The Digital Playing Field
CSULB, collegiate gaming holds the future of eSports
By Matthew Gozzip, Athletics Editor
There were members from every concentration and legion, the greatest warriors from the area assembled to challenge each other in the arena. For the time being everybody stood at peace, casually conversing strategy and exchanging tactics. They might have been cordial at the time but in a few minutes, they would wage battle with each other. 200 people, one space, all for the sake of seeing who was the best in the land.
This wasn’t a mythical battleground.
It was the first meeting for the eSports club on campus.
Whimsical fantasy comparison aside, there is no denying the relevance of video games in popular culture. Anybody who was born in the past three decades has at the very least played an arcade game or picked up a controller for a quick game of “quell the curiosity.”
As video game technology evolved over the years, social gaming culture followed suit. With more accessibility to online play and faster connection speeds, competitive gaming turned living room battles for neighborhood bragging rights into international tournaments crowning the best players in the world.
This new frontier, the multi-layered organization of tournaments by designated games, is only continuing to grow. The eSports scene holds unstoppable momentum.
The eSports Association started four years ago with around 50 consistent members. At the first meeting of the fall semester, there were easily over 150 people who showed up.
Cat Tompkins, the club’s president, experienced the rapid evolution of competitive gaming culture in Long Beach in a short amount of time.
“I’ve been at the eSports club for three and a half years. I’ve seen the switch from ‘what is eSports’ to ‘hey this is the eSports club.’” says Tompkins. “The amount of passion and awareness for gaming has grown through the community.”
Even more are expected to show up in the coming weeks. Tompkins noted that after Week of Welcome that around 200 people usually sign up for the newsletter. Last week, 400 people had already signed up.
The continual rise of eSports can largely be attributed to how easy it is to pick up a controller and start playing. Compared to other sports that require years of physical fitness, eSports is accessible to everyone.
Moving forward, collegiate gaming is going to be the key to eSports’ consistent expansion into regular sports culture.
“The way the industry is trending, it’s going to come down to collegiate sports in the next couple years,” says Tompkins. “I see even more growth when more events will get regularly scheduled. This is the first time the room has been so overcrowded that we find necessity to move to a gym…we could even outgrow that.”
Through collegiate eSports, organized teams from academic institutions can play against each other, much like other sports such as basketball or football. Allocating designated funds for these eSports teams would be much easier compared to the big budgets of the aforementioned sports. Even with the smaller funding, eSports can arguably make just as much as any other collegiate sport.
According to a report from statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight, around 205 million people watched or played eSports in 2014. Of this audience, 28 million viewers tuned in from Europe and North America.
On average, this group will increase by 21% a year. Last year, the most popular eSports game, League of Legends, telecasted it’s world championship to an audience of 36 million viewers. That’s was the 2nd most viewed sporting event in the US last year, behind only the Super Bowl. Speaking of viewing channels, Twitch.tv, the preferred medium to watch eSports competitions streamed live, can have up to hundreds of thousands of viewers on average for any major event.
Rejecting the legitimacy of eSports is an exercise in futility. eSports has flourished in the new age of video games, ascending to a plane of popularity that matches the interest of the most popular sports that have been around for centuries. Gaming culture continues to progress and at a pivotal time for the future of the industry, CSULB is ready to lead the horde.
The general meetings for the CSULB eSports club are on Wednesdays at 6:30 pm in LA5–246.
Photos from CSULB eSports Association Facebook page.