ICS News Archive

Student Blog: The growing field of e-sports

It’s no secret how involved UCI is with eSports — we were the first university to launch an e-sports initiative, building an eSports Arena on campus and offering scholarships to our League of Legends team. The Association of Gamers at UCI has the highest number of members out of any club on campus, and in 2015, UCI was ranked the No. 1 school for gamers by College Magazine. We are a strong and active player in the gaming community, and that showed incredibly through with the UCI eSports Symposium held at the Cove at UCI Applied Innovation last Friday, May 19.

The event was a daylong affair full of involved persons speaking about e-sports, its future and its rapidly growing potential as a market. The guest list included academic experts and industry analysts from MIT, UC Davis, Boise State, Wedbush and Blizzard Entertainment, as well as notable individuals from the UCI eSports division.

Many of the presenters spoke of e-sports as this incredible force of an industry that could one day be as big as the traditional ball-sport market. Over half of the population in the U.S. alone plays games regularly, and that number will continue to grow as time passes. With e-sports broadcasting platforms such as YouTube Gaming and Twitch.tv growing rapidly and grabbing huge viewership numbers on a daily basis, it isn’t a surprise that games such as League of Legends can bring in 43 million viewers (14.7 million concurrent) during their "World Championship" stream. It seems that the future of e-sports will be very bright and prosperous, and UCI has an amazingly progressive early start to becoming a dominating collegiate force in the competitive and working e-sports industry.

The entire UCI eSports Symposium was live-broadcasted on the UCI eSports Twitch channel, and the VOD can be viewed anytime atwww.twitch.tv/UCIeSports. Check out the guest speaker and topic itinerary below:

• TL Taylor (MIT) — “On the Fields, In the Stands: The Future of Women in eSports”
• Constance Steinkühler (UC Irvine) — “eSports and Academics”
• Patrick Lemieux (UC Davis) — “Seventeen Seconds of Dota 2”
• Tom Boellstorff and Kurt Squire (UC Irvine) — Discussion
• Chris Haskell (Boise State) — “Epic Wins - Intercollegiate & Scholastic eSports”
• Michael Pachter (Wedbush) — “The eSports Business Model”
• Michael Pachter, Chris Haskell, Matt Wyble and Che Chou (Blizzard) — Discussion
• Kathy Chiang, Khaila Amazan-Hall, Ryan Griswold, Loc Tran (UCI eSports) — “Panel of eSports Athletes and Student Advocates”