People have been talking about virtual reality forever. Dan Shefelman remembers a time when it was going to be huge in the ‘90s, but it never reached the heights people predicted it would at the time.
Maria Hwano details what virtual reality is and why, despite not taking over as people thought it would, it continues to capture the imagination:
“If I had one or two words that I have to explain it, it’s just the experiential aspect of virtual reality. You’re actually living it. You feel it. You’re experiencing something that actually isn’t real life in your world.”
The way Hwano sees it, people still love talking about it. There have been multiple booms that at times have even felt like fads. Virtual reality has even been talked about in education
“As a computer scientist, VR is brought up a lot,” explains Hwano. “People ask me about it. People love talking about it. People like to ask opinions about what’s going to happen with virtual reality. It’s a very interesting question.”
As exciting as VR technology is, Maria Hwano believes people need to understand where the technology is currently, and what its evolutionary process might look like.
“A long time ago, when the computer keyboard was not a thing, it used to be a one-to-one input. It was on a piano and a sticker was put on it. And a signal was given to do input. It wasn’t until 10 years later that somebody created the keyboard that we take for granted right now. That’s how long it takes to make a keyboard. So you can only imagine how much we don’t know about the potential VR might have.”
Still, the future of virtual reality is full of possibilities, especially when it comes to augmented reality.
“Augmented reality is basically taking what’s around you and – through a phone or some device – and placing something there virtually so you can see it on the phone,” Dan Shefelman says. “It’s an illusion, obviously, but it’s using the environment around you and putting assets in it. . .You’re using the space that you’re in.”

Games do very well when it comes to the notion of affinity space, according to educational scholar James Paul Gee. If you like a game like World of Warcraft and you have a strong interest in it, you can visit a site on the internet dedicated to the game. Many such sites exist. And in many cases, the websites link to each other. On these sites, you can join a group of people who share your interests or passion. There are all sorts of activities you can partake in, explains Gee. You can review, strategize, theory craft, and mod. You can even set up gameplay. You can redesign, make apps – there is a wealth of possibilities!

And soon, this affinity space will be recognised as a physical space. If you’re at a conference or playing in a land party, you may be in a physical space, but you could also be in a virtual one. As Gee explains, an affinity space comprises of a group of people joined together by interest and passion, because you can take that interest as far as you want. It’s a place where everybody can teach and learn. You teach what you know well while also learning from others at every level of expertise.

Through affinity spaces, games are not only offering a portal into a world where you can show off your problem solving and use the tools listed above, but they’re also giving you a common identity. Not an identity as an American, or White, or Black, but as a World of Warcraft player – a new type of identity in the world.

There are now affinity spaces for everything you can imagine. And they are not only a very powerful way of organizing learning, but also organizing membership, belonging, and identity. As we’re learning today, human beings only feel safe to others, and happy with themselves if they feel they belong, matter, and can participate. Unfortunately, lots of people in America don’t believe that what they do really matters anymore, or that they really are participating in their society. This mentality can make people physically ill.

In extreme cases, it can also become dangerous, warns Gee. Sadly, human beings will take participation and meaning wherever they can find it. So if they can’t find it in a good cause, they’ll find it in a bad one. White supremacist groups are affinity spaces. So was ISIS. So are all of the tremendous networks of physical and virtual spaces through which rich people hide their money offshore. They’re well organized and the people involved learn a lot from each other. They’re very powerful and they give a strong sense of belonging. But they can be dangerous to us. So, Gee recommends that anyone designing affinity spaces for good intentions such as video games should learn how they worked in-game, because the game designers understand their game’s community and intentions.

If you’re trying to get into esports and competitive gaming, you want to make sure you have the right equipment. This ensures you can perform the best when the time comes for you to compete.
A lot of folks grow up with this idea that playing video games on their television is the best experience or the most optimal. But according to Malik Forté, a 14-year veteran in the gaming industry, the input rate on most televisions isn’t as good as when you’re playing on a monitor, even if you’re playing on a console.
Malik insists that if you switch over from a tv to a monitor you’ll notice that the latency from the time you press a button on your controller to the time you see it play out on the screen is going to be a lot shorter. You will gain a lot more comfort as a player knowing that as you press buttons on your controller the resulting actions are happening with minimum latency.
Outside of the monitor, the most important thing is to make sure the game settings are comfortable for you. The biggest misconception in competitive gaming is that you must follow the top pros’ settings. None of that is true. You need to do what’s best for you and your gameplay style.
Everybody has something different that works for them. Malik Forté plays shooters without vibration because if he is pressing a button and the controller shakes, it hurts his accuracy. Some people need that vibration as a cue for when things are happening to them within the game world. Preferred settings are really case by case. You need to find what is best for you before you decide when it comes to those small mechanical decisions.

In 2014, Ivan Curtiss began his professional esports career when he and his friends started an amateur pro-am league called My Player Basketball Association (MPBA).

Curtiss first met LT Fairly and Lawrence West, also known as ‘BiggWest’ in the 2K community, while playing in various gaming leagues. Through playing together in various leagues, LT had the idea to start his own league. He brought in Curtiss first, then BiggWest came in later down the line. BiggWest marketed the league, assisting LT in anything he knew about day-to-day operations.

Slowly but surely, the league started picking up a lot of traction. Many of the top players, who played the Jordan Rec Center mode at a time when everybody played with their My Players, formed teams to participate in structured and organized leagues.

Later, in 2016, NBA 2K came out with a pro-am mode. This allowed players to come together and form teams in their own arenas and gymnasiums so they could play against other teams like their own. But it wasn’t until a year later that the MPBA was looked at as the premier pro-am league to play in. At that time, they had received a lot of acclaim and success through the league.

In 2017, the NBA 2K League was announced to the 2K community. It was going to be a professional esport league. In the first draft held, over 80% of the drafted players, especially in the first round, participated in the MPBA. And that is where their notoriety began. Curtiss describes it as their wake-up call that this professional esports event was something that they themselves had created. They got to see the success of players who participated in their league develop from amateurs to professionals.

During that season, they were also awarded the opportunity to work with BucksGG, which is the Milwaukee Bucks affiliate team of the NBA 2K league. Curtiss and LT worked as draft analysts. They helped put together their team and roster in the first season. Afterward, LT assisted them in small roles daily, and Curtiss stayed on as a community manager.

“What is a game?” This is the first question Jessica Hammer asks in her game design class.

Pure definitional questions are not actually that interesting for either game research or game design. “The way I try to help my students think about what games are is that there are different lenses or different frames for defining what is or isn’t a game, and you can pick one or a subset of lenses to talk about games with when you are either designing or studying games,” says Hammer.

Typically, Hammer will start by teaching her students about three different frames of how you can look at what a game is. One of these frames is formal. What are some of the characteristics of an artifact that make it a game, whether or not it’s being played, totally in the abstract?

The second is thinking about it aesthetically. Do people feel playful when they’re playing? What is the experience of play? People will play things that are not games, and people will play games in ways that are not playful.

If you think about professional baseball players, are they feeling super playful when they’re playing the seventh game of the World Series? Probably not.

But we still recognize baseball as a game. So these are two different lenses that can get us to different answers about whether something is a game even when we’re looking at the same experience and trying to analyze it.

The third is thinking about what we culturally understand as a game. There are some agreements as a culture about what a game is.

“When I talk about games, I always say, OK, tell me some games you play. People almost never talk about sports because the word ‘game’,“ says Hammer.

If you asked someone “Is sports a game?”, the answer would be “Yes, of course sports are games.”

However, if you asked someone if they played games, they don’t always think of sports or gambling or other kinds of activities that by both formal and aesthetic experiences would certainly fall into the category of games.

Looking at these cultural understandings explicitly is a third way to ask the question of “what is a game” and come up with an answer that is interesting.

As a game designer, someone can’t tell you what the right frame is for your work. But as current-and-future game designers, you are going to have to come up with a frame for your work that you find productive for making incredible experiences for players.

Think about what something being a game means to you, and worry less about some kind of categorical definition that you might spit back on an exam. Because in the real world of games, nobody cares.

There has been a lot of interest coming from schools. The innovative schools in the early days recognized that if they offered esports programs, they’d be wilfully attracting some of the brightest STEM students on the planet.

STEM is a big part of gaming. Engineering is a big part of gaming. And computer science is definitely a big part of gaming. Some of the brightest kids on the planet are coming into STEM programs because of gaming, and the wise schools recognized early on that they could use esports for recruiting.

In that regard, Wim Stocks helps schools that may not have seen that very early tide coming in. They’ve aided them in building their curriculum. They’ve helped schools create the notion of a career by offering a curriculum, training, and learning opportunities for careers in esports and venue design.

Wim Stocks also had a hand in helping a college cultivate local sponsorships to help support the building and funding for an esports program on that particular campus. But they are not just the intercollegiate competitor, enabler, and league. They are also helping schools build far bigger footprints in esports than they might have been able to do independently. So much of esports is focused on competition.

Let’s use an analogy. First, think about the business of traditional sports. Then, think about all the jobs surrounding traditional sports: production, broadcasting, stadium design, agents, analysis, marketing, advertising, and sponsorship. Those same dynamics exist in esports.

One of the schools that Wim Stocks have a close association with has identified that there are 87 different skill sets that they can base their curriculum around to help students who want to be involved in esports build their knowledge, education, and experience. By no means is this a small opportunity. They also work very closely with production companies. There are very specific things to esports that don’t come into play from any other sports or any other experiences. And so that’s a powerful dynamic for esports, the marketing of esports.