On Dec. 3, eight teams of students from universities across North America battled in the Tespa Collegiate Series: Overwatch quarterfinals. Tespa—"a network of college clubs founded to promote gaming culture and host the best college eSports events and competitions"—is one of many organizations dedicated to collegiate eSports, or competitive video-gaming. The Tespa Collegiate Series is the organization’s dedicated competition in Overwatch, one of the six games featured in the tournament. To an outsider, this organization and specific competition might sound like one of an endless number of video game challenges, but the US $120,000 in scholarship and prizes up for grabs would indicate otherwise.
ESports have increased in popularity in countries around the world and the number of formal competitions continues to grow. Organizations like Tespa facilitate this growth but the rise of collegiate-level eSports in North America is still a relatively new phenomenon. Canadian and American students are generally less familiar with Tespa and other collegiate eSports organizations than with traditional sport governing bodies such as U Sports and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA).
Nevertheless, the collegiate eSports industry has begun to establish itself in Canada and the United States. Tespa has amassed tens of thousands of social media followers and will distribute over US $1,000,000 in prizes across its competitions this academic year. Its “Heroes of the Dorm” competition—a joint venture with the American video game developer Blizzard Entertainment—has been broadcast on ESPN in the past, and is now moving away from the media giant to stream exclusively on its own Facebook page. And Tespa is just one cog in the collegiate eSports industry.
Recently, Canadian and American students have scrambled to put together their own teams. Major institutions like Georgia State University and the University of California, Irvine have gone as far as supporting their own varsity eSports teams. As the industry continues to boom, it will benefit from an increase in viewership, prize pools, and the number of varsity teams in collegiate eSports.
McGill is no exception to the rule, and has also witnessed an increase in engagement with eSports. The McGill E-Sports Students’ Association (MESA) has grown immensely since its beginnings as a small club for students to play StarCraft—a real-time strategy video game by Blizzard Entertainment. Now MESA is a Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) club that runs eSports events and assembles teams that compete in games like League of Legends and Hearthstone at the inter-collegiate level. Despite already holding a small-yet-established presence on campus, it remains to be seen just how collegiate eSports will solidify on Canadian campuses.
The first possibility to consider may be McGill’s own varsity eSports team. St. Clair College in Ontario, was the first Canadian institution with varsity eSports in 2017. In an interview with The McGill Tribune, Geoffrey Phillips, director of sports programs, Athletics and Recreation at McGill Athletics, mentioned that departments across the country have taken note.
"Major institutions like Georgia State University and the University of California, Irvine have gone as far as supporting their own varsity eSports teams. As the industry continues to boom, it will benefit from an increase in viewership, prize pools, and the number of varsity teams in collegiate eSports."
“[Varsity eSports teams are] on the radar,” Phillips said. “It’s been discussed at the national level, [and] it’s been discussed at the regional level.”
Between administrative support, athletic funding, and a formal endorsement from an institution, the advantages of being a varsity team are clear. According to Shaun Byrne, ESports coordinator for Saints Gaming at St. Clair College, these benefits are easy to achieve given how compatible collegiate sports and the world of eSports are.
“I think there is a fit for eSports on any campus,” Byrne said. “The college-age demographic and video gaming [go] hand in hand.”
From an athlete’s perspective, there is little to lose from a varsity eSports program. Such a step would go a great length toward legitimizing eSports on any campus and would benefit university clubs like MESA. As they are a relatively small SSMU club, MESA President Andrew Tran (U3, Engineering) explained that his club faces a range of difficulties.
“The infrastructure of the whole campus makes it very difficult to run eSports events, [...] compared to other schools,” Tran said. “[McGill’s internet] connectivity is pretty bad across the board in most of the buildings [....And it’s] very hard to find computer lab space.”
In March 2017, the association’s major event, McLAN, was derailed as a result of internal conflict within the SSMU executive. SSMU and MESA were supposed to co-host the event and split organizational tasks between the two bodies, but the SSMU contingent could not fulfill its responsibilities after president Ben Ger and vice-president External David Aird resigned. For a club of MESA’s size, it was a hard blow to take.
Granting MESA a lower-level varsity status would go a long way in solving the issues of space and legitimacy the group currently faces. This sort of elevation has proven successful at St. Clair. After only 10 months of existence, Saints Gaming has garnered a good deal of attention through both viewership and recruitment. With deals like the acquisition of Esport Gaming Events—an act of vertical integration, of sorts—Byrne expects the progress to continue.
“We have sponsors that have already committed to five-year deals,” Byrne said. “This is only the beginning but we've gotten off to a very strong start.”
At least in the short term at McGill, the hurdles are too high to clear. Within McGill Athletics, there are hardly enough resources to maintain the status quo.
“Realistically, with budgets not going up, costs going up, demands coming from [McGill Athletics organizations, McGill Athletics] are challenged financially and on a human resources level,” Phillips said. “The people who have been hired [to handle McGill Athletics’ newer challenges] now have too much work [....] Right now, we’re looking like we’re going to run a deficit budget [....] You get to a point where you go, ‘How much more can we put on people’s shoulders?’ And the stuff that I can’t control is already escalating the workload.”
There are many other reasons to not participate in varsity eSports. Regardless of whether one believes eSports are really a sport, the competition’s compatibility with McGill Athletics and Recreation’s fitness pillar renders the creation of a varsity eSports team difficult to reconcile.
“[McGill, the Réseau du sport étudiant du Québec (RSEQ), and U Sports programs] are about health and wellness and physical conditioning,” Phillips said. “Whether it’s a sport or not, in whatever definition, doesn’t really come into play.”
Byrne, meanwhile, outlined factors that make Canadian institutions, and McGill in particular, less fit for varsity eSports teams than their peers in the United States.
“I think Canada in general is just a little behind in terms of the eSports industry,” Byrne said. “Part of that [...] has to do with available internet infrastructure [....] On average, schools in the U.S. have a lot more capital [to invest in athletics].”
Finally, the varsity label simply isn’t that valuable. Canadian universities have fewer finances to invest in athletic ventures, so on a tangible level, there’d be little to distinguish a team run through the athletic department from one run through any other body, besides the varsity title—a label which carries less prestige on Canadian campuses than American ones. There is also a meager selection of competitions devoted exclusively to varsity teams.
“There is [only] one league that claims to only allow true varsity teams to compete,” Byrne said. “However, [Saints Gaming hasn’t] seen enough value in it yet to participate. Instead, we participate in [competitions that] are open to [...] college varsity and club teams alike.”
Creating a varsity eSports team would require considerable energy. McGill Athletics has yet to receive sufficient demand to prioritize such effort, Phillips explained.
“I think Canada in general is just a little behind in terms of the eSports industry,” Byrne said. “Part of that [...] has to do with available internet infrastructure [....] On average, schools in the U.S. have a lot more capital [to invest in athletics].”
“There has to be a demand through a formal structure, in the sense that we won’t just have a varsity team if there’s not regional or national [organizational demand],” Phillips said.
Tran agreed that the issue with raising support for collegiate eSports at McGill is a vicious circle. With minimal resources and without leverage to ask for more, it is near-impossible for MESA and other eSports fans to build up the demand that Phillips mentioned. However, administrative bodies like SSMU will not prioritize the eSports scene until there is more general interest.
Thus, the new wave of collegiate eSports will likely originate primarily from outside the university—without a McGill varsity eSports team in sight. However, fans shouldn’t be discouraged. Competitive eSports teams at McGill lose little without the varsity designation, and there is still plenty of potential for collegiate eSports to grow even if institutions like McGill aren’t ready to help the movement along. Phillips pointed out that there is much more potential for a larger Canadian eSports organization to gain popularity through a student or outsider-led movement.
“There’s probably a lot of people out there, who are students, who are getting involved in this, who have far more expertise,” Phillips said. “Generally, I think [nontraditional sports movements] don’t come from the top-down. They come from very active students with an interest.”
Phillips has seen students take a niche sport and run with it before.
“Ultimate [frisbee] is the prime example, where a game that’s played in pockets across the country finally had a couple of people take it to the next level,” Phillips said.
In ultimate’s case, students and recent graduates from across the United States came together to form the Ultimate Players’ Association in 1979. The club has since rebranded into “USA Ultimate,” and, as of 2015, boasts more than 50,000 members.
Similarly, the push for the Canadian eSports collegiate movement’s expansion will come from the bottom-up rather than from an older group of athletic department directors. Phillips was confident that the movement would be led by millennials.
“It’ll be a 20-to-30 year old, either an entrepreneur who’s just gotten out of [university], or a group of people who reach out to their peers at other schools,” Phillips said.
The precedent for grassroots success has been established in collegiate eSports, too. A group of three students at the University of Texas, Austin founded Tespa in 2012 as a school group not too different from clubs like MESA. In just five years, Tespa has grown exponentially. In the exploding eSports industry, there’s plenty of space for a Canadian collegiate organization to make a name for itself.
“As a smaller club, it’s hard to [even] get an office space [where] we can have people play [...] and hang out to make a community,” Tran said. “For eSports to be big, it needs to be more community-driven.”
At McGill, even if it’s just a student club like MESA that competes within a new, Canadian organization, campus eSports will eventually flourish. The UBC eSports Association, for example, opened a gaming lounge in 2016. Any student at the University of British Columbia can use it to play a wide range of games any weekday. When the lounge is closed to the general public, the competitive team uses the space to train for matches.
Sponsors were integral to funding the lounge. It would be difficult—and has been impossible, thus far—to find a similar space for MESA at McGill, but Tran asserted that even a minimal dedicated space for eSports on campus would help establish a culture.
“As a smaller club, it’s hard to [even] get an office space [where] we can have people play [...] and hang out to make a community,” Tran said. “For eSports to be big, it needs to be more community-driven.”
If collegiate eSports had a greater presence in Canada, there’d be a greater collection of fans at McGill, and more leverage for MESA to request a space. Furthermore, a larger presence would increase the availability of scholarships for groups like MESA. Currently, MESA is largely self-funded, which holds many students back from participating in eSports and prevents many players from getting serious about competing.
With an athletics department that already appears stretched thin, it’s unlikely that McGill will follow in the footsteps of institutions like St. Clair College in establishing varsity eSports teams. Still, eSports fans at McGill shouldn’t fret: There isn’t much to lose from stepping down from a varsity team to a student association. With more support for collegiate eSports in Canada, clubs such as MESA can take real advantage.
“At a place like McGill, [...] I think we’d be blind to think that [eSports] won’t find its place,” Phillips said.