elder dragon will spawn which provides even more benefits based off of which elemental dragons a team has slain before them the baron the last monster type is the most powerful in league of legends baron nasher spawning at the same pit as the rift herald the baron will appear at the 20-minute mark and will continue to spawn every 7 minutes until the end of the game the team that lands the killing blow on the baron is awarded a team boost in attack damage and ability power for 180 seconds allied minions also become more powerful if nearby a champion with the baron buff die while carrying that buff and you lose it killing the baron can be the final step towards victory or stealing it can snatch your team out of the jaws of defeat they're gonna try they're gonna dive into the pit plenty of damage available but will they even stop the baron as this fight oh he gets to kill the juggler who's gonna get it you gotta be kidding me licorice solo carrying this game there's still two counts for africa but can you believe that barrett's deal keep an eye out as some of the best team fights happened around barron so now you know the basics of how a match of league of legends works there's just one final piece to the puzzle and for that we have to go all the way back to the beginning of the match before a match begins actually before he talks about that really quickly if you die um you actually just respawn back at your base uh but there's a timer so you have to wait for a few seconds to in order to do that and the timer gets longer and longer as the game progresses so if you die in the first like two minutes you only have to wait you know a couple of seconds before you come back um but if you die much later in the game after like 20 to 30 minutes you're talking about like you know 30 seconds you have to wait and so there's no real costs to dying since you don't lose any items or gold or experience or anything like that but um you the the opposing team gets some gold for killing you and you can't do anything on the map while you're waiting to respawn so the team has some advantage there each team will enter a draft during the draft a team will decide which champions they want to ban from the opposing teams as well as draft their own team's champions each team bans five champions these bands eliminate them from being selected forcing the team to select champions from the remaining champions pool with 150 champions available team compositions can be crafted in many different ways from many different strategic game plans in some instances when a match is all said and done people will claim that the match will be won or lost during the draft phase league of legends is constantly changing and growing new champions big patches and changes in play style but in the end these simple facts will hopefully help you understand it all better for more coverage of league of legends in the 2020 world championship keep it locked here on youtube and at espn.com esports [Music] okay all right so that's just an introduction to both league of legends and starcraft again this there's a huge amount of stuff out there uh i mean it's it's kind of like trying to explain nfl football to somebody in like five minutes and all the entire culture that exists around it and all the different strategies that are involved and kind of how different plays are run and stuff like that it's it's that complicated it's that level of stuff um but at least now if you ever hear somebody talk about it you'll say like oh yeah i have heard of that and uh i know something about it so uh yeah those are the major ones i think and so that should cover it for us but that's it alright great