Page 5 - MidWeek Kauai - Nov 16, 2022

Playing To Win In The Esports Universe
FROM PAGE 4
NOVEMBER 16, 2022 KAUA‘I MIDWEEK 5
Overwatch Opportunity Blizzard Entertainment, one of the world’s largest vid- eo game companies, wanted to hold its Overwatch finals at
leagues (in North America) for competitions.
“But then we started win- ning games here,” he says. “That was a relief. That showed we could hold our own. We were expecting the worst, but I think Overwatch had one of its best seasons last year because of us.”
big arenas in Asia and North America.
Kauweloa and UH are up for Esports Awards. The prestigious prizes — think Grammys for gamers — recognize the industry’s best. Kauweloa is nominated for Esports College Ambassador of the Year and UH has a chance to unseat Maryville University as Esports Collegiate Program of the Year.
This is a rematch for Kauweloa and UH, as they’d been nominated last year, but fell just short of bringing home the titles.
Voting is open to the public through Nov. 30 at esportsawards.com/vote.
The awards ceremony takes place Dec. 13 at Resorts World Las Vegas.
UH-Mānoa.
“We hosted Overwatch fi-
The problem was getting good ping — that’s industry slang for network latency, or the time it takes to transmit electronic data from a com- puter to an Internet server and back. Generally, the closer the computer to the server, the better the ping.
But for Kauweloa and UH Esports, the momentum con- tinues.
nals here five times last year,” Kauweloa says. “They came here five times. They brought professional teams from North America.”
The Overwatch game server was in Japan, which is closer to South Korea and China than North America. That meant the East teams would have a faster connection and an un- fair advantage. To even the playing field, OWL officials had to get the North Ameri- cans closer to Asia — without traveling internationally.
Twenty UH students vol- unteered as interns, helping OWL run a global operation connecting players in Hawai‘i and Asia with shoutcasters in California to deliver enter- tainment to viewers around the world.
In September, they scored a visit from the head of Goo- gle’s Gaming and Strategy Initiatives. Moonlit Beshimov held an informal talk to high- light the potential of esports beyond competition.
Even for Kauweloa, a big believer in UH Esports, this boggled the mind.
“Most people think of gam- ing as not something you do for a living (but) it’s a leading industry for technology,” she told UH officials at the time. “It’s a huge market with a lot of innovation coming out of it. That angle is incredible be- sides the actual achievement of being a ranked esports team in the nation.”
“For us to be selected by this major gaming publisher to hold competitions was un- real,” he says.
In addition to the invaluable experience, they also got col- lege credits and shout-outs on OWL’s social media channels.
we need to figure out ways to make that happen.
seriously the gaming indus- try. We’ve already made huge strides in doing this. We’re ac- tually out in the front among universities that do this.”
Phone: 808.245.6369
It was the esports equivalent of NFL or NBA teams play- ing season games in Hawai‘i, albeit without a stadium and crowds due to the pandemic.
They landed on Hawai‘i as the perfect middle ground and reached an agreement with UH.
OWL returned to UH for its 2022 season finals earlier this year, and one of its North American teams, the LA Glad- iators, won the league’s Mid- season Madness tournament from UH.
That’s the direction Kau- weloa sees for UH Esports, too.
“Honestly, I believe this is the future of UH,” he adds. “(People) will have to take
Like Valorant, Overwatch is a wildly popular multi-play- er first-person shooter game. Because of COVID-19, the Overwatch League — the game’s professional players’ league, also known as OWL — needed to virtually connect its East leagues (in China and South Korea) with its West
Still, Kauweloa worried something would go wrong. What if the ping wasn’t good enough after all? Would the pros blame UH? Those fears weren’t alleviated when the teams from the East won the first few games.
Ahead Of The Game
“The next step is to create more public-private partner- ships with industry,” he says. “My goal is to make sure students are interfacing with industry and able to get jobs. Students have a deep desire to be in this industry and I think
It remains to be seen how the UH-OWL relationship evolves post-pandemic. With travel restrictions lifted, the league could return to the
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