Since they were first announced in 2015, Columbia College’s new League of Legends Esports teams, along with the new gaming hut (the repurposed soccer locker room), which will host the teams’ practices, has churned up a good amount of controversy on campus, and most of the voices have been less than enthusiastic about the addition. Several students and staff members have confessed their confusion about the “League of Legends” team to me and wonder why the money is not going toward the traditional sports programs.
Controversy revolving around video games and “traditional” artistic mediums has existed since the advent of the 8-bit classics from the seventies. A large percent of the population today, gamer or not, will concede that video games have established themselves as a unique form of interactive art rather than brainless entertainment. It wasn’t until recent years, however, that video games stepped into the professional sports arena.
The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (That’s right, even ESPN) considers competitive games serious sports, creating a tab on their home page for E-sports such as Valve’s Defense of the Ancients, Blizzard’s Hearthstone, and Riot Games’ League of Legends. The last of which is the focal point of Columbia College’s new teams. Despite ESPN’s classification, opinions stir about whether or not competitive E-sports belong in a college atmosphere.
Since the early 2000’s, regional and worldwide tournaments have increased in popularity, with prizes reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. One tournament in particular, “Heroes of the Dorm” (a clever pun on the name of the championship’s central game, Heroes of the Storm), is specifically for college teams. Blizzard and Tespa, the creator of the game and a national college-based video game community respectively, hold the championship for students to earn tuition for their upcoming school years. The championship boasts prize money for each player of the winning team toward his or her tuition for up to three years, or $75,000. With national championships of this scale, it’s hard to question the legitimacy of the game as a sport, and Columbia College’s pursuit into placing its own team onto the battlefield.
And that’s not to mention the League of Legends world championship reaching over 36 million unique viewers according to lolesports.com. To put that in perspective, the most viewed World Series of all time had 37 Million.
Since the younger generations were born after the advent of both the Internet and the games we play through it, it only makes sense that games and sports coincide with our electronic-centric lives. Yes, E-sports step away from what we would consider traditional sports. While the two mediums can’t be compared to the amount of muscle used, they share the requirement for a finely tuned set of skills as well as teamwork.
The E-sports teams at Columbia College will be unfamiliar territory for students and staff. And it’s true that, according to columbiacougars.com, the school will be “one of the first in the country to offer scholarships” to E-sports players. With tournaments like “Heroes of the Dorm” already setting out to inject professional gaming into college life, it only makes sense that the schools themselves follow suit.
