EPTRight now in my thesis class, we're working on the Review of Lit, which in mid-march will end up being a 10+ page, 15+ works cited document. This sounded absolutely impossible when I started up with this whole eSports/gaming culture endeavor, but if you get away from eSports and just look at gaming and how it's expanded in the last ten years, you can find interesting gems such as this gem about PC Bangs - the book Korea's Online Gaming Empire was extremely helpful too just to help me understand what goes on in South Korea. There were only three or four sources about eSports itself, the aforementioned book included, but a broad view of just the culture seems to be helping quite a bit too.
I have a mentor - that is, a member of the community who is willing to set aside a huge amount of time for the next ten months to help me out as much as s/he can. In this case, it's a technology/business teacher who recently got her PhD in some sort of data collection thing (man I'm a terrible mentee for not remembering her titles). She knows almost nothing about video gaming - and absolutely nothing about eSports - but I can probably list on both my hands the number of people at my school who do. Regardless, she's been helping me mold exactly what I want to do with my thesis process, and this is what it's starting to turn in to:
eSports Association in the U.S. -
- creates a registration process to become a registered pro-gamer
- creates and helps maintain a code of ethics required to keep the support of the association
- supports specific map pools in order to give pro-gamers a more narrowed focus and improve the quality of games
- supports pro-gamers and protects their right to payment/fair contracts/etc.etc.
- runs a few tournaments to help spread eSports awareness and show/test the practicality of certain maps and rules
...and I got to thinking, that last bullet point could really turn into something interesting - why not host a video game tournament at my school as sort of the capstone to the entire thing?
That's my plan for the next ten months of my life - get research on how to run things like this (funding, employment, cooperation with other organization), figure out how to make it work to the best of my ability, and then use as many of the regulations I made as possible in a small-scale video game tournament (starcraft 2, league of legends, counter-strke source) for my community.
What did you do the summer between your junior and senior year? Because I'm going to end up killing myself through research-overload trying to perfect this whole thing
