Screen Time

Last May a few hundred students sat in Kent State University’s 6,000-plus-seat MAC Center for a tournament. There were no players running up and down the court. Instead, competitors perched by computers and played “Overwatch” while spectators watched via a large screen for the university’s first-ever esports tournament. Two play-by-play announcers called the action.

The concept of esports is relatively new, accompanying the rise of online and competitive video gaming. Essentially, players compete in team or solo-play video games to see who is better, and the public often tunes in to watch live competitions on the streaming website twitch.tv, making it a spectator sport. The popularity of esports has led to the development of several professional teams and leagues at the high school level throughout the country. Universities are the latest institutions to jump on the esports bandwagon en masse.

This is the first full academic year that both Kent State and The University of Akron are offering esports to students, with varsity and club teams for popular games like “Overwatch,” “League of Legends,” “Hearthstone” and “Rocket League.” Both University of Akron and Kent State were among the first 50 universities to add varsity teams.

“All these coaches, all these players have a passion for gaming, and they’ll do whatever they can to take this new esports department off the ground — and it’s pretty successful right now,” explains Emily Matusz, an “Overwatch” student coach and senior sculpture major at University of Akron.

Matusz leads a pair of varsity teams — the better of the two is the gold team; the second-best is the blue team — through four-hour practices that refine everything from a player’s aiming ability to team positioning and communication. She holds scrimmages and records the gameplay to review later.

“When the scrim is done, I put the recording somewhere else, and then I look it over,” Matusz says. “I’ll take a certain part of it, show it to the team, and we’ll criticize it for a whole session. Then we’ll make a goal and work toward that goal.”

University of Akron cemented their commitment to esports when they announced that they are opening 5,200 feet of dedicated esports space in three areas Oct. 5: an arena, an esports center and a gaming cafe with more than 90 computers and 30 consoles to support its five varsity teams, as well as its club teams. The university says this amount of dedicated esports space is more than any other university in the world.

Universities are also offering their support for the programs through financial aid.

“We’ll have about 20 scholarships to give this year,” says Steven Toepfer, Kent State University’s director of esports and an associate professor of human development and family studies at the Salem campus. Kent State has two practice spaces and hopes to provide free workshops out of its rec services department for its four varsity teams, clubs and others interested in esports.

When Toepfer first approached the administrators at Kent State last September, there were only about 40 colleges offering esports in the nation. Now, according to ESPN, the National Association of Collegiate Esports governs nearly 100 varsity competitive gaming programs in North America.

In 2016, the University of California, Irvine, became one of the first seven schools to develop an esports platform after conducting a survey that concluded 72 percent of its incoming freshmen class identified as gamers.

“This is what people like to do,” says Toepfer. “And one of the many reasons that I got into it was that these guys are doing this in silos by themselves around campuses in their dorm rooms. So I thought, Why not make this a social endeavor? Get them to know each other, get them to represent the university.”

That’s how Toepfer helps explain the program to critics who worry that esports should not be encouraged because it’s a sedentary activity. Matusz also recognizes some of the latent teaching that esports can provide, such as working in an organizational structure.

“We have our players, and then up above we have our coaches and our team managers, and then we have the administration,” Matusz says. Learning how to interact with people in various positions like this is an important lesson, especially before young adults enter the workplace.

While it’s still in the planning stages, Akron’s “Overwatch” team is slated to play against other universities in tournaments, but the teams may be appearing at tournaments for leagues outside NACE. Kent State plays tournaments through Tespa.

In a way, approaching a hectic match of a first-person shooter game like “Overwatch” is similar to what Matusz and Toepfer are doing by helping to pioneer esports at Akron and Kent, respectively.

“It’s going to be interesting because, this year being our first year, we’re going to learn a lot,” Toepfer says. “I want to always be evolving on this. I don’t want to have this be a static program. I want it to be an extensive program that can offer a lot of comunity to a lot of people.”