Learning Leveled Up - Exploring Esports and E-Gaming in Education

00:00.81

Sean Strathy

Greetings everyone! This is another exciting edition of the Tech In EdTech podcast where we discuss technology that powers education and improves learning for all. In today's episode, we'll be discussing the rise of esports, its place in academics, and what the future might hold. I'm your podcast host Sean Strathy from Magic EdTech and our guest for this special edition podcast is Mark Deppe, Director of esports at the University of California, Irvine. Mark, thanks for joining me, and welcome to today's show.

00:38.91

Mark Deppe

Thank you so much. I'm happy to have this conversation.

00:44.15

Sean Strathy

Great. So um, can you give us some background about yourself and how you got into your current role?

00:50.93

Mark Deppe

Yeah, I lead UCI’s sports program. We launched our program in the fall of 2016 so we are in our eighth year right now and essentially in the summer of 2015 we just started exploring this idea around esports. We saw the growing ecosystem of competitive and of teams, we saw UCI's club had been super successive, super successful competitively. We saw Robert Morris University the first school to ever kind of adopt scholarships at a university, had just started their program the year before and our student our school had just been ranked the number one school for gamers by College Magazine and so for me, we just saw a lot of interesting data points to be connected and so we just started exploring this idea around whether tier one research university would be able to ah support this idea of giving scholarships to kids who play a lot of video games and obviously we were very successful. We found a ton of support, both from campus, leadership, faculty, staff, and students, and also from the corporate world, and found some great partners and sponsors who were helpful, helped us make this cost neutral certainly at the beginning. So um, yeah I identify myself as a higher ed entrepreneur someone that built something that was not expected to be built or not needed to be built but built it nonetheless. And I've been doing it for 8 years and it's been an incredible journey so far.

02:26.56

Sean Strathy

That's great and before we get a little further into the specifics of what everything looks like today. Since you've been doing it for 8 years, can you just tell me a little bit about that journey like where did you guys start off at and where are you you guys today? And maybe then we can jump off on our conversation from there.

02:44.68

Mark Deppe

Yeah, it's been a very very interesting journey. So starting in 2016 that was, we got, we had several years of a lot of excitement and growth in the world of esports. A lot of investment happened in the first few years of our program, so our program grew we had a huge donor supporting both our program and also some scholastic and k through-12 efforts we were leading at the time. Then we had our pandemic phase when everyone went home and who knew what higher ed was gonna look like. Esports could still happen online but you lost that in-person engagement that we had made such large investments into and now we're in the post-pandemic world where the ah technology space is going through some growing pains, esports is going through some growing pains at the professional level and so the journey's been all over the place. But we're bigger and stronger than we were when we first started. We've got great coaches and athletes and staff, and yeah, it's hard to take a snapshot today and compare it to anything else we've done because it depends on the context of the world. But I think we've got a really good identity about what we want to do what we want to be and we've got the campus buy-in and support. So, I'm really proud of where we are.

04:09.12

Sean Strathy

That's awesome. Um, I think you know when I was looking at the history of esports. It kind of goes back to the early 2000s. You know it's been international from the beginning and obviously there's a lot of money that's being pumped into it from advertisers, sponsors and everything there's money to be earned and won but can you tell me a little bit about esports in education and what scholastic esports look like?

04:36.52

Mark Deppe

Yeah, absolutely. It's a few different models I would say there are I think the biggest group of universities that are doing. I'll talk about higher ed first, most universities are looking at esports as a way to drive enrollment. Higher Ed's going through this shift right now where a lot of the smaller liberal arts private universities are having to compete and struggle to keep students engaged in coming to their school. So esports has been a way to draw attention. It's been a way to offer a unique program to a lot of folks who care about it and I would say that's what the majority of scholastic esports looks like. We are at a very different university at a big public state institution that has no enrollment challenges. For us, it's really about competing amongst the many incredible priorities and opportunities the campus has um and so our program has to align deeply with the academic mission. So we have 4 pillars of our program that we hold really tightly onto. So first is, we compete so we have scholarships, paid coaches, we're able to recruit athletes to compete for our teams, and League of Legends, Overwatch 2, and Valorant. Our second pillar which is maybe unique to us, of all schools in the world but we have a research pillar so we are tasked with supporting faculty research, graduate student research, undergraduate research. We have held and thrown our own academic conferences with peer-reviewed material, just had a symposium this last fall to talk about interesting topics in esports and we're actually working and leading a research study with some physicians to come out and collect some passive health data and look at esports performance specifically related to sleep, so that's very unique to us. Our third pillar’s around community building, so connecting all the many people who care about games both on campus and off campus. And lastly, we learned after our first year we've had a unique opportunity to help with career development and lifelong learning of our students and so that's now an active pillar for us. So, helping with job boards and internships making sure all our students have resumes ready to go, and helping them articulate how they're experiencing our program and whether you're a competitor or student staff member how that articulates and translates into the real world. So that's what it looks like in higher ed at UCI specifically but it's kind of interesting to see how every school rolls it out.

07:09.40

Sean Strathy

So I want to ask you a question about k12 too but before I get to that. I think you touched upon a couple of points that are really important and I saw some interesting things that you had said previously. Um, first of all, enrollment challenges, right? every higher ed institution especially small 4 our-year schools liberal arts schools are really struggling to get students in the door to start and then things like completion rates are you know a major challenge for a lot. I think I saw something that you said previously about how your students um their completion rates are higher than that of the general population is that true? Can you comment on that?

07:53.30

Mark Deppe

Yeah, we're old enough now we can look back at 5-year graduation rates, and for our first two classes, I haven't done it for the third class yet. But our first two classes, they had a 94% five-year graduation rate. So if you showed up on campus at any point with our program and you're an athlete with us. There was a 94% chance you were gonna graduate, and so yeah, that is infinitely higher than our peers. Some there's a lot of turnover and scholastic esports, collegiate esports, people might hop universities, go in and out of the professional scene. But we're really unique in that we just have this really high graduation rate and the university's graduation rates like 83 % so UCI is very strong. That's very good. 

08:38.65

Sean Strathy

That's very good. Yeah.

08:44.31

Mark Deppe

For those people that don't know about graduation rates I mean their school is in the 20s and 30s and so yeah, that is an important metric for our leadership and certainly for schools like UCI.

08:50.59

Sean Strathy

That's awesome and then you brought you touched upon the research element that's pretty unique to your program. I'm curious like, if you had any examples of some interesting research research projects that are coming out of your program in conjunction with the faculty and students that you might be able to share with us.

09:08.41

Mark Deppe

Yeah, several come to mind one of my favorites that I actually participated in as a subject we have some neurobiology and memory specialists at UCI and they were testing. They do a lot of stuff around memory and learning and they had people exploring and building in Minecraft and they kind of compared before and after results and turns out that 3 immersive spaces, virtual spaces your brain treats them very similarly to the 3D real world and so when you're exploring in a game like Minecraft. It's stimulating your hippocampus and those memory spaces and so um, yeah, your spatial memory improves and it's interesting that it's not just playing the game you have to actually have to explore and so the more you explore the stronger the benefits. If you're just building on a flat plane in Minecraft. You don't see the same benefits but that was one interesting study is just the exploration aspect and just showing that your brain is really stimulated by video games and now they're using that similar kind of philosophy to help older folks kind of keep their brains functioning and to treat kind of neurocognitive challenges. The second one that was really interesting was talking about communication in League of Legends specifically, We had a graduate student coding people's voice communications to kind of categorize them as timely, or helpful, or supportive, or singular, or team-oriented, and it was really interesting to see how that improved over time as people had a team experience and team environment. So you got a little coaching, you became a better communicator and so I think it's just really cool to see even though a lot of people may look from the outside not understand what learning and what growing is happening in video games. I think we're starting to learn and the research is certainly showing that important cool stuff happens in games and if you are looking in the right places you'll you'll see some of those things.

11:18.21

Sean Strathy

So um, that actually touches upon one of the other things that I found interesting about your program that I think some other of your peers in the higher ed space their programs are geared towards preparing people to be professional gamers. Whereas I think your program is a little bit different. Can you um touch upon that and how you know some of these aspects might be leading people to be having successful careers outside of being a professional gamer?

11:46.65

Mark Deppe

Absolutely,  I was like college esports is in a weird place like we're both getting people who aspire to be pros and we get some of those too. Um, we're actually getting more that have kind of already explored the professional world and are ready to advance their career and kind of set themselves up for long-term success. There's a lot of research showing that a college degree is really valuable and pays dividends far into the future and so UCI is this unique intersection of elite competition. Our teams are all feared and respected in the collegiate world. Um, but our degrees are incredibly valuable and our graduation rates are high and so we have this really cool group of students we attract who are both very committed to school and academics and also still want to compete at a high level. They make they may have lost their drive to play professionally. They may have retired from professional play but they still find that competitive drive really compelling and they still like being on a team and so with that unique mix of those two factors. And so as the professional scene right now is kind of going through some shrinkage. Collegiate esports is becoming really really close to the professional scene it is now probably the best tier-two ecosystem. So just below the professional leagues’ collegiate's gonna pry in my opinion, be the, fill the gap right before the professional league. So anyways, that that's kind of our position is mixing those two of high level of both. But for me, it's really important that our students are committed to earning a degree certainly some might leave early to explore professional opportunities that has happened but um, we're really hopeful that they see UCI as an important step in their life journey to whatever they want to do and so yeah, we have people who have gone to medical school, that are going to law school, getting PHDs, a lot of computer science. So computer scientists and engineers graduating from our program and so, yeah, we have people getting hired right out of our program because they folks want people who understand games in youth culture and the content creation elements and all those different aspects to work for the company. So we're we're pretty happy with the kind of the place we're finding for ourselves in the world.

14:07.25

Sean Strathy

That's great. That's interesting. What are some of the challenges that you face with launching an esports program in schools and maybe what advice might you give to people who are just getting started?

14:16.22

Mark Deppe

Well, one challenge you probably wouldn't expect to hear is but we whine about it a lot in my peer groups is there's no regulation or standard setting. So while we graduate all our students and have grade requirements and eligibility requirements. Some schools out there and these days are some of the most successful teams are just kind of churning through players. They might like our seasons will start in January, February, and some of these schools won't even have their teams there, at their school ever. But they won't even have their roster identified till like February and they might be gone by May and so for us our students often feel like they're not competing against college kids because they're having to deal with roommates and living in the dorms and relationship challenges and financial aid and grades and changing majors and and a lot of the people competing at the highest level in colleges. They just don't have those same challenges they might be remote student, might be there for three months, and they might be gone after that. And so that's one of my challenges that might be interesting. But in terms of recommendations, a lot of advice for folks, one is to talk to your students and find out what they want. When we first started our program, we surveyed our campus. There was a ton of support behind the idea which helped administration feel confident in investing in us. But um, understanding what games people want to play, what kind of resources the gaming community wants. It could be just supporting the club and giving them a space. It could be scholarships but it's interesting that the more the university engages that the the more, I guess the less freedom the students have and the less agency they have so there have been times over the years where our club students or students that are self-organizing may have felt a little disappointment because we had taken over some of the competitive aspects. They were no longer in charge of the teams and some of those things and there's certainly some confusion between the club and our program a lot of external folks tag the wrong group on social media and so I think engaging in a conversation with your students is a great first step to understand the potential opportunity and what's gonna be most supported on campus.

16:43.10

Sean Strathy

So you touched upon a few really interesting points there on the first element, on the lack of regulation or standards. Um, I've been I was reading up a this is a problem not just at the collegiate level but at the professional level as well. There's not really a governing body, regulations, or anything. And at the collegiate level, I imagine like you like you brought u, It creates a lot of confusion like I don't think there's too many students who are confused about you know intramural basketball but you know, and the NCAA team that the college has but at your level with this sport. Do you see esports kind of entering into something like the NCAA program or do you think it'll always remain separate? What's your what are your thoughts on that?

17:29.94

Mark Deppe

We certainly need something like it. Um, I think right now everyone doesn't think the NCAA is the group that will do it. They have turned down the opportunity to engage with it a few years ago and also I think that like traditional sports look just so messy from where I sit in terms of conference realignment that name image likeness challenges. They're having amateurism pretty much gone in college athletics at least the revenue sports and so yeah I mean we need some sort of self-governance clearly. Right now the people running collegiate esports are the tournament organizers. The people who throw the tournament set the rules and oftentimes those are young people, could be private companies, oftentimes as game companies who own the intellectual property. And so everyone's got different motivations and understanding of the college environment and experience. I don't think anyone's appropriate to set standards for collegiate esports outside of higher education leaders like that needs to be something that campuses agree to create themselves and so actually we're working with a bunch of presidents and chancellors. Our chancellor is actually leading conversations with other presidents and chancellors of universities to make sure this is on their radar. They all seem very interested in the topic of esports. So we're providing some information to them and we're trying to get some feedback from them on what challenges that they face, they think we should tackle, what priorities and values we should try to insert because like I said it's pretty murky right now people call it the Wild West. I like to call it The lord of the Flies because it’s a bunch of young people running around without any life perspective ah ruling the world. So, yeah, I think those are some of our issues right now.

19:25.63

Sean Strathy

I think that's great. Um, now I think in higher education, especially over the last I would say 5 to 10 years accessibility and reaching diverse student populations and making sure that inclusivity is a part of the institution's mission has become you know top of mind for almost every institution, right. How are you guys ensuring that esports are accessible to people of diverse abilities as well as to people from diverse range, you know, diverse backgrounds? Um, I was reading you know for example in the professional world there's geography constraints, right? because there's so much internet infrastructure that needs to go into things like esports is really popular where they have that infrastructure and it hasn't quite reached the areas where it hasn't yet. So how are you guys addressing that?

20:25.29

Mark Deppe

Yeah, I'll so first start by saying like kind of inclusive excellence is a top priority for our university so it is a frequent topic of discussion at UC Irvine and every department is trying to think about it certainly esports are. It's interesting that because we're not an NCAA sport and I'll go into the weeds a little bit here. We are not recognized as athletics or a sport by the US Department of Education and what that means is we are not subjected to the same kind of requirements and abilities that folks are regarding Title 9 so Title 9 you probably are aware is a piece of legislation I think from the 70s and we're 50 years out of Title 9 these days. Essentially means people that get federal financial aid or federal funding need to not discriminate based on lots of categories. But for sports specifically, they ask for, they require a gender balance between men and women equal resources, equal opportunities, and so that's a rule for traditional sports. And you also have a lot of rules around not discriminating based on any protected category and actually gender's one of them. So outside of sports folks are not able to factor in someone's protected category when they're recruiting or creating teams or creating resources that is different in traditional sports. You have to do that actually, right? So you have to have an equal amount of scholarship dollars, opportunities, all that stuff for men and women, so, because esports is not labeled as that for the Department of Education. Um, we are unable to recruit people based on any particular category and gender obviously is one of those. So even if I wanted to have an all-women's team and we would certainly love the opportunity to have equal representation or a very diverse group. It is illegal for us to do that. So we, we cannot have a camp just for women we have a girls in gaming camp but it's open to everybody. So I just wanted to kind of lay that foundation of there's a difference between what we would like to see and create and the levers to just kind of click it on don't exist for us and we would get in a lot of trouble if we were to do something like that. But let's talk about what we are doing so our campus identified as you suggested earlier like if you look at esports right now you would not, you would not maybe describe it as incredibly diverse certainly on the the gender aspect almost every professional player on the top stages are male. Certainly, there's women leagues, there's co-ed leagues and there's certainly some women who have kind of made it through those barriers and challenges and made it onto the top stages but those success stories are few and far between. So we assembled ah a task force back in 2017 led by some faculty. We had our legal counsel on there, our Title 9 officer, we had community members um all the different folks who could kind of weigh in on this topic and we created a working document for what we should and can do based on legal requirements, obligations, opportunities, funding all those different things and so yeah, we have like a 15-page document on our website you can check it out. But we've done all the things that we're able to so we talk about having a code. Well, we have a code of conduct. We address kinds of hostility, and toxicity, and harassment. We do have a Girls in Gaming camp for all people but to celebrate women in gaming to create a community for them. Um, and so yeah, the list of things that we have tried to do are all, it's a long list but they're all kind of small interventions that haven't quite made the impact. It's a long pipeline to get superstar athletes from early age to college team and in the professional world and so we're still working with the pipeline. We need the k12, k through 12 folks, and young people to help out. We need the online hostility towards women and people who some people don't identify as stereotypical gamers to like be reduced, so there's a lot of factors that are gonna go into making esports more accessible more more accommodating. I will say even though our teams are elite. We have had success the last 4 years. We've had women on our team, we are recruiting our first woman ever for one of our teams right now. We've never offered a scholarship to one in the past and we're not doing it because she's a woman but she's just that good and so we're doing that. So, it's interesting about what we're able to do what we have to do. So there's this need for diversity but there's also a lack of tools to just implement it if we wanted to. So that's a very long-winded answer I could keep going on but I think I'll stop there.

25:24.41

Sean Strathy

Nah, that was really insightful, and thank you for that. You just touched upon the pipeline of students coming in right and that kind of led me to a question that I had earlier and I forgot to ask which was around esports in k12, right? We talked about kind of the esports and the higher ed I think for most higher education professionals who would be listening to this podcast the enrollment and retention question that comes up all the time that you know that's enough of a reason to invest in something like this at a program at your institution but can you tell me a little bit about your experience with working with k12 schools and um, what advice you might give them like what a K12 what do you typically see at a k 12 school that they need to set up in order to get this up and running. And I know that was like five questions in there in one but please.

26:12.91

Mark Deppe

Yeah, well let me first start with an answer to a question you didn't ask but essentially what's the value of esports in k12 but I will say um, one challenge that they're facing so higher ed's dealing with enrollment and retention. K12 is often dealing with lack of lack of engagement. Students who feel disconnected from k12 they may not love reading Shakespeare. They're not on the football team, and so how do you connect with these people who are probably very smart but just don't care about anything that's happening during the school day? And it turns out almost every young person plays video games. It's in the high 90% of people who play games regularly per week and so you have this thing that is very important to young people and so it's a tool you can use to do lots of cool things and so by having it esports program having a video game club suddenly so many students who care deeply about this thing and who care very little about almost everything that's happening at a school finally find a connecting point where their passion their hobby is now part of the school experience and so there's really powerful things that happen grades go up, attendance goes up, affinity for school goes up, and so anyways, there's lots of great reasons to do it but that's one of the top ones I've seen. In terms of what do they need I mentioned talking to students. That's an important thing to do. But most schools start with a club so they start with a club that's usually an extracurricular activity after school, could have some game design element to it. Oftentimes, It's club teams competing and so you need a space, so, identifying a space having computers that can play the game sometimes. That's a barrier almost every school has computers but are they good enough for the game you want to play that could be a little bit of a challenge but often schools are able to solve those challenges, your IT folks need to be on board. There's some ports and some access that you need to open up. Ten years ago schools were not interested or IT administrators were not interested in opening up ports for video gameplay but that has certainly changed um and so I would say um, recommendations are to start a club, I think having some teams that are competing with a little bit of coaching. There's a really powerful interaction interventions that happen when there's a coach involved. It's now someone that people look up to that is a subject matter expert on something they care about that's helping them get better still learning communication and teamwork and tenacity and hard work and all those different things. And then when you build the team you can also build a lot of the stuff around it so you can build like someone to do social media, for the team graphic design to talk about upcoming matches and results, you can do the content creation on the broadcast side so some streaming and commentating. So my recommendation, start with the club, find out what logistics you need to make that happen from a space to a teacher slash advisor and the IT elements that you need to unlock all of that, and let the students kind of dictate where it goes from there. But I think I think folks see very powerful results and I think if anything's going to drive esports forward in this kind of challenging economic moment. It's going to be education right now because while the viewership may not be there and maybe the advertising dollars haven't been, haven't lived up to what they've I guess haven't lived up the investment. The return has not made been on the investment for the advertising I think the return is there for the investment of educators in terms of engaging students and creating a lot of value there. So that's what I'm seeing and those are my recommendations for k12.

30:00.81

Sean Strathy

Well, I think anybody that's passionate about education at any level is going to bring up the fact that you know we have a mental health crisis in this country, especially with young people, social emotional learning is incredibly important and there's major gaps in students ability. In those areas especially at the K-12 coming out of the pandemic and everything. So um, you know, all of those could be addressed in some form using esports. So that's really interesting and I think that's a great place to kind of to kind of leave our conversation but before we wrap up. Just any last-minute things that you want to share with the audience before we wrap up?

30:41.82

Mark Deppe

You know I think the world's getting a little bit more. It's catching on to esports think it's aware of esports, I think every high school's talked about it, every university has talked about it. I think people are still learning about it. So for those of you that are just learning about esports, I think be open-minded to it. I think like I said earlier, there's really great learning that can happen and if if parents and educators put some structure around it. Certainly, you want your students to do their homework before they start playing games. There's certainly a way you can use video games in this really important thing to young people to really capture their attention to kind of create the behaviors that you're looking for as they're learning and growing. And so I would just consider, suggest everyone be open-minded to this idea and do a little bit of research and listen to some of the stories. The folks have been involved because It's really heartening to hear those aha moments or students who turn it around their high school experience because they find something they're passionate about or they find a group they belong to and so that's my recommendation and request for folks is just to be open-minded and look into it a little bit.

31:56.47

Sean Strathy

Well, Mark, this has been super enlightening for me and I want to thank you for joining us on the Tech in EdTech podcast, and thanks for your time. 

32:07.72

Mark Deppe

It's been my pleasure. Have a good one.

32:08.72

Alrighty you too.