How the Coronavirus Infected My Thesis Project

It has definitely been a weird and interesting few weeks since I last wrote an update on my project. I’m in my final semester at college, finally feeling life I’m starting to get things together, and looking forward to everything Lions Gaming has in store for the second half of the semester, and then it gets abruptly ended by a pandemic. Not only am I disappointed that I am not going to properly end my college career and will only get to see the campus for one more day, but I am also disappointed that I have to largely abandon my original concept for my thesis project, which was going to be a documentary on an entire semester’s worth of TCNJ Smash. King 2020 was going to be a large part of it, but that, too, was cancelled.

Before the announcement that the rest of the semester was going to be completely online, I was ready to go back to campus at the beginning of April, sure that this was going to be a minor roadblock in the progress of my project. I would find a way to finish things up and get any remaining footage I needed. As I saw other colleges end their semesters and other events get cancelled nationwide, however, I knew there was little chance we would return. Because I had not made significant progress on the editing of the videos anyway, I am changing my project to be a collection of short interviews with a few notable players in the TCNJ Super Smash Bros. community. I have already began working on an episode featuring Chris “Strawhat” Reubel, who is the number 10 player in New Jersey and has won nearly every TCNJ tournament he has attended. The quality of my project may be diminished somewhat due to only having footage from five events to work with, and I will not be able to present it at the Senior Showcase (because there is none anymore), but I am confident that I will still be able to create an entertaining product that I can be proud of. Over the coming weeks, I will do my best to edit the footage I have and present the TCNJ Smash community in the best way possible, as my final sendoff to the college and to Lions Gaming.