Esports at Valpo

[wh]

Esports catching on at Region universities

"Valparaiso started its own esports program in 2019, and Overwatch player Franco Raimondi can hardly believe the opportunities at his fingertips now. The Genoa, Illinois, native has seen the perception of competitive video gaming gain far more acceptance than it had when he was falling in love with it."

"The culture about it is ever-growing and changing and becoming normalized and accepted," Raimondi said. "It's not seen as, 'Oh, you play video games?' It's more like, 'Oh, man, you're an esports player? That's awesome.'"

https://www.nwitimes.com/sports/college/esports-catching-on-at-region-universities/article_c3c68b3a-b8b0-5c2e-b96e-e8c8636d9cdd.html

This is Latin and Greek to me, but if it's a revenue generator, I'm all for it.

[Pgmado]

Yes, Valpo sure does need $$. And I suppose there are always new disciplines developing. Universities should adjust to new intellectual and professional opportunities for students, if there is room to experiment and add!

But honestly, I think it is kind of sad that Valpo is adding E-Sports while having just laid off a ton of the professors and/or cut programs in Education, Classics, Theatre, Chinese, Japanese, English, Philosophy, Astronomy/Physics, Political Science, Art, Theology, Latin American Studies, Sociology, and more... Even if E-Sports is a short-term revenue generator, it's not the sort of program that will help Valpo be taken seriously as an academic institution.

Or maybe I'm being too harsh to suggest that e-sports isn't as intellectual legit or worthwhile. I admit I don't really understand myself what the upsides might be in terms of academic learning... so maybe I'm being biased?

But seems kind of painfully obvious that this is probably getting added for considerations of mainly revenue and not so much education. Isn't it hard to make the case that this is going to be any replacement intellectually for what's being lost across the university with so many staff leaving either because of layoff or jumping ship?  E-sports is symptomatic of short-term thinking (great, Valpo can enroll 5 more students next year, since they'll think e-sports sounds fun!) and not long-term strategy (are our degrees going to be taken seriously as a quality education in 10-15 years?)

It's much cheaper to transfer to Ivy Tech or Purdue NW, not pay the $40K for a private liberal arts education and just play video games for fun as club sports. Some faculty left for Purdue NW, so you can even go take some of the good profs from VU over at Purdue NW now.

I teach an Intro to Mass Media Studies course. For the final, I ask my students to do a deep research paper and presentation about any topic that is tied to the mass media industry. I had 35 students in the class last semester and I'd say a third of them chose something video game related for their final research paper. The topics ranged across the board and were some of the most thought provoking of the bunch. Video games/Esports are a huge part of the culture of today's college student. The demographics of the students who chose these topics also varied across the board. There isn't just one segment of student who is interested in esports. It's everywhere and it's not going away. Kudos to Valpo and other schools for capitalizing on it.

[valpotx]

You know, more power to them and glad to see that such opportunities exist, but we need to stop calling them 'student athletes.'  There has to be a better term, and this is coming from someone who loves video games, and encourages his kids to play, knowing the strategic and computer science/STEM value that they can provide.  Sitting in a chair and playing video games, regardless of the endurance/strategic aspects to the competition, does not make you an athlete.  Do we call Chess players athletes?

[crusadermoe]

This trend toward E-Sports and doing everything virtual all day on every day depresses me greatly.  That's all I have to say.

[vu84v2]

In regards to the concern raised by valpo22, programs are different from activities. E-sports is an activity and you need to update activities to attract students. As far as the programs you list, the reason that most of these programs are scaled back is that current and prospective students are not interested in studying those disciplines as majors. The cost of college is too great to study a discipline that offers no job prospects. But don't misread what I am saying...I think that studying those fields fosters an ability to think which is critical in any career (I minored in one of those programs and perhaps the most valuable class that I took at Valpo was in another of those programs).

[vu72]

In regards to the concern raised by valpo22, programs are different from activities. E-sports is an activity and you need to update activities to attract students. As far as the programs you list, the reason that most of these programs are scaled back is that current and prospective students are not interested in studying those disciplines as majors. The cost of college is too great to study a discipline that offers no job prospects. But don't misread what I am saying...I think that studying those fields fosters an ability to think which is critical in any career (I minored in one of those programs and perhaps the most valuable class that I took at Valpo was in another of those programs).

Don't forget about the programs that have been added! For example, Environmental Engineering, Bioengineering, Business Analytics, Supply Chain and Logistics as well as several new Masters and Doctoral programs in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences.  Perhaps we have scaled back in some areas but clearly are expending to meet student and societal demands

[Pgmado]

This trend toward E-Sports and doing everything virtual all day on every day depresses me greatly.  That's all I have to say.

Let me first say that I don't write this post to be critical to crusadermoe, but only to ponder a question. Hasn't this always been happening? What I mean is the shifting of technology. We went from people telling stories in the town square to people reading those stories in books. That meant they stopped interacting with people in the community and they started reading on their own. People used to go to the theater to see dramatic productions, then they went to the movie theater before ultimately getting televisions in their homes. The trends have always been changing. This is just another change.

I used to show a PBS Frontline documentary called "Digital Nation" in my class. Here is a transcript from part of the documentary...

MARC PRENSKY, Founder & CEO, Games2train: The reason a lot of people are stuck, I think, is because they confuse the old ways, the best ways of doing something once, with the best ways of doing those things forever. So it's not that kids shouldn't learn to communicate. It's not that they shouldn't learn to express complex ideas. Of course they should still learn all those things. Those are what we call the verbs. The nouns that they use, whether it's the essay or the paper or the writing or whatever it is, or whether it's the video or the podcast or the- that's what changes. The learning may stay the same, but we invent new ways of teaching. And I don't know that the book, which was for a long period of time - but not that long, maybe a couple of centuries - the way that people did this - that was the primary way - is the best way in the 21st century.

Prof. JAMES PAUL GEE, Arizona State Univ.: There's always gains and losses. You know, when print replaced oral culture, when writing happened, there are certainly things we lost. One of them was memory. Think of the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric singers could produce thousands of lines of poetry out of their own memory. We're not good at that anymore because print took it away. Is it a loss? Sure. And to a certain extent, getting people to be contemplative and a little bit slower, not to multitask all the time, paying avid attention over a long period of time- to a certain extent might be lost. But that's the price of gain.

[vu72]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6msk-jGz6M

[valpotx]

Yay....sitting in chairs.

[crusadermoe]

The Arts and Sciences........  Huegli and Kretzmann might be rolling over in their graves.  At least college of business would be a location for a mindless consumer-driven fad.

Or maybe Plato and Aristotle, or and Newton and Pasteur, might be up for shooting some astroids.

[vu72]

At least college of business would be a location for a mindless consumer-driven fad.

Spoken like a history major who ended up selling insurance.

[crusadermoe]

To some degree it's true I like playing the part of "Walter," the grouchy ventriloquist dummy who says, "and that's the way it was....and we liked it!"  My daughter just rolls her eyes when I launch that phrase.

But at the same time, ESports is a product rather than a body of examined thought and scholarship. Should we offer minor courses of study in "crossword puzzles, board games, or card games? 

[vu84v2]

ESports is a product rather than a body of examined thought and scholarship. Should we offer minor courses of study in "crossword puzzles, board games, or card games? 

Very well stated. The only exception would be if computer science classes taught programming skills for developing esports games.