Photo Courtesy of UTD Esports
Gaming club members discuss feeling disappointed, ignored after creation of official esports department
In 2012, gaming as a competitive sport seemed a distant
dream for students at UTD. It began with three students deciding to open up a
chapter of TESPA, a known national gaming organization, at UTD to increase
awareness about gaming and esports. Its members aspired to see esports as part
of something bigger than club skirmishes and tournaments, and built an
incredibly close-knit gaming community over the next few years.
Flash forward five
years, and esports was being discussed among members of the UTD Athletic
department. It became an official university sport in half a year. Within that
year, the program has taken their “Smash” team to national competitions, and
rose up among the best esports teams in the region.
Members of gaming
clubs at the time felt excited about their efforts finally coming to fruition
until the program began its course. Former club members and skilled players
migrated to the esports teams, but TESPA members’ attempts to get involved with
the program were met with little to no response. While the esports department
flourished, members of the gaming clubs ended up feeling used, their
contributions minimized and their efforts ignored.
From the beginning,
the clubs aimed to foster an environment that welcomed gamers and enthusiasts
through events, competitions and tournaments. Computer science graduate and
president of TESPA Tenjue Koh said the club hosts tournaments and events for
games like “League of Legends,” “Overwatch,” and “Heroes of the Storm.” Members
receive prizes and have opportunities to compete, and the club is sponsored by
Blizzard and sometimes Ubisoft. Up to 50-60 people attend events, and even more
depending on the game being showcased at the event, Koh said.
“It’s a fun group.
It’s cool. A lot of the students are really casual. They’re all nerds. We can
all relate to each other and especially when you have common interests between
each other,” Koh said. “There’s a lot of gamers (that) are really shy and talk
to each other, but as soon as they see that other students have common
interests with them, they’re really inclined to talk about it or it makes at
least easier to talk about it with them.”
TESPA Event
Coordinator and business administration junior Adam Alami has hosted weekly
Comet Clash tournaments since 2016, where students could compete playing “Super
Smash Brothers.” On-campus tournaments sometimes involved other universities
competing such as University of Arlington and students from Houston. These
often lasted eight hours at a time and up to 80 people would attend and play
between a few consoles, Alami said.
As TESPA grew, so did
other clubs such as League of Legends at UTD and Rocket League at UTD, Koh
said. He said they ended up breaking off into their own clubs to focus on
playing in their own games’ competitions and TESPA continued to be a general
gaming interest club.
“A lot of the people
who are more interested in ‘League of Legends’ or ‘Rocket League’ or
‘Counter-Strike’ usually go through their specific clubs,” he said. “That means
the people who come to the TESPA general meetings have a niche taste in games
or a niche in terms of how popular they are at UT Dallas.”
Athletics Director
Bill Petitt said it was in 2017 when members of the Athletics department began
to consider adding esports as a recognized sport at UTD. After discussing among
student athletes, staff and other student organizations, the esports department
was created over a six-month period until its inception in August 2018, Petitt
said.
During those six
months, former music director and current esports coach Greg Adler was hired
after a nationwide search for a coach. He said the combination of passion
students had for gaming and esports and support from the university made it
easy for esports to flourish and for him to hire high-quality players.
“It’s pretty
unbelievable, but we kind of expected this. We knew that we would have students
that would want to be on the teams that already play at this extremely high
level. It was just a matter of actually creating and validating it,” Adler
said. “So, while it is pretty crazy and an amazing experience to get to play
these teams, this was the expectation that we were going to be one of the top
in the nation.”
Despite the growth
and victories the esports department has gotten over the year, members of TESPA
and other gaming clubs said they felt there was little to no opportunity for
collaboration between them and the esports department, and their club members,
expertise and passion for the field were siphoned off to be a part of the
official esports teams.
Adler said the
esports clubs have Discord servers, which are linked to the esports department
Discord server to give them more attention, direct people to their clubs and
help them flourish. While university officials did not directly respond to
these specific concerns raised by TESPA members, Adler issued an email
statement to The Mercury suggesting possible future collaborations.
“Our goal is to
service the campus as a whole and create a program all students at UT Dallas
can be proud of,” Adler said. “We’ve already been building strong relationships
with our student gaming clubs on campus and will continue to do so going into
the future to ensure all voices are heard.”
Koh said that members
of TESPA were consulted for tips about how to run esports events in the
beginning.
“It’s like ‘We’d like
to ask TESPA for some tips on that.’ Well, why don’t you guys just hire us? Why
don’t you guys just work in conjunction with us? If you just do a collaboration
with us, we’ll do it for free and we’ll provide (prizes),” Koh said. “There’s
no pain on your end and you get the benefit of hosting the tournament under
your name and what we get is publicity for working with UTD, (and) they’re
like, ‘Oh no, we kind of want to do it ourselves.’’’
Alami said despite
feeling excited and wanting to be involved in the esports program at first, the
lack of involvement and collaboration opportunities between the esports
department and the clubs made it disappointing. He said he, along with current
and former TESPA members, applied for advertised positions within the esports
department but got little to no response. While it’s unknown what became of the
paid and volunteer positions the esports program advertised in the beginning,
TESPA members still felt ignored and pushed to the side.
“It’s nice to see
that UTD recognizes esports as a thing, but I feel like a lot of the time it
just kinda feels like they’re trying to just take over the esports scene at the
school just for themselves,” Alami said. “We worked really hard to get them to
recognize it as a concept and then it finally happened. This is what we’ve been
working towards. None of that really came to fruition. It felt like they
already knew exactly what they were going to do with the program and they
didn’t really want to stray from that.”