This past week I had the pleasure of producing an eSporting event led by City College of New York students for Harlem Week. Harlem Week is an annual celebration of “the best of Harlem.” CCNY, located in West Harlem, offered a number of activities this year, and I was invited to engage their eSports Club and see what together we could pull off. This Club gathers students around the campus who love competitive video games and support one another to develop their skills and compete nationwide.
Could these students demonstrate their well-honed gaming skills while talking about the ways gaming has help them to pursue their academic goals? That’s what we aimed to find out.
If you’ve been following my recent work, you are well aware that last spring I worked for SAENY and CCNY, in partnership with SIA, to develop a deeper understanding of how video games are shaping the interests and life-goals of youth around the college. I wrote about some of it here and look forward to sharing our learnings in more detail in the coming months. We worked closely with CCNY’s eSports Club during that research and I was excited to partner with them to produce something both for the public and that could serve as a demonstration of their leadership abilities.
A collaborative effort between CCNY and SAENY’s Harlem Gallery of Science, and funded by CCNY, we called it the “CCNY eSports Game Exhibit”. The following is the language used to promote the event:
Americans’ love to watch live sporting events whether professional or college sporting events. Growing in popularity are eSports which are a multiplayer video game played competitively before spectators, typically by professional gamers. Do you know anyone who plays eSports? To learn more about eSports and why college students play eSports you are invited to join members of the City College of New York eSports Club who will explain and show how they use eSports games to improve their academic and social experiences at college.
The CCNY eSport Game exhibit will showcase a number of popular action games: Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege and Valorant. The gaming exhibit will be led by an announcer who will introduce the eSport Club players, include interview segments on the club members, and explore what eSports and the video game industry means to each of them.
We originally planned to run the event in-person, but due to the Delta variant we pivoted in the week up to the event to run it all online. If you are new to eSports, two common tools used for livestreams are Discord and Twitch. Discord for gamers is like Teams for offices or Slack for everyone who hates Microsoft products; it is the tool for people to gather and chat, especially about games. Twitch (now owned by Amazon) hosts more than 90% of all live-streamed games. The CCNY eSports Club has their own Twitch channel.
During the event, the incoming President of the Club, Matthew (Ozone on Discord), coordinated everything. Each of the players streamed their love gameplay through Discord, and together they all shared the same audio channel. Twitch pulled from that audio channel and then Matthew directed the Twitch “camera” to one of the player’s streams, jumping back and forth among their games and vantage points.
At a normal eSporting event, the announcers would comment on the action: the unexpected kill shot, analysis of a particular strategy, etc. But this time – as his classmates dodged bullets, purchased weapons, and coordinated their attacks – Matthew asked them to talk about how video games helped them to develop collaboration skills, patience with difficult people, the ability to deal with loss, and more. Meanwhile, on the Twitch web site, viewers could contribute in the live chat, asking questions that Matthew would often draw upon.
For two hours the Club held court, not only demonstrating their extensive gaming skills but also the important role gaming plays in their lives as CCNY students. And because the entire event was run virtually online, you can almost pretend you were there by watching the replay here.
Go head – click on the link – watch Matthew introduce the event, and then jump ahead a few times, maybe 20 to 30 minutes at a time, to watch the students play different games while successfully tackling the challenging questions Matthew tosses their way, as they make the connection between eSports, life skills, and their academic pathways.
