Esports: Online gaming is growing in popularity with special esports college courses in Hampshire

Level 2 and 3 BTEC Esports courses at St Vincent's College in Gosport, now boast around 60 students in their second academic year whilst Havant and South Downs College offers esports courses at its Alton and South Downs campuses. Specialised esports colleges, such as the Guild College and the College of Esports in London, are intaking their first round of students this year.

So what is esports and where did all this interest come from?

Esports is competitive virtual gaming, where a person or group plays against another, either online or in person, in real time.

The term 'esports' is a catchall for the many different video games, or sports, people compete in, like Counter Strike Global Offensive (CSGO) or Rocket League - much the same way 'sports' refers to all traditional sports like football or tennis.

The first accredited esports tournament was an in-house Stanford University, 24 player event called the Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics, but professional modern esports tournaments have their roots in the early ‘90s, with the advent of tournaments like the Evolution Championship Series (EVO) revolving around 1v1 fighting games, such as Street Fighter.

Games like Quake and Starcraft propelled the popularity of broadcast esports in the early 2000s, with tournament Counter Strike debuting in 2001.

The 2010s introduced dominant streaming platform Twitch, as well as League of Legends and Dota 2 which effectively took over the market, changing the landscape of esports to largely orient around streaming

Today, the most popular esports by the current number of competitive teams, in descending order, are CSGO, Rocket League, League of Legends, Valorant, and Dota 2.

Roehampton University were the first in the UK to hand out an esports scholarship, in 2018, with the first being given to law student Julia Cwierz in 2019.

In 2020 the British Esports Federation created the framework for their esports BTEC courses, the first of its kind in the world, eventually working with the College of Esports in London in 2021 to establish higher education courses for the study of business in esports.

Esports and IT Course Leader at St Vincent’s, Martin Birch-Foster, who pioneered the program at the college, said the transition from IT to epsports was a gradual but natural one.

‘I was always trying to gameify the Level 1 IT which is what I started with, trying to explain to students how Xboxes are put together rather than how PCs are put together.’

‘One day a student said to me ‘can I watch this video game’ and I said yeah go for it, if you want to watch the video game, while all the others are playing these video games that's fine.’

‘But I don’t understand why you would want to watch the video game when you’ve got it right next to you, and the student’s response was ‘well why do you watch football?’’

‘And so based on that one response it prompted me to look at how esports was doing and how it fits in with education.’

‘Dell saw that we were getting involved in esports… they had already partnered with other colleges, or one other college at the time.

Dell partnered with the college in late 2022 to provide discounted computers, equipment and jerseys as part of the new iteration of their competition practice space, the ‘Shark Tank’, and is the flagship case study for Dell’s Levelling Up Education initiative.

GT Omega, an office and gaming chair company, provided the chairs and racing rigs for the Shark Tank, and Hyper X, a gaming products company, provided the keyboards and mice.

‘The future of Portsmouth esports, and the surrounding area, I think we are going to see it grow rapidly - over the next few years I think we’re going to start seeing it take off’, Martin said.

‘It’d be great to see Portsmouth football club looking at getting involved in this, a lot of football clubs all up and down the country are already doing so, Wolverhampton football club… they’ve got a very successful esports team.’

‘I think we just need to keep going, keep pushing with this momentum forward and drive home the fact that esports is the future.’

Esports, globally, is worth around £1.2 billion, with the video game industry as a whole worth around £270 billion pounds, according to the World Economic Forum, with its generated revenue being double what movies and music make combined.

ALSO READ: Portsmouth Comic Con – all you need to know