Tag: Concordia ESports

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A League of Legends World Championship like no other

Esports without in-person viewers leaves much to be desired.

The annual League of Legends World Championship is no stranger to highlights and upsets, and this year is no exception. Through two weeks of the championship, the level of competition is at an all-time high, and the record-breaking viewership numbers on the broadcast streams suggest Worlds 2020 hasn’t skipped a beat.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced Riot Games, tournament organizers and developers of League of Legends, to proceed without fans in attendance, meaning highlights that would normally have a sell-out arena going wild are now being greeted by a deafening silence that even broadcasters struggle to fill in.

Patryk Surowiak, President of the Concordia Esports Association (CESA), believes that esports are built on fan interaction and attendance above all else, including the video games themselves.

“It’s true that at its core, esports is played on a computer at home,” Surowiak said. “But the industry has grown so much over the years, where it’s now entirely built on the fans and these in-person events that draw the attention of thousands of people from around the world.” 

As President of the university’s club, created for casual or competitive gaming enthusiasts, Surowiak does a little bit of everything. He helps team coordinators get their teams and players together, helps set up the intramurals in accordance with Athletics and Recreation, and handles conversations with outside partners and sponsors.

Surowiak is also a proud and skilled gamer. He currently plays at a semi-professional level in Riot Games’ free-to-play multiplayer tactical first-person shooter Valorant, but it was the studio’s first hit game in League of Legends that captured Surowiak’s attention as a teenager back in 2012.

“I made a new friend in my first year of high school who introduced me to the game,” Surowiak said. “From there, I was instantly hooked and got really interested in the competitive side of the game, especially the professionals at the time.”

While Surowiak has broadened his gaming library over the years, he credits League of Legends for sparking his overall love for esports that has persisted to this day. 

“I try my best to watch all the Worlds matches with video on demand but it’s been hard with games taking place in Shanghai,” Surowiak said. “At the end of the day it’s Worlds. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

While esports as a viewing product has suffered slightly from COVID-19, there has never been a better time for the industry. The practice of social distancing has forced many to sit tight in the confines of their homes, and gaming provides a convenient distraction for people looking for social interaction and competition.

Surowiak described the experience of arranging events as President of the CESA during the pandemic as difficult.

“We usually hold viewing parties for Worlds at the school, and last year over a hundred people showed up,” Surowiak said. “It was a fun event that built gaming fans, friendships, and ultimately helped grow the club.”

Instead of another year of development and growth for the club, Surowiak faced a number of unprecedented challenges. The pandemic ultimately forced him to cancel most of its 2020 events.

“At the pinnacle, esports wasn’t too heavily impacted by COVID-19,” Surowiak said. “However, for the Concordia club, it was definitely a major hurdle. The club was prepared to work with multiple new sponsors and partners that would have bolstered the Concordia esports association.”

This year, the CESA and its Rocket League team will be competing in the Ontario Post-Secondary Esports League. The Concordia team will be the only Quebec school represented in the year-long collegiate tournament that began on Oct. 5.

The eventual return to in-person normalcy will likely cause the esports’ surge to stagnate, but the industry has been forever popularized in a meaningful way. The League of Legends World Championship is drawing people’s attention more so than ever as one might expect from a year devoid of social interaction.

However, regular fans realize that this year’s tournament will be a bittersweet memory. Ultimately, no matter how spectacular the matches, viewers will remember how it could have been if not for the pandemic.

You can catch the remaining Worlds action live or on-demand at the official League of Legends esports site. 

Feature graphic by Taylor Reddam

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Second League of Legends team aims to qualify for playoffs

By Ana Bilokin

New squad took time to develop chemistry but have found success together

Concordia’s new League of Legends Esports team is heading full speed towards the 2019 playoffs.

This is Concordia’s second League of Legends team, or the B team, which currently sits in third place in its division in the Collegiate Starleague (CSL). The team still has the winter semester to qualify for playoffs.

“We can definitely make it to quarter finals at least,” said Charles Morin, the team’s coach. “It all depends on how dedicated we are and how much we play as a team.”

League of Legends is an online role-playing video game in which a very large number of people participate simultaneously. Two teams of five players—who occupy different roles—play against each other until a final objective has been destroyed by one of the teams.

After a summer internship in management at StyroChem, Morin linked his passion for League of Legends to the knowledge he had gained at his internship. Since he didn’t play as much as he used to but still understands the game well, Morin approached the president of the Concordia Esports Association, Dimitri Kontogiannos, to be a coach. He offered Morin that position—a status Morin claims suits his personality.

“I always found myself more of a coach,” Morin said. “Even with my friends, I was like a leader.”

After two weeks of tryouts in September 2018, Morin filled the five spots on the team. Since players usually master one of the five roles, the coach was lucky to find players who practise different positions on the map.

The map is divided into three lanes—top, middle and bottom—that are separated by jungles. Three players occupy the top lane, the middle lane and the jungle respectively, while the two last players fight for the bottom lane.

To be part of the team, players had to meet certain requirements. They needed to be full-time students at Concordia and had to be dedicated to multiple practices during the week, including one game per week.

A key skill players needed was communication rather than raw talent for the game. Just like other team sports, League of Legends is based on a team’s ability to synchronize their movements around the map, and act upon different situations to win.

“At the beginning, it was tough because no one knew each other,” Morin said. Every player came from a different department of the university, but it didn’t stop them from meeting, because they practice from the comfort of their own homes.

“One day I was like ‘guys we’re not doing practice, we’re going to a bar’ and that was the first time we actually met up,” said Morin. “I think that after that day, we became more friends than just a team.” After that, the players quickly built chemistry, which inevitably made them a better team.

As the fall season progressed, the players started practising on their own, taking initiatives without the coach’s intervention. Since coaches can’t talk to their players or watch competitive games live to avoid cheating, players have to put their communication skills into practice to coordinate plays. Thanks to his deep understanding of the game, Scott Dejong quickly became the voice of the team.

“[Dejong] looks in the future of the game and tells us what we’re supposed to do in two minutes, five minutes or ten minutes,” said Luca D’Ambra, the team’s mid lane player. “As long as we follow his calls, we should win the trades with the other teams.”

Dejong also became the centre of the team’s jokes. As a support, his task is to assist one of his teammates, called the attack damage carry (ADC), to put him at an advantage on his counter enemy. However, Dejong showed a better understanding of the game than most of his team, which is ironic considering his job is to support rather than attack the opponents.

“All the stupid things come from the ADC and the support,” said Arthur Tourneyrie, the team’s top lane player. “We just always tease the bot lane because, in terms of rank, our support is much better than our ADC.”

By joining a team, the players found themselves setting personal goals, and improving on aspects they didn’t think needed tweaking.

“When I play alone, I usually don’t communicate,” D’Ambra said. “I hope to increase [my communication skills] way more, like try to get a more macro sense of the game, not just single player skills but more how everyone should be doing on their team, who should be doing what at what time.”

Even though the team wants to qualify for playoffs, the players’ main goal is to have a blast with their friends playing their favourite game.

“It’s just a hobby kind of thing,” Tourneyrie said. “If we make it to playoffs and if we just play to our full potential—at least feel like we’ve done our best—it would be really great.”

Main graphic by Ana Bilokin.

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Sports

Concordia Esports aims to start intramural league

Archive graphic by Zeze Le Lin.

League of Legends will be the first game available for casual gamers

The Concordia Esports Association (CESA) wants to expand from its competitive teams and organize an intramural league for students. President Dimitri Kontogiannos said the club is looking for people to play League of Legends in a fun, non-competitive environment.

”We’ve seen there are a lot of students that want to play in Concordia Esports organized events, but we’ve only really had a competitive team before,” Kontogiannos said. “So there was a lack of structured events for people who are a lower caliber or just don’t want to play on the competitive team.”

Kontogiannos said CESA is starting with League of Legends as its inaugural intramural game because it has the biggest following on campus. Games will be on Friday nights and players can sign up either as an individual and be put in a team, or a team can sign up together. Although the club will start with one game, they hope to expand to Overwatch and Super Smash Bros in the future.

The intramural league will be organized independently from Concordia, unlike its intramural leagues with traditional sports such as hockey, soccer, and basketball. Despite this, Stingers athletic director D’Arcy Ryan believes there’s room for growth for Esports at Concordia.

“Montreal is a hotbed of talent in the gaming industry because of some of the big companies like Ubisoft and CGI,” Ryan said. “We have the academic talent with programmers in the engineering faculty, so I think there’s a great potential for a partnership between the academic and recreational side to promote the gaming market.”

Kontogiannos has also seen Esports grow at the university level across the country. “All schools see the popularity and growth of Esports,” he said. “There’s significant interest in Canadian schools. At Concordia, [it’s] because of inclusiveness, and they use sport as a means to attract new students.”

Through the intramural league, CESA wants to introduce students, particularly first-years, to other students that share their passion. First-year students can focus too much on video games, according to League of Legends team manager Guillaume Bélisle.

“They play too many video games in the first year and then crash and burn [mentally],” Bélisle said in an interview with The Concordian in September. “Then in the second and third year, they will focus more on their studies. It’s all about balance.”

“In my first semester, this is the way I met people at the school,” Kontogiannos added. “I didn’t have many friends coming from Dawson to my program, so to find new people was one of the catalysts as to why I joined [CESA].”

Kontogiannos also believes video games play an important role in integrating new students from abroad. “[League of Legends] transcends countries,” he said. “It’s not just in North America that people play it, but also in Europe, in Asia, and even the Oceanic region. It’s a game the school can really benefit from by having organized activities around it.”

The president also wants to use the intramural league to potentially recruit players for their competitive team. “We just want people to have fun,” he said. “But it always ends up with us looking at new talent that’s popping up around Concordia, or seeing talented players that we didn’t have the chance to see before.”

Still, Kontogiannos wants the players to enjoy it. “I hope there are some good games. I know non-competitive players tend to stray out of the competitive strategies, so it’s a whole new game.”

To sign up for the intramural league, you can visit CESA’s Facebook page.

Archive graphic by Zeze Le Lin.

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Sports

Don’t blame shooting on video games: expert

Graphic by @spooky_soda

Concordia Esports club says video game addiction is a big problem

On Aug. 26, David Katz walked into a restaurant in Jacksonville, FL, where a Madden NFL 19 tournament was taking place, and shot and killed three people, including himself.

Immediately after the incident, media outlets searched for the motive behind the shooting. USA Today reported that one of the victims killed, Eli Clayton, who went by the gamer name “Trueboy,” had beat Katz at the tournament earlier that day. CNN found documents about Katz’s parents’ divorce. They stated that the 24-year-old had mental health issues, and “was in treatment for psychiatric issues at least as early as the age of 12.”

Global News also suggested possible video game addiction that Katz could have had as a teenager. “Katz played video games obsessively as a young adolescent, often refusing to go to school or bathe,” the article stated.

Multiple media outlets were trying to blame the shooting on Katz’s obsession with video games and mental health issues. However, video game experts don’t blame either for the incident. Mia Consalvo is a professor in the communications department at Concordia, and the Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design. She said the vast majority of people with mental illnesses aren’t dangerous, and only a small minority are dangerous to other people.

“It’s a common stereotype that people with mental illness will snap, lose control, or that they are a danger to others,” Consalvo said. “In terms of the shooting in Jacksonville, it seems more indicative of the mass shootings in the United States now in general, rather than something to do with a video game.”

In 2015, over 200 academics signed an open letter criticising a study in the American Psychology Association, linking video games and violent behaviour. Dr. Mark Coulson is an associate professor of psychology at Middlesex University in London, and signed the letter.

“I fully acknowledge that exposure to repeated violence may have short-term effects—you would be a fool to deny that—but the long-term consequences of crime and actual violent behaviour, there is just no evidence linking violent video games with that,” Coulson told the BBC in 2015.  

“If you play three hours of Call of Duty you might feel a little bit pumped, but you are not going to go out and mug someone.”

In fact, Consalvo has done research on people who play sports video games, such as Madden NFL, which was played during the Jacksonville shooting. She said sports video games actually produce positive feelings for the user.

“[People who play sports video games] had really strong and positive memories of playing games with members of their family, or friends. Sometimes those memories would go back years, and sometimes even decades for them,” Consalvo said about her findings. “It would have a really strong and positive influence in their life.”

The media also touched on Katz’s video game addiction as a possible reason for the shooting. The World Health Organization recognized “gaming disorder” as a mental health condition in June 2018, and the Concordia Esports Association (CESA) thinks it’s a major problem, especially for first-year university students.

“It’s more of a problem in secluded communities,” said co-president of CESA, Dimitri Kontogiannos. “What happens a lot is students come from abroad and first-year students live in residence. So it’s usually what they only do, they play by themselves.”

Consalvo disagrees, and believes there’s no agreed-upon definition for video game addiction just yet.

“There’s a lot of controversy, and there are a lot of arguments within the scientific community whether video game addiction is actually a thing,” Consalvo said. “Before anybody could even say if there is a problem and how widespread it is, they need to agree on a definition, and that still hasn’t been done yet.”

Guillaume Bélisle is the League of Legends team manager for CESA. This summer, he ran a video-game design camp for kids in the West Island. He said one time, while they were singing happy birthday to one of the campers, the birthday boy was playing Fortnite on his phone, and didn’t look up once.

“One thing I noticed is that the parents were not doing anything about it,” Bélisle said. “It’s not just that the kid is the victim. The parents give them whatever they want, and the kid takes whatever they want.”

Bélisle has also seen severe cases of video game addiction with students at Concordia. He said he had to cut a player from his team because he was playing video games for 16 to 18 hours a day and failing classes.

“He would literally show up to class with a laptop and play, then go home and play,” he said. “That was a very extreme case, and we tried helping him. But if he doesn’t want to help himself, there’s not much you can do about it.”

Kontogiannos, Bélisle, and Consalvo all agree that video games can be used as a social connection for some people. CESA organizes events for gamers to meet at a pub and play a game, have drinks, and socialize. “Socializing around a passion really breaks the player out of having the one focus of having the need to play,” Kontogiannos said. “Once you get isolated and in the mode to just play, it’s even bad for your mentality.”

Consalvo’s current research is about gamers who live stream their gameplay on Twitch. She said people do that because they enjoy the social aspect of video games, and interacting with their viewers.

“We seem to have this image of people who play video games as loners who are socially inept, and for the most part, I find people who just want to be social, and share that activity with other people,” she said.

As for the Jacksonville shooting, Katz’s motive remains under investigation, according to CNN.

Graphic by @spooky_soda

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