After StarcraftWire publicised the news item about a DeCal StarCraft 2 college course at UC Berkeley that gives college credits for passing, a lot of websites hooked on, and the news spread over the globe. Being a limited StarCraft 2 fansite, the news kind of got overrun by some, others didn't acknowledge the origin, and a few were more than happy to give credit. Having contacted and actually spoken to Alan "Nimue" Feng, we knew that it was not a hoax, as some sites claimed, and already prepared for a deeper insight into the course through an interview with Mr Feng.

The course started with a brief history of StarCraft.

The StarCraft Course is a so called “DeCal” course, meaning that it's run by fellow students rather than Professors. Would it have been run by a Professor, it would have made an even bigger impact on the community (as well as media in general), but the course has at the very least been approved by a Professor (just like other DeCal courses on StarTrek or Firefly has in the past). Alan explained to us that "to get a class started at UC Berkeley, we need a faculty member to approve of it, and to get them to approve, we have to demonstrate the significance of our topic," he continued to say "I found a professor to show to him the importance of our topic, and also to prove that the class has rigorousness, i.e., enough to teach over the course of 13 weeks."


"Nimue" is a student gone pro StarCraft gamer gone student, and spent some 2.5 years in the progaming circuit of StarCraft, but couldn't make enough money out of it so he went back to school. He's a Physics major (which equates to a 2nd year UG in the UK), and points out that this is an important distinction between himself and other professional gamers. He said: "because a lot of my methods, models and math involved all come from physics and it's some of that university teaching that goes into this class that makes it different from how other people might view Starcraft."

TeamLiquid tired of threads related to the course...

Alan posted a thread on TeamLiquid's forum (progaming site dedicated to StarCraft) about his course, several days before it was picked up by StarcraftWire and then the rest of the global videogaming media, "and within 24hrs of posting, the thread on the class got about 50 responses and 1000 views." Considering the response by the progaming community, it's strange that it wasn't picked up before StarcraftWire reported on it! Mr Feng continued to tell us about the reactions on campus: "people are excited, that is for sure [...] professors haven't really taken the gaming world seriously yet, only isolated ones but even people who don't know about Starcraft have been asking about it." When asked about negative reactions, he couldn't really recall any: "no, not really, my parents, I guess. [They said] something like 'if you drop out of school again, we're going to KILL you' but we can never stop doing what we love, right?"


The course itself has no upper limit of students. The first part started last Thursday but since our interview with Alan took place before that, he was unsure exactly how many were going to turn up. "The largest classroom on campus is 480 people but I doubt they'll let me have the auditorium" he said about the upper limit, and guessed that he would end up with about 40 people in the class. I implied that it's probably a pretty good number for such an unconventional class at least before we told the Internet about it. He referred to other DeCal classes and said: "by comparison, the chess class gathered about 20 people last semester and the rubik's cube class had like 15".



Alan "Nimue" Feng.


Over the winter break Alan worked with a professionally trained orator and teacher from China, who taught political figures how to orate before moving to the States, and he hoped that some of his skills had rubbed off on him. He has also know his notes and the material backwards and forwards, and sounds very optimistic of his performance as a teacher to other students. Seeing as StarCraft 2 is on the horizon, I asked him of the possibilities of the sequel being a candidate for class topic. Alan said "as excited as I am to actually play SC II, I don't think it will be worth abstract discussion for a while, but my class has many pure theory aspects that work for nearly all RTS's and I'm going to try to instil a kind of analytical thinking that should bridge Starcraft and Warcraft 3 or Starcraft and StarCraft 2".


The lessons will be made available over YouTube, and possibly the PowerPoint presentations as well. We contacted Mr Feng shortly before his class started on the Thursday and, he said that he was "excited like you wouldn't believe" and that he was "gonna bring you all the very best."


The Friday following his course held even more media attention that spread to mainstream media like NBC and Alan himself was hard to come by. One of the students that attended his course was a blogger by the handle "Sirlin", who posted his impressions of the course. A quite detailed description of the first lecture, and giving an insight to what Alan is trying to do. Contacting Alan today, he admitted that his course homepage, BerkeleyStarCraft.com had been hammered, and he has gone through the bandwidth limitations of two hosts so far. IncGamers.com has agreed to host his site as soon as his webmaster wakes up.


A lot of gaming media sites have also tried to contact him about the course, but he admits that he was afraid of standing alone in the lecture hall. In either way, it went a lot better than expected with 150 or so attending. The course filled every seat in the lecture hall with some left standing. Our "Nimue" reflects over the lecture: "I think the first lecture went well; the responses have been overwhelmingly positive and everyone got a kick out of it. People thought it was just [going to] be a laid back class where we talk about Starcraft or play. Instead, it was a very intense, and at times, contained very abstract concepts. I've been reading on forums that [the course] is "intense, and inspirational."



Preparation with the team
before the class.


In the end, the little StarCraft fansite also gets a little credit: "I gotta hand it to you [Leord & Starcraftwire]. Without your site, gg2sc, tumeroc, and infinite bloggers around the world, I would have been one lonely guy in the middle of a big lecture hall.

Sources:
Study StarCraft for College
BerkeleyStarcraft.com
StarCraft Berkeley Syllabus Mirror
StarCraft Berkeley Facebook Group

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