By Bohdan James, Norman High School
Esports at the University of Oklahoma continues to evolve, with the creation of a new facility in Couch Towers and the expansion of scholarships and games.
It’s all part of a large vision Michael “Moog” Aguilar, the director of Esports and co-curricular innovation, has for the OU Esports organization.
“The next chapter, which is this school year, we’ll see the birth of physical space on campus which is a separate facility,” he said.
Aguilar said the facility will have a space for all six pillars, or branches, of OU Esports, which are community, leadership, media and news, sportscasting, streaming, and competition.
“So that will help us get home from all six of those pillars, as well as creating the first kind of Living Learning Community concept, which you see in athletics in high tier academic components where they house those students together,” he said.
OU Esports started in fall 2016 with research into the industry and what students were specifically interested in, Aguilar said.
“We knew that playing video games is the core, that’s obvious, and we know that the word eSports really represents competitive gameplay but the industry overall is so much bigger than just those two,” he said.
This led to an event in April 2017 that served as the kickoff event.
This led to the university’s first eSports event in 2017. From there it grew rapidly, even through COVID. And now a facility to house OU Esports is under construction.
Scholarships are also a big part of the future of OU Esports, said Jody Farmer, assistant director of OU Esports.
“We’re going to grow our scholarships from 40 scholarships a year to close to 70 and we’re going to have larger scholarships,” she said. “So instead of only like $2,000 a semester, up to $10,000 a semester,”
This ties in with the facility as students with a scholarship to any of the six pillars will have first priority on having their housing at the facility, Farmer said.
There are plans to include bringing new games into the competitive space. Farmer noted how the Overwatch team is already preparing for the release of Overwatch 2 and how changes will have to be made such as adjusting the team size from six to five players.
The facility will have resources catered to each pillar. For the community pillar, there will be a 40- to 60- person computer lab. For leadership, a conference room/vod (video on demand) review room. For the media and news pillar a couple of workstations and a dedicated green screen space are proposed.
For sportscasting there will be a dedicated production room. For streaming, setups in the production room for content creators or watching live streams are proposed, and for competition, two dedicated rooms with six computers each are planned.
The first phase of the facility is the computer lab,
which should be up and running by February, Aguilar said with the rest of the facility completed by the end of 2023.
In addition to scholarships offered for each of the six pillars, Aguilar said there is a seventh scholarship that focuses on underserved representation in the eSports and gaming industry.
“So, don’t think of it as under representation from a minority or a minority in the heritage or minority of gender perspective,” he said. “Think of it as a minority in a specific industry, a perfect example.
“Black and African American communities in gaming and eSports typically are about 20 to 25% of all the consumption of the entire industry of entertainment. However, only representing maybe 2% of any kind of c-level administrator or high-level executive in these positions. So those notions can be tacked on to any of those for six if they meet those criteria,” Aguilar said.
These scholarships allow for students, especially in the competitive branch, to play games such as the upcoming Overwatch 2.
“The new game comes in October and their tournament seasons actually doesn’t start until November through the spring semester so they are already looking at that and some of the changes that are going to happen,” Farmer said.
