Loc Tran is a big man on campus at San Jose State University in Northern California.
“A lot of people stop me when I’m walking,” said Tran, a 19-year-old sophomore, who speaks in quick and confident bursts. “They congratulate me.”
But Tran is not a star on the football team, or a leader in student government. He is a top player on the school’s competitive video game team, helping San Jose State claw its way to victory in June over California State University, Fullerton, in a tournament watched online by nearly 90,000 people.
Video game competitions, also known as e-sports, have taken off on campuses across the country. More than 10,000 students now play in the biggest college league, 4,400 more than last year and 4,600 more than the number of men who play on Division I college basketball teams.
The stakes keep climbing, too: Winning a big tournament can sometimes earn players several years’ worth of tuition money. And in a possible sign of the future, the athletic department of Robert Morris University-Illinois in Chicago created an official video game team this fall, offering the same sort of scholarships given to athletes playing soccer, football and ice hockey.
While the college e-sports craze started as a grass-roots effort, game makers have quickly swooped in, propelling the sharp rise in interest. The companies now underwrite scholarship prizes, offer team banners and provide organizational support.
“Game developers are really waking up to the publicity power of these communities,” said T.L. Taylor, an associate professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has studied e-sports.
Colleges, meanwhile, are often standing at arm’s length. While e-sports groups are often sanctioned clubs, receiving practice spaces from their schools, the leagues and competitions have few of the student regulations governing traditional college sports, like grade-point minimums or time limits on practicing.
But it is unclear whether becoming a more formal part of a school would help or harm the growth of college e-sports. The time commitment required for serious competitive gaming could lead to concerns about whether e-sports leave enough time for academic study.
For game developers, however, the lure of being on campus is simple.
“We think that’s where a lot of our players are,” said Michael Morhaime, the chief executive and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, which develops and publishes entertainment software.
