Gaming Scholarships?

Hi Tracey! I survived the wifi outage. It was a painful week. Since we’re going through the whole college/scholarships process, I want to show you scholarship I recently found out about.

League of Legends is the most popular online video game by far with 67 million monthly players, and last fall, Robert Morris University in Chicago became the first college in America to accept competitive gaming (eSports) as a varsity sport. In fact, the college is offering athletic scholarships for League players. The University of Pikeville has followed Robert Morris’s lead in offering scholarships for eSports.

This is great. Most people have the chance to obtain scholarships for doing what they’re passionate about. Getting scholarships can be a struggle, though, when others don’t take your hobbies seriously. This League scholarship is a great change in an era when gaming has become more popular among the public.

However, the Pikeville scholarship and the Robert Morris scholarship has received some backlash from the gaming community on Reddit. Neither scholarship has received glowing praise, mainly because they appeared to falsely offer tuition-free education. The scholarships shouldn’t be avoided by any means, but gamers should carefully consider what the scholarships actually offer. This is a progressive time for eSports, and while these scholarships aren’t well received, I hope other universities develop scholarship programs that appeal to those with a strong interest in competitive gaming.

–Nancy

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Sources:

Forbes

Time

Video Game Piracy

Hi Tracey! Chinese New Year was awesome this year; there was lots of good food. I hope your week-long family dinners were more exciting this year.

A lot of people, especially people our age, have pirated something, be that a movie, a song, or a piece of software. Most industries fight this through copyright laws, but as you know, copyright laws aren’t as strict in America as they are in, say, Japan. So piracy remains. Video game developers, however, have taken an aggressive approach to piracy. A trap ending had been coded into Skullgirls that would be activated if the game was pirated. In Game Dev Tycoon, developers coded a failstate into the game that forces a player to see their in-game career end in bankruptcy for player who obtained the game illegally. These are smart ideas, but bigger publishers have turned to invasive Digital Rights Management (DRM) policies to stop piracy. This includes online authentication so invasive and unreliable that paying players are forced to access the game through torrent sites.

The most common argument in piracy in digital entertainment is that it undermines the rights of the creators. It’s a fair argument, but the video game industry isn’t known for its standard of living and working conditions. Employees are often under short term contracts and underpaid, forcing them into hours of overtime to make a living. Ethically, neither side is right, but it is very difficult to support an industry that does not have a history in petitioning for humane living standards for its workers.

–Nancy

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Sources:

Forbes