"StarCraft, a video game, is often compared to chess: it is strategic and extremely difficult, requiring a mathematical cast of mind, and, unlike many other video games, with their scrolling or first-person vantages, it affords a bird’s-eye perspective of the board, or map. But the analogy breaks down in countless ways. The map changes from game to game. (In this instance, it was called Habitation Station, and shaped somewhat like a butterfly.) Instead of black or white, players choose from among three “races,” called Zerg, Terran, and Protoss, with different strengths and vulnerabilities. In the early stages, players cannot see one another’s armies, and must dispatch scouts to illuminate darkened corners; they must also develop economies, with which to fund the inevitable battles. It’s as if Garry Kasparov had to plot a pawnless endgame while simultaneously harvesting minerals, building fuel extractors, and searching in vain for Spassky’s queen. Academic researchers now use StarCraft II—the “drosophila” of brain science, as one paper suggested—when studying people who expertly perform cognitively complex tasks. Chess may soon be eclipsed as the standard-bearer of competitive I.Q. “Imagine playing a concerto on a piano, and if you miss one note the entire orchestra stops playing and you’re kicked off and you lose your job,” Sean Plott, one of the official commentators on the Scarlett-Bomber match, told me recently. “That’s what this is like.” The piano reference was not arbitrary; top-level StarCraft requires as many as three hundred actions per minute, or A.P.M.; an élite practitioner’s left hand, as it manipulates the keyboard, can appear almost to be playing Chopin. The right hand, meanwhile, darts and clicks with a mouse, contrapuntally, so frantic that carpal-tunnel syndrome and tendinitis are common side effects."