How High School Gamers Can Be Varsity Athletes
November 30, 2018 8:45 PM Subscribe
Delane Parnell is creating a valuable scouting grounds for new tech talent. Parnell’s PlayVS (pronounced play versus), an e-sports platform for high schools, has yet to even launch. But the 26-year-old Detroit native exudes confidence. “Investors are starting to realize that gaming is the next social paradigm,” says Parnell, answering a question about e-sports’ mainstream popularity. “And they want a piece of it.”
You don’t have to look far for evidence of gaming’s influence
Hustler hustles, film at 11.
posted by praemunire at 9:27 PM on November 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by praemunire at 9:27 PM on November 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
I played a shit ton of League of Legends in college, where entire floors of computers in the undergrad library had it installed by students & you could see dozens playing everyday. I absolutely would have played on a collegiate team had one existed at the time. I wanted to play professionally. I wrote guides and played in or streamcasted tournaments. I met the man I’m marrying playing that game! But I also played traditional sports (women’s side rugby).
First of all, follow the money. How does this make everyone rich? Parnell is clearly looking for the opportunities that are quickly lucrative for himself personally. College sports wants a bite of the esports pie they’re missing out on, especially now that football is a great way to die early of a neurodegenerative disease. Playing college rugby for me was a great first-hand look at how little of a shit colleges give toward student sports that don’t make the school money. This whole deal sounds exploitative of early talent in a nascent sport who aren’t yet being tapped for partnerships with college teams and pro recruiters/agents.
He sees PlayVS as an opportunity not only to develop new athletes, but also to help parents and teachers “understand there’s a pathway to a career.”
And what career would that be? A lot of pro esports players retire and turn to coaching, team management, or commentary casting by the time they hit their mid 20s to early 30s, but those jobs aren’t abundantly available, and turning pro in any game is HARD and requires a huge time investment that only younger people can really afford. Staying relevant after being a pro player is hard unless you were extremely good and popular. It’s not unlike going to the Olympics at 16-22, then slowly fizzling out and needing a second career backup after your pro life is over.
There’s a bit of unseen risk for pro players as well. When a game falls off and another rises up quickly like what happened with Starcraft 2 to League, and arguably is starting to happen with League to Fortnite, you have to be really fucking good to stick around, or pivot quickly, which takes time. Lots of Starcraft 2 players in S. Korea and the States jumped to League throughout the early 2010s when it was clear the tournament scene and the money was going in that direction, but it’s incredibly hard to peak in more than one game.
I’ve been friends with people who could have easily turned pro in LoL (or CounterStrike), but the view we had of the pro players is that they’re literally sacrificing their long term future for meteoric bright moments of international glory. It was common for the group I played online games with to quit playing entirely when we got too deep into grad school or our careers, myself included, because it just wasn’t worth it.
So again, what career is that, as a player? And at what sacrifice? I see lots of jobs in content creation for esports that I would have loved to take as a kid in college, but a lot of them are skilled positions in visual design, writing, or communications and require a college degree. Not a lot of these pro kids are even going on to college to begin with (I’d like to see actual numbers on this) because of the incredible amount of time you need to invest in just playing the game. There’s some kind of hinting in the article that the kids who could play collegiate esports are also potential programmers or 3D artists? Let me tell you how many kids who could play at a competitive level for free also have time to get a CS degree (and how many of them are female or not white).
And the ease of access to games in college and the addictive behaviors that some kids have toward gaming as an escape creates a cute little feedback loop that’s caused many a student to fail a class or even drop out of college entirely, tangential to the youth labor exploitation aspect. I’m positive there are all kinds of unhealthy behaviors that come up in traditional sports too, games just seems to offer up particularly terrible ones by virtue of its accessibility. High schools enabling this at an early age by incentivizing it feels weird and gross.
I don’t understand the pipeline here except as a meat grinder with very few opportunities at the top. Anyone who has read Kids These Days sees the pattern here: more competition for the same tiny amount of spots at the top pushes that competition onto younger ages and forces kids to invest more of their own time at younger and younger ages to pay a ton of money honing themselves for a prestige job marketplace that will chew them up and spit them out unless they’re the best. Kids will do the unpaid labor to prepare themselves for the marketplace and the rest is a cash grab.
Taking a huge step back, a lot of the article insinuated that all gaming can be kind of equivocated to esports and competitive play, which flat out isn’t true. There are no paid tournaments for best farm in Stardew Valley (a girl can dream!). Games have to be fun to watch competitively in order to be viable as an esport, and these days the games companies caught on and competitive aspects of gameplay are built with an eye for esports and broadcasting in mind (DOTA 2, Fortnite, what League has evolved into). They don’t seem to be the games women are more attracted to as a recreational activity or willing to invest tons of time in. I’m sure the numbers are marginally better now, but when I was playing League heavily, women made up 5% of the user base.
And to echo the above, where are the young women? So many historical and systemic factors to this, but there’s also a massive amount of free labor in amateur (unpaid) esports competition just to, what, prove you’re the best at something? To get sponsored? Why sacrifice so much time for something so risky and exploitative and masochistic?
I’d like to think maybe more women can smell the bullshit a mile away, and want to protect their time and energy, but that being just one factor of many. There’s the social expectations of women professionally, and the misogyny in games, still boiling just beneath the surface as ever, and maybe you watched the few women to breach the pro tier like Scarlett in SC2 get treated as an anomaly to be purged or a precious exotic Other. Maybe it’s just not worth it to wade through the cess pool of public comments/chat on the most popular platforms for gaming (Discord, Twitch) that are your main social access into the pro gaming world. Maybe your guy friends tell you repeatedly that you’re not good and laugh when you talk about considering trying to go pro, maybe you write guides for the game that you love and anonymous internet shitstains use it as an opportunity to tear you down, maybe your boyfriend is so uncomfortable with your passion that he implies he’ll leave you if you decide to go down that path. Why the hell would anyone want to stick around for work it takes to go pro in esports if it’s offering a path of most resistance and borders on self-harm to continue to participate?
To sunmarize: gross.
posted by Snacks at 11:24 PM on November 30, 2018 [19 favorites]
First of all, follow the money. How does this make everyone rich? Parnell is clearly looking for the opportunities that are quickly lucrative for himself personally. College sports wants a bite of the esports pie they’re missing out on, especially now that football is a great way to die early of a neurodegenerative disease. Playing college rugby for me was a great first-hand look at how little of a shit colleges give toward student sports that don’t make the school money. This whole deal sounds exploitative of early talent in a nascent sport who aren’t yet being tapped for partnerships with college teams and pro recruiters/agents.
He sees PlayVS as an opportunity not only to develop new athletes, but also to help parents and teachers “understand there’s a pathway to a career.”
And what career would that be? A lot of pro esports players retire and turn to coaching, team management, or commentary casting by the time they hit their mid 20s to early 30s, but those jobs aren’t abundantly available, and turning pro in any game is HARD and requires a huge time investment that only younger people can really afford. Staying relevant after being a pro player is hard unless you were extremely good and popular. It’s not unlike going to the Olympics at 16-22, then slowly fizzling out and needing a second career backup after your pro life is over.
There’s a bit of unseen risk for pro players as well. When a game falls off and another rises up quickly like what happened with Starcraft 2 to League, and arguably is starting to happen with League to Fortnite, you have to be really fucking good to stick around, or pivot quickly, which takes time. Lots of Starcraft 2 players in S. Korea and the States jumped to League throughout the early 2010s when it was clear the tournament scene and the money was going in that direction, but it’s incredibly hard to peak in more than one game.
I’ve been friends with people who could have easily turned pro in LoL (or CounterStrike), but the view we had of the pro players is that they’re literally sacrificing their long term future for meteoric bright moments of international glory. It was common for the group I played online games with to quit playing entirely when we got too deep into grad school or our careers, myself included, because it just wasn’t worth it.
So again, what career is that, as a player? And at what sacrifice? I see lots of jobs in content creation for esports that I would have loved to take as a kid in college, but a lot of them are skilled positions in visual design, writing, or communications and require a college degree. Not a lot of these pro kids are even going on to college to begin with (I’d like to see actual numbers on this) because of the incredible amount of time you need to invest in just playing the game. There’s some kind of hinting in the article that the kids who could play collegiate esports are also potential programmers or 3D artists? Let me tell you how many kids who could play at a competitive level for free also have time to get a CS degree (and how many of them are female or not white).
And the ease of access to games in college and the addictive behaviors that some kids have toward gaming as an escape creates a cute little feedback loop that’s caused many a student to fail a class or even drop out of college entirely, tangential to the youth labor exploitation aspect. I’m positive there are all kinds of unhealthy behaviors that come up in traditional sports too, games just seems to offer up particularly terrible ones by virtue of its accessibility. High schools enabling this at an early age by incentivizing it feels weird and gross.
I don’t understand the pipeline here except as a meat grinder with very few opportunities at the top. Anyone who has read Kids These Days sees the pattern here: more competition for the same tiny amount of spots at the top pushes that competition onto younger ages and forces kids to invest more of their own time at younger and younger ages to pay a ton of money honing themselves for a prestige job marketplace that will chew them up and spit them out unless they’re the best. Kids will do the unpaid labor to prepare themselves for the marketplace and the rest is a cash grab.
Taking a huge step back, a lot of the article insinuated that all gaming can be kind of equivocated to esports and competitive play, which flat out isn’t true. There are no paid tournaments for best farm in Stardew Valley (a girl can dream!). Games have to be fun to watch competitively in order to be viable as an esport, and these days the games companies caught on and competitive aspects of gameplay are built with an eye for esports and broadcasting in mind (DOTA 2, Fortnite, what League has evolved into). They don’t seem to be the games women are more attracted to as a recreational activity or willing to invest tons of time in. I’m sure the numbers are marginally better now, but when I was playing League heavily, women made up 5% of the user base.
And to echo the above, where are the young women? So many historical and systemic factors to this, but there’s also a massive amount of free labor in amateur (unpaid) esports competition just to, what, prove you’re the best at something? To get sponsored? Why sacrifice so much time for something so risky and exploitative and masochistic?
I’d like to think maybe more women can smell the bullshit a mile away, and want to protect their time and energy, but that being just one factor of many. There’s the social expectations of women professionally, and the misogyny in games, still boiling just beneath the surface as ever, and maybe you watched the few women to breach the pro tier like Scarlett in SC2 get treated as an anomaly to be purged or a precious exotic Other. Maybe it’s just not worth it to wade through the cess pool of public comments/chat on the most popular platforms for gaming (Discord, Twitch) that are your main social access into the pro gaming world. Maybe your guy friends tell you repeatedly that you’re not good and laugh when you talk about considering trying to go pro, maybe you write guides for the game that you love and anonymous internet shitstains use it as an opportunity to tear you down, maybe your boyfriend is so uncomfortable with your passion that he implies he’ll leave you if you decide to go down that path. Why the hell would anyone want to stick around for work it takes to go pro in esports if it’s offering a path of most resistance and borders on self-harm to continue to participate?
To sunmarize: gross.
posted by Snacks at 11:24 PM on November 30, 2018 [19 favorites]
Pertinent is the part of the article that talks about how quickly these “sports” age out. Imagine a kid investing significant chunks of time into mastering a game, with the implied promise of it maybe leading somewhere career-wise, only to find that the game has fallen out of popularity by the time they graduate from high school. I don’t know how well elite gaming skills transfer from one game to another, but I don’t think focus on any flash-in-the-pan phenomenon is a good use of taxpayer dollars for education.
I would so much rather see technically-inclined children, who are not engaging with traditional book learning, be encouraged to develop actual tech skills such as computer programming. Schools could also broaden their view of physical education, so that students who don’t like (or actively dislike) traditional team sports have a school-sanctioned way to get physical exercise and maybe some competitive fun. Note the emphasis on the word “physical.”
This feels like the next round of the “are video games bad for kids?” debate, which the pro-gamers maybe have the edge on so far, except this time the goalposts have been moved from “gaming for a couple hours in their spare time” to “gaming as a substitute for school sports and tech clubs.” We shouldn’t let this by without some scrutiny.
posted by mantecol at 2:09 PM on December 1, 2018
I would so much rather see technically-inclined children, who are not engaging with traditional book learning, be encouraged to develop actual tech skills such as computer programming. Schools could also broaden their view of physical education, so that students who don’t like (or actively dislike) traditional team sports have a school-sanctioned way to get physical exercise and maybe some competitive fun. Note the emphasis on the word “physical.”
This feels like the next round of the “are video games bad for kids?” debate, which the pro-gamers maybe have the edge on so far, except this time the goalposts have been moved from “gaming for a couple hours in their spare time” to “gaming as a substitute for school sports and tech clubs.” We shouldn’t let this by without some scrutiny.
posted by mantecol at 2:09 PM on December 1, 2018
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My second reaction was: Where are the girls?
posted by MovableBookLady at 9:00 PM on November 30, 2018 [4 favorites]