Page 4 - MidWeek Kauai - Nov 16, 2022

4 KAUA‘I MIDWEEK NOVEMBER 16, 2022
STORY BY
KAREN IWAMOTO
PHOTO BY
ANTHONY CONSILLIO
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A t its most basic, esports are video games played com- petitively in front of spectators. Thirty years ago, that could have meant a gathering of friends at an arcade. Now it entails all the spectacle of a major sport- ing event — arenas, live music, la- ser lights and thousands of cheer- ing fans. Today’s pro gamers play on stage for million-dollar prizes as towering LED screens broad-
That’s a lot for some folks to wrap their minds around.
(Top) Sky Kauweloa gathers with his UH Esports varsity team members, from left, Dylan Kira, Tracy Lee, Kylin Daniel, Gabriel Harp and Zach Trebbien. (Above) UH Esports students help Overwatch League officials prep computers ahead of the league’s Midseason Madness tournament earlier this year. PHOTO COURTESY UH ESPORTS
cast their moves to the crowd. These tournaments are streamed on YouTube and Twitch. Shoutcasters (the esports equiva- lent of sportscasters) deliver play- by-plays for millions of fans tun-
Serious Contender
ing in from around the world. “Esports has transitioned into a media industry,” says Sky Kau- weloa, director of the University of Hawai‘i Esports program. “The gaming industry is huge, bigger than the movie (and) music in- dustries combined. Many people don’t realize that. It’s a $200 bil- lion industry globally. (Esports) is much smaller than $200 billion but it’s something that drives the
It’s Kauweloa’s job to get the broaderpublictotakeitseriously. Under his guidance UH Esports has gone from a fledgling club to a major contender in the college esports space — in just four years. It boasts an internationally ranked team and hosted tournaments for a professional esports league.
rea, I turned on the TV and saw a StarCraft match,” he says. “The match was in an arena and the players wore uniforms. There was cheering, the fans had thun- dersticks. That was surprising.”
decided to make it the focus of his research.
Texas A&M last year to capture the Valorant Fall Brawl title. This year, it beat seven universities in the Asia-Pacific region to win the Association of Pacific Rim Uni- versities’ Rampage Invitational Tournament — clinching an in- ternational title. Valorant is one of the most popular multi-player first-person shooter games on the market.
video game industry heavily.”
“When I came to South Ko-
UH’s Valorant team is now ranked No. 4 among colleges and universities nationwide, having beat University of Arizona and
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“Esports sits in this kind of bizarre realm of tremendous pop- ularity but unbelievability,” he says. “Like, what is this? How can this be popular? The kids who are involved in this are committed, but for the (general) audience it still remains a bizarre thing.”
But before all that happened, Kauweloa had to take gaming se- riously himself.
Still, he was seeing a lot of new and surprising things in the coun- try that would bring the world Gangnam Style and BTS, so he didn’t think too much about it.
“For me it was not enough to just read it. I had to take part in it,” he says. “I wanted to create (an esports program) because I saw other schools had something like that and I thought, why not here? Why not UH?”
As a kid growing up in Hawai‘i and California in the ’90s, video games were a fun pastime he took for granted. Then, in the early 2000s, he moved to South Korea to teach English.
It wasn’t until years later, when he was back in the U.S. pursuing a Ph.D. at UH, that he began to take a closer look at the industry — and
The response so far, he says, has been amazing.
Those wins were milestones for the program, but an even big- ger opportunity arose.
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Sky Kauweloa and University of Hawai‘i Esports are leveling up — and industry leaders are taking notice.