eSports Programming
Personal Connection
- Do you love the competitive environment of video games and sports?
- Are you interested in learning to code?
- Are you excited by the opportunities that present themselves when you are working in an emerging and rapidly growing field?
- Are you interested in the technology that enables seamless eSports tournaments?
Other Connections
STEM Connection
The secret to success in eSports is data analytics:
5G will change the eSports industry:
Blockchain and smart contracts can secure eSports competitions:
Professional eSports athletes are turning to AI coaches:
Journeys to Becoming an eSports programmer
James Dean has a computer science degree and started his career in various computer jobs “which always had a game element.” He then launched a gaming brand to sell computers specifically built for gaming, and that’s when “gaming started to look more like a career possibility, rather than just a personal interest.” “We started thinking about what we could do around eSports on a competitive level, and… we sponsored some of the gaming tournaments.” He then ran operations for one of the largest gaming peripheral companies in the world that sponsors eSports teams and went on to become the managing director for the world’s biggest eSports league.
James started thinking about how he could further develop eSports by making them more accessible to a wider audience. He started working with universities “to offer an eSports module that can be attached to any subject the university is offering. You could be doing a law degree and you could take an eSports module to apply what you’re learning around law to the eSports industry. Psychology and life sciences, also data analysis and statistics, are particularly interested in doing research. There’s a huge amount of data generated by eSports and a lot of stuff to look at in terms of playing habits and data about the individual’s playing. That’s only just starting now. We’re really excited about taking a lead in that.”
By having students apply their field of study to eSports, they were able to create new technology to improve tournaments. One group of university students performed live data analysis at one of James’ eSports tournaments with a new technique they had developed. They were collecting the player data – how the game was being played – and it was being analyzed in real-time to feed statistics to the commentary team.
Read more about James’ story here
Read about the middle school students who are already on their way to a career in eSports:
Grade 7 and 8 students participate in eSports tournaments at a middle school in Maryland. The goal of the tournament is to combine eSports with educational programming to introduce students to STEM. “It lets students explore career paths — many of which are related to gaming — such as coding, audio engineering, virtual and augmented reality, and others.” The goal is not to tell students to become professional video gamers, but to expose students to all the possible careers behind it, “from the graphics, to game concepts, to coding… Every company that sells something is going to need people that engineer those experiences.”
One student, Evelyn, said the tournament “fed into her competitiveness” and that she’s now considering a STEM career path. “I want to learn how to code when I’m older.”