eSports from an IT Perspective
Like many folks I grew up playing Nintendo, Playstation, X-box and computer games but I would never call myself a gamer. Now that I am father of three I see my kids playing games on their devices more then I ever played games. I also see the increase of eSports among the younger generation which means as they enter into college they are looking for their choice school to provide eSports for them. There is talk about where eSports belongs as well as if video games is even considered a sport. This article is not going to say where eSports belong or if it is a sport or not; side note I do believe it is a sport. This article is going to look at the IT and AV side of eSports.
IT Side:
The first thing to consider when setting up eSports in higher education is are you going to use special computers? The computers that we are installing in classrooms can not handle the demand of these games. There are some off the shelve gaming machines but most part gamers are looking for those custom built machines. Going with custom built hardware means that we need to step away from our standard builds. These custom build computers will still need to adhere to a standard so we can keep managing them and have spare parts to prevent long down time but these standards will be different than other computers on campus.
Now that we have computers for gaming we need to be able to manage them. IT likes to make managing computers easy on themselves. There are tools like Microsoft System Center that allows IT to manage software and computer images remotely. This tool allows the IT department to control the software that goes on to the computers as well and manage the operating system so all the computers within a lab or the whole campus are the same. Being able to deploy software, handle updates, or even re-image a computer remotely is key in keeping our campus’ computers operational for the students. The issue with doing this for eSports machines is many of the gaming platforms are large in nature. Due to their large size they take up a good chunk of the storage on IT’s servers. Not only do they take up the storage but when they are deployed the size of the files can cause increase bandwidth on the network.
Another concern that we need to be concern about eSports is updating the software. Most schools limited who can update and who can not update software on the computers. In eSports the software can come out with updates almost daily at time. This kind of puts a demand on the IT team to handle the updates or allow the students to update the software themselves. If you allow the students to update the software themselves you need to make sure there are no other issues that might come of this change in permission.
Now when it comes to eSports most are not stand alone machines but are teams events where they are playing online with other people. This type of setup puts a demand on the school’s network as gamer can not have lag while they are playing and working as their team. If the network is not setup correctly, causing a battle for bandwidth, then we are going to have issues not only in the eSports lab but also within our classrooms.
AV Side:
On the AV side we need to be mindful of how important details are to these gamers. The player need to be able to tell the different in color while looking at their environment on the screen. If the monitors are not providing the proper colors, resolution, or refresh rate then a player could be missing out of key information to help them during the game. These also need to be the same for every player to provide a level playing field.
Not only is the visual aspect important but so is the audio. Players needs to be able to hear the smallest of sound in their game. This mean they can not have noise from outside the game distracting them. This outside noise could be from HVAC systems, hum of the equipment, people talking or even their teammates breathing. The environment that these gamers are in need to be suitable to turn out everything else in the room. While we discuss the audio side we should not leave out that players need to be able to communicate with their teammates in realtime. There can not be latency on their communication as it could hinder the action on the screen. They have to know that the information they are providing their teammate is getting to them clearly and quickly.
Conclusion
No matter if you think eSports is a true sport or not it is something us AV/IT folks need to be mindful of. Even if the eSports team/department/lab does not fall under our domain we still might find ourselves supporting them in one way or another as eSports does require a lot of IT and AV.