Esports in Higher Education

Fostering Successful Student-Athletes and Successful Programs

George S. McClellan, Ryan S. Arnett, Charles M. Hueber

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781642671445
• eBook ISBN:
  9781642671476
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This comprehensive resource examines the rapidly-growing esports phenomenon in higher education, bringing the perspectives of players, administrators, and scholars together in one volume to discuss the basics of esports, how to start and maintain successful esports programs, and issues and trends in the field.Esports are a global phenomenon with an estimated audience of 400 million people in 2018. Given their already strong base and rising popularity on college campuses, esports have been referred to as the new college football. This book offers practical insights into how to develop and maintain an esports program that is consistent with institutional purposes and values. The book is helpful to all types of institutions (small to large, public and private, 2-year or 4-year). It draws on current scholarship and the professional experience of the authors, focused heavily on practical advice for higher education professionals.Among the challenges of esports in higher education the book addresses are competition structure, competition climate, child protection, cheating, gambling, lack of reliable relevant data to inform decisions, and the advent of an esports arms race. Some of the opportunities described in the book include student recruitment and success networks with high schools, and partnerships with the esports industry. Done correctly, esports can provide a structured way for all students (on campus, off campus, and online) to engage in both curricular and cocurricular programming that can provide measurable learning outcomes and have a positive impact on retention rates.

1

AN OVERVIEW OF ESPORTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

What Is It, How Big Is It, and How Does It Work?

In Culture Is Our Business, Marshal McLuhan (1970) predicted that electronic media would restructure human society into tribes of affiliation. Kozinets (1999), writing nearly 30 years later, pointed to electronic games as offering “an important space from which to examine the intersection of recreational and relational online modes in the creation and collective consumptions of fantasy experience” (p. 262). Now, 50 years after McLuhan’s observations and 20 years after those of Kozinets, electronic sports, or esports as it is commonly called, offers ample evidence of the prescience of those two scholars. Esports is at the center of a global gaming and business phenomenon (Seo, 2013) that includes wide-scale interest and participation by a diverse array of people.

Among those esports players are college students who, as part of noninstitutional teams as well as teams affiliated with their colleges and universities, spend a great deal of effort and time perfecting their skills and sharing their experiences with virtual networks of other players. A growing number of institutions see esports as presenting opportunities such as increasing enrollment, student learning and development, and institutional prestige. How many students are involved in esports? In what games? What are their experiences in esports? How many institutions are offering esports opportunities? In what forms? How is that working out for them? How are esports organized as a field? Who, if anyone, is governing intercollegiate esports? We will attempt to answer these and other questions about esports and higher education throughout the course of this book.

We begin in this chapter by offering an overview of esports. What exactly is it, and who is competing in it? Who is attending esport events? How are people learning about esports? Who is watching esports and through what means? Is it really a sport? Next, we discuss esports as a business and entertainment enterprise before moving into specifically exploring the big-picture questions about the connection between esports and higher education.

What Is Esports?

It might be helpful at this point to define esports. As Funk et al. (2018) wryly observed, “While all eSports are video games, not all video games should be classified as sports” (p. 9). A simple definition is that esports are multiplayer video games that are played competitively, often for spectators, either over local area networks (LANs) or online. However, the relatively recent emergence of esports as an international phenomenon, the rapidly changing nature of the underlying technology, the variety of types of games generally included within the field, and the diversity of disciplinary perspectives of those seeking to author a definition all make developing a singular and commonly accepted definition somewhat of a challenge.

Defining Sports

Those seeking to define esports commonly begin their effort by offering a definition of sport itself. A number draw on the work of Tiedemann (2004), who defined sport as

a cultural field of activity in which human beings voluntarily go into a real or only imagined relation to other people with the conscious intention to develop their abilities and accomplishments particularly in the area of skilled motion and to compare themselves with these other people according to rules put self [sic] or adopted without intending to damage them or themselves deliberately. (p. 3)

Wagner (n.d.) refined Tiedemann’s definition of sport by highlighting cultural relevance. He offered the following:

Sport is a cultural field of activity in which people voluntarily engage with other people with the conscious intention to develop and train abilities of cultural importance and to compare themselves with these other people in these abilities according to generally accepted rules and without deliberately harming anybody. (p. 2)

Defining Esports

Working from this definition and noting that in contemporary society technological skills are culturally important, Wagner (n.d.) went on to define esports as “an area of sport activities in which people develop and train mental or physical abilities in the use of information and communication technologies” (p. 3).

Hamari and Sjöblom (2017), in somewhat of a departure from Wagner, put the emphasis on “what constitutes the ‘e’ in eSport” (p. 213). For them,

the crucial question is then what portions or aspects of the sport have to be electronic and/or computer mediated for a sporting activity to be counted as an eSport. We argue that the main difference between a sport and an eSport comes down to where the player or team activities that determine the outcomes of the sport/play are manifested. In traditional sports, all outcome-defining activities can be seen to happen in the “real world,” even though the sport’s practitioners may employ electronic and computerized systems to aid the sporting activities. However, we observe and argue that in eSports, the outcome-defining activities happen in a “virtual world”; however, it is not the physical and practical circumstances that the player inhabits that ultimately defines the outcome of play, but rather the system states that exist within the confines of the electronic system (which is controlled by the player and governed by the rules of the eSport’s software and technology). (p. 213)

Seo (2013) differentiated esports from other electronic gaming practices in that esports “is primarily played to improve consumer abilities in the use of digital technologies and playing computer games as a form of competition” (p. 1544). Seo also noted that

a computer game played for eSports must feature some objective measures of comparison that can be used to judge players’ performances within the game. These measures may and often do vary from one computer platform to another. For instance, in one computer game, players may be required to defeat their opponents, whereas in another game, their performance may be judged according to their gaming score. Furthermore, the rules and formats of competition are often governed by the external governing bodies and communities of eSports players, which now perform an institutionalizing role in ensuring the consistency of conduct among various competitive computer-gaming practices. (p. 1544)

Types of Esports Games

So what games make up esports, and what are those games like? This section offers a typology of the most common forms of electronic games played competitively as esports and offers examples of some of the most popular game titles within each of those forms of games (Gambling Sites, n.d.).

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Games

Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games are typically contests with two opposing teams made up of individual players. Team sizes vary, but five members is common. The team’s objective is to destroy the other team’s base, but other goals are sometimes identified (e.g., eliminating all the members of the opposing team).

Individual team members have control of a character in the game, and those characters are known as heroes. The strength and skill sets of heroes can be developed through acquiring experience in the game or through obtaining various game items through wager (chapter 5 includes further discussion of gambling in esports) or conquest (either capturing an item or buying it from the game store using game currency earned through various accomplishments in the game). There are various hero types in the games, and a team will typically have a strategy as to the mix of heroes it employs.

MOBA is a very popular form of esports. Among the most popular MOBA games in esports are Dota 2, League of Legends, Smite, and Heroes of the Storm.

First-Person Shooter

First-person shooter (FPS) games are one of the earliest forms of esports games. They first appeared in the mid-1970s, and their popularity skyrocketed in the 1990s. FPS games are similar to MOBA games in that the common objectives are to eliminate the other players or to capture the base of the other players. FPS games may be played individually against the computer, individually against other players, or individually in what is called co-op, where players work together as part of a squad. Problem-solving or puzzle-solving and strategy (particularly as it relates to selection of weapons and battle gear) are important elements of many FPSs.

A distinguishing feature of FPS games is that players view the game from the perspective of their character (or avatar). There are also third-person shooter (TPS) games. Fortnite, which actually has three versions (cooperative, battle royale, and build-your-own-environment), is one extremely popular example of a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 An Overview of Esports in Higher Education: What Is It, How Big Is It, and How Does It Work?
• 2 Creating a Successful Esports Program on Campus
• 3 Running a Cocurricular Esports Program
• Appendix 3A: Schreiner University Gamer’s Guild Creed
• 4 Experiences of an Esports Student-Athlete
• 5 Ethical, Legal, and Governance Considerations for Esports Programs on Campus
• 6 Summing Up and Looking Forward
• Glossary
• Additional Resources
• References
• About the Authors
• Index
• Also available from Stylus
• Backcover