I mostly write about learning from watching StarCraft, learning from laddering, and learning from practice, but StarCraft isn’t school: it’s a hobby. And this last Friday, I got a good reminder for why I play.

I gathered 6 of my friends to hop on Battle.net together for a few games, and it was everything I remembered from my Brood War days: way too many technical problems, lots of shenanigans, some generally awful play, but most importantly, a lot of fun. Most of them hadn’t played in awhile (on the scale of weeks since, if not months), but no one I asked turned down the opportunity, so there we were. We played a few 3v3s, a 3-way 2s game, a 3v3 mono-battle (mothership-ghost-marine v. mothership-archon-muta? My team lost hard), and a FFA for about 3 hours of total game time.

We had 4 of us here at my place and 3 playing remotely. When we do it again, I’ll definitely have us all in a Skype call as well so we can taunt each other and joke around without having to deal with Battle.net’s flakiness. In the end, we’re just hanging out anyways.