 All right, we're back. This is ThinkTech Tech Talks. Now we're doing it at 3 o'clock because that's why we're doing it at 3 o'clock. All right, and we have Cody Down. He's a CIO of HPU. We have Dominique Bouchang. She is the campus recreational director of HPU. We have the eSports Arena Manager, Reed Pasatiempo, all from HPU. Our show today is about HPU. It's called Winning Big at the HPU eSports Arena. Today we're going to teach you about eSports in Hawaii and elsewhere. The tagline is, the first collegiate eSports Arena in the state of Hawaii opened in February. Wow. You guys must be excited. Tell me the level of excitement. You first, Cody. Well, it's been a long time coming. We spent a year plus getting it ready, and so me and my team, IT, worked pretty closely with Dominique's folks over in athletics and put a lot of effort into forming a team, getting them playing well, working with sponsors and other locals in the community to help build the arena out. And so my guys especially spent so much extra time researching the right equipment to use, figuring out the best configurations for the arena, ordering the equipment, trying to get the best deals we could, and then being creative with our audiovisual in the arena. So when it launched, we did a soft opening in November where we just opened the doors and let people kick the tires, and then we did a full-blown launch in February where we had members of the community, our board of directors. We had high school teams come and play. We had a mini tournament with four local high schools. So it was great. It was a lot of fun, and ever since then we've just been trying to do more and more and keep it running, and I think we're all real happy with where it's at right now. Yeah. Dominique, your role in all of this? So I am the supervisor, advisor for our eSports team, which right now we have a team for League of Legends that plays in the Riot Games Campus series, and we just finished our first season towards the bottom, but we're offering scholarships for the upcoming semester, and we're really excited to see who our team finishes next semester. So this is like real sports. Teams, leagues, you have winners and losers and all that. We do. It's much more like real sports or traditional sports than people may think. Okay. Reed, what is eSports and what is the arena? And then we're gonna look at pictures, so you better give us a good word picture right now. I think the easiest way to say it is eSports is competitive gaming, and usually deals with multiplayer video games. So you're competing against possibly one, possibly five, possibly even ten other competitors around at the same time. And then as far as the arena itself, the arena gives them a place to come together to be able to play. It also gives them a facility where a lot of gamers, they don't usually get out of their house, let's just say, all that often, but the arena gives them a place to come where they can communicate together, work out strategies, build friendships, and just be able to communicate as a team. Yeah, okay. Well, let's take some pictures and sort of flesh this out a little bit. Why don't you describe the pictures, Cody, and we'll sort of get a handle on what it looks like. By the way, I have to proceed this by saying I've been there, and it's really beautiful, and it's brand new, and it's got great equipment, you know. It's like our studio in its own way. All right, Cody, what have we got? So this is a picture from our grand opening. You'll see we've got a lot of people there. There's a couple high schools, one on each side of the table there, competing against each other. There's five players on each team in League of Legends, and you can see that the TVs above there are broadcasting the games that they're playing. We have people around kind of watching. We also, you can't see in this picture, but we have some seating, casual seating, so people can kind of sit back and watch the games. On that far wall, you'll see, I guess, four monitors there, and those are our console machines. So we have Xbox, PlayStation, Wii, Switch. Is that it? Yeah. So we have several different console machines up there. So you have two groups of them. I can see one group is here on the right, and then in the back, sort of around the corner there, around the other side of that wall, you have another bank of them. Right. There's a bank of 12 here, the slightly higher end systems, and then around the corner, there's another bank of 12, and then we have, like I said, the four console stations in the back there, and then to the right in the corner there, we have a virtual reality station. It's a HTC Vive. And then on the other corner, the left corner, you can't see it on this picture, but we have another VR system, and that's the Oculus Rift. So this was, this was what I just, your February opening, or before that? I mean, people are obviously very engaged in what's going on. Now these are spectators, came around. So friends and family. This is, looks like Damien right here. We had Damien Roosevelt, St. Louis, and... Marinal. Marinal, playing this little mini tournament. And so you have, you have the players, their families, their friends are all there, plus members of the community, members of the HPU community that helped build it. So let's see some more pictures. Okay, what's, oh, this is, I can see the game is on that big, yeah. So this is a shot of just one of our console systems, and some people playing there, and other people watching. Yeah, where's the food? I know there's food there. There is food there now. At this point, there wasn't. Okay. So we do, we do sell food as a fundraiser up front. Okay. So these are just random shots here. You can see both sides, the two teams competing against each other. I'm not sure. They all look so intense. Here's our president on the left, and Dominique on the right there, handing out our official eSports jerseys to our team. So we have an A team, the varsity team, you could say, who all got these jerseys as part of the opening ceremony. Treasured item, eh? Yeah. Okay, well, let's take a moment and ask Dominique, you know, how do these teams work? How do they work? I mean, we compete against other colleges all around the country. And, you know, it's really nice because unlike other traditional sports, we can compete without traveling, which is a huge advantage being here in Hawaii. So we compete, there's brackets, there's regions, and we compete against each other and try to make it to the championships, just like any other sport. Oh, wow. So you have a team, or you have multiple teams at HPU, yeah? Yeah, so we have two teams right now for League of Legends. We have an A team and a B team, and I hope as, you know, the arena grows, we'll have more teams and hopefully more competitive gaming and clubs that'll come up. So a club can also field a team. So for example, you know, high school or another college anywhere in the state, I suppose. Anybody can get down to your arena, I suppose. Absolutely. Can participate. So it's not just HPU's teams. No, yeah, we're open to the community. We encourage people to come down and check us out and play with our team. We're open every day of the week, open late. So we really want to be, you know, part of the community. We want high school kids, junior high school kids to come down there with their teams, practice alongside our team members. You know, hopefully eventually they decide they might want to come to HPU. That would be great. If not, you know, if not, you know, we wish them well, but it's a good learning experience. Dominique might want to talk a little bit about, you know, how she's seen some of our players grow in how they relate to each other and how they lead teams. I mean, she's seen it a lot. And so she may want to talk briefly about sportsmanship, isn't it? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I saw tremendous strides in a few of our players from the very beginning when we started from a club from day one to, you know, now where they're in leadership roles and they're taking over rooms. They're talking to cameras. They're at the head of, you know, this amazing, tremendous thing that HPU's built. So they've handled it very well. And I've seen, you know, great strides in academics, taking so more seriously. There's a relationship there. Yeah, so that they can compete. We do have a minimum grade point average that they have to maintain. So I mean, it's a balance. And I think it's definitely worked out for our players. It's very nice. Yeah, when we come back on this, I'm going to ask you about the relationship between eSports, okay, and jobs. We talked about that too. But first, what is the eSport? What does it look like? You know, read, we have we have access now to the way it's being played globally on the internet right now. What's the name of the game? How is it played? What do I need to know and learn and do? How how is my hand-eye coordination playing all of that? So let's let's put that on the screen. And you can describe how this game or games work. Alright, so let's go ahead and take a look. What do we have here? Alright, so right now we have a game being played. This is live, by the way. The streamer's name in the bottle or kind of mid left corner there. His name is Ninja or that's his gamer name at least. And he streams every day. And right now he's playing a game called Fortnite. It's a first person or more like a third person shooter type game. It's probably the most popular game on the market right now. He gets approximately about 300,000 plus viewers a day. And so what he does is he commentates his gameplay while he's playing it. And there is an entire business just by streaming games. There's an entire business of just commentating on the games which is called shout casting. And so this is definitely opened up a whole new field of business and just allowing this group of gamers that who who know that one point it just seemed like for fun. An actual career, something that can lead into something even greater. Yeah. Now what's with that column of things over on the right? That's the chat, eh? Yes. The comments you mentioned. Correct. So everybody who is watching this streamer right now has the ability to comment on the stream. He just won and everybody's giving them cheers right now. And they also have the ability to donate to him as well. And so spectating a video game is actually a huge part of eSports itself. Not only just the audience, it's the crowd. Exactly. Exactly. And the players like to have that. Right. I mean, there was a football game without an audience, right? Yes. Exactly the same. So there are multiple games. This is only one of them. This is just one. Now if you put all those consoles in play, they're gonna be playing the same game at the same time, right? So how do I know what game is being played at what time? How do I prepare, you know, to play the right game when you're competing on that game? So I think the easiest way to look at it is the different types of games in eSports. Can just be looked at as like different sports, right? You're gonna prepare for football. You're gonna prepare for basketball in that way. Same thing with eSports. You're gonna look at a game like League of Legends and you'll prepare as a team of five or six people. You can strategize together. You work out plans like that. Whereas in like Fortnite, for example, it's a one player game. In which case you're more looking at self building, right? You're looking at, okay, what can I do to outsmart my opponent one on one, head to head, that type of thing. But that's a beauty of eSports. There's so many different avenues, so many different varieties. You know, the what do you have to have to play this game? Do I have to have a hand-eye coordination? Do I have to be smart? Do I have to be quick? Do I have to, what talents and skills do I have to have or develop to play effectively? Well, if you're talking about just playing a video game, then you can take anything. And I think that's where video games is evolving into. Doesn't matter what your skill sets are. If you are good at hand-eye coordination, there's games that you can thrive on. There's games that you like to maybe dance. There's games that keep track of your dancing movements. VR is very, I guess, self-explanatory, right? So like if you're a farmer or something in the VR, you know how to dig up grass or whatever maybe. Whereas if you're a fighter in VR, right, you know, you can throw some punches here and there. And so that's the thing. The video games gives you a sense of being whatever you want to be, gives you that ability to do whatever you want to do. And so the skill set is all dependent on that. Yeah. How young do I have to be? In other words, can a person who is over 22 play the game? Can Cody actually play the game over here? He does. And again, I think that goes back to, you know, just a being for everybody. They have games for young children. They have games for older individuals. And they have games that are not even that involved. You can even have, you know, strategy games, things like even crosswords and things are going digital as well. So you can consider those video games as well at this point. Pretty exciting. So what's the demographic of people who actually use these games? Are they all young? I mean, there are people in their 70s, 80s, 90s, hundreds. Actually, do they do it too? You know, who's involved? You know, we're talking 300,000 people online here. Who is it? And that's mostly the younger generation. I would say that I mean, we always joke that, you know, by the time these these players get to the college age, when they join our team, it's the senior league. And there's their retirement. You know, they've already made it when they were 16 or 13, right? Those are the age groups where these these kids really, really thrive. Not to say that people don't play, you know, up into their 50s or 60s, which they do. I play games still every day, not competitively like these guys, but just for fun. You know, my kids started playing games when they were, you know, four or five. And can you can be too much a player? Okay. You know, if, if, if my kid is playing at two o'clock in the morning, do I have a problem? It depends. Yeah, you may. I mean, if they're making a few million dollars a year, maybe not. But yeah, you have to show some restraint, you know, and just, you know, use your best, better judgment on how long to play. I mean, it's just the same with parenting with anything else, right? Yeah, speaking of restraint, we're going to restrain ourselves for one minute. We're going to take a short break. And when we come back, Monique is going to tell us, Dominique is going to tell us all about the money. We're going to hear about jobs. We're going to hear about these incredible money things that happen around these games. We'll be right back. Oh, stay tuned. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, your host on Pacific partnerships and education here on Think Tech Hawaii. Every other week, Tuesdays at 3pm, we have guests on and talk about the fascinating, interesting and unique partnerships in education that occur across the Pacific Islands with Hawaii, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Guam, all these places have really rich local education programs going on. And the exchange among and between these programs is a wealth of great information, helping the islands all learn how to survive and thrive in our ever changing world. I hope you'll join us on Pacific partnerships and education. I'm Jay Fidel of Think Tech. You know, George Santayana said, you know, if you don't study history, you're going to, you're doomed to repeat it. And we have that history professor. It was wonderful to have him, John David, and HPU. And we do this thing, a history lens. We see the world through history. Very important, critical to understand our world around us. We do this on Tuesdays at 2pm, whenever we can get him. Right. John, what would you add to that? Jay, just tune in, folks, because we're talking about incredibly important issues. And we're projecting backwards into history, looking through the lens of history to add to our knowledge about these very important current issues, like white supremacy, trade and tariffs, impeachment, all of these important issues that we've been addressing on this show. Yeah, it runs all the way from terrifying tariffs to historical history. John David. That's it. Thanks a lot, Joe. I hope you noticed that with Professor John David Ann, history of HPU. We are surrounded virtually. Virtually is important. With HPU. Okay, Dominique, I promised to ask you about the money. So can you tell us what the money is on all this? This is not without financial implications. Talk about it. Well, eSports is just blowing up. I mean, there are companies with many opportunities for young people graduating. If you look at Riot Games, they're just a huge company to work for. And I think that's tremendous for somebody, you know, graduating college and getting a degree in a job and interests that, you know, it's going to pay off. And, you know, they're giving great salaries. So why not? I mean, plus there's tremendous scholarship opportunities now. And I mean, all these skills that they're learning in eSports are just resume boosters and the leadership roles that they're in and developing are only going to be... And the team play, the team work and all that? Yeah, absolutely. That's part of it. Correct. That's actually executive training in its own way. And that's what employers are looking for. So, I mean, it's kind of endless, really. It's kind of the future for our generation. Well, I'm talking before about, you know, the kinds of things that Cody was describing in terms of, you know, what all of you have been describing, what you do in these games, the kinds of skills you have to have, the kind of challenges you're presented with, the kind of collaborative effort you have to make. These, to me, these suggest they would be useful for the government, for, you know, national security, for homeland security, for various government agencies that are concerned with, you know, military-type software and all that. But you also told me that some of these guys who play these games make much more money than you would ever make in the government. That's true. So, as a career pattern, you know, if I'm chasing that, what's my best career track on it? What do I look at first and how do I get there? And what do I say in my curriculum V-tie about my gaming experience in order to get there? Well, I mean, it's kind of the same as looking at any other traditional sport. I mean, if you're after becoming a professional soccer player and you want to play in the World Cup, I mean, how many of those guys are there? There's just a handful, whereas, you know, you develop coaches and, you know, athletic administration, other jobs and avenues that they can take. That's just like esports and what they're developing. I mean, you could take a game designer, you know, somebody that's going to build a game, create a game. Programming, coding. Correct, yeah, absolutely. A whole new idea, yeah, yeah. Exactly, and a lot of our players are all very tech-savvy. I can see them going in multiple different directions. Our captain right now wants to be an astronaut and is making strides to do that. And I think esports and gaming and the camaraderie and the community that we are building in the arena is helping him to, you know, go down that career path, which is very exciting. Yeah, it really is exciting. So Cody, and how did the university come to this idea? Is it because, you know, the students approach the university and so we must have this? Is it because the university decided that there was a kind of movement going on with 300,000 people online all the time? Yeah. Is it, why? Why is it? Well, it all started from an idea from our president, actually, who friends of his and colleagues have told him that, you know, this esports thing is the next big thing. You've got to get on board with it. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry. It's just growing like crazy, especially it's really starting to grow in the collegiate levels, university levels, and so he crossed the country, crossed the country, crossed the world. So he took that, he took that advice and he called me up and he said, Cody, what do you know about esports? And I thought, I don't know anything. What is it? He goes, wait a minute, you're the GIO! At the time, you know, I didn't know much about the competitive gaming scene, right? So I looked into it and got back to him and he said, you know, this, I think this is something we've got to build. So let's find a way to build it. And so I worked with different vendors around. We had some donations from some key individuals that gave us enough funding to do the initial build out. Like I said, a lot of people in my team worked very hard to try to get good deals on equipment and set it up properly. A lot of expertise from Reid and others who helped us design the arena in a way that would fit in a competitive environment. And so we took all that and we also, we also looked at it as, this is something for our students, right? We'll build this for our students. It's a place that they can come, they can game, they can exchange casual, they can have friends like Dominique was saying, you know, it's right there at all. They can build relationships away. So there's that part of it. There's the team part of it, which is the competitive side forming a team, being a leader, you know, winning and losing and all that goes along with that. So that's a great new sport for some kids that may not be interested in some of the other traditional sports. So it's another option for them. And then we're also looking at, you know, another pillar of what we're trying to build there is the academic side. So as we build the arena and now we have the opportunity to attract faculty who want to use the arena to teach their courses, to have symposiums, to do summer classes on game design. We're actually holding a summer camp this summer, which is going to be for kids 13 and up. And it will be, will involve gaming, some game design, some, some shout casting which we saw earlier, some lectures from, from different faculty from both UH and HPU. So all these things, so you get an academic spin on e-sports as well as the gameplay. So it'll be great, great experience for kids. They'll get both the academic side and the e-sports side. So actually there's a relationship between gaming, e-sports and my, my grade point average. Because if it, if it helps me in a credit course, then obviously that's going to help my, my grade point average. Yeah. But, but I don't get, do I get points for winning? Do I get points for winning an international tournament, or is that, is that sports without, without credit? Well you get, you get rankings. So you get a higher ranking depending on, you know, what sport, what game you're playing. Yes. So the more you win the better it is, right? But not for credit. Not for credit at HPU. But what we are offering for this first summer camp is a certificate of, you know, completion for an e-sports camp. In the future, if this is successful, we hope to hold longer camps where we will offer HPU credit. So you go to camp, you learn all these skills, and then come away with some college credit. A syllabus, a curriculum that you follow. Yeah. Yeah. So, so there's that piece of it. We're also looking at game design programs in the future, where we'll teach down there, teach students how to design games that can test their games on those computers. Okay, so let me ask you about the future. Right now, you probably have a couple thousand feet involved in the, in the, in the sports arena. Three thousand. Three thousand? Yeah. Yeah. Where's it going? Is it going to get bigger? Can I come back in five years and find out that it's five times the size? You know, are you going to have more food? I mean, the first, I guess, we're in maybe phase two right now. I mean, the first phase, we wanted to build it up, get our students in there, start using it. Now we're trying to build it as a business to help sustain the operations of it. Because it's expensive to afford, you know, the bandwidth down there, all the computing systems, the software upgrades, hardware upgrades, all that kind of stuff costs money. And so we want to keep it as affordable as we can for everybody. So we're... Treat it as a business? Yeah. So we're running as a business to to raise some money where we can to help support the operations. Hopefully, if we do well at that, we can expand. We have 24 high-end gaming systems. I'd like to move that to 48. We have room in that facility to add another two rows in there, bring that up to 48. Add maybe a few more console stations and maybe another VR station. I think right then we'd be pretty full in that arena. Yeah, I want to come down and actually videotape how it works. And we'll make an OC16 show in a month. So on the future, Dominic, may I ask you about the future of this as a national and international sport? I mean, it's really gone great guns in the past one year or two, but where's it going in the next five years? Give me a plan. Well, HP is going to win the championship. Well, that's all settled. That's what's going to happen. You know, my, what I feel is going to happen is NCAA eventually is going to sanction this as a sport, and there won't be as many gray areas as they're all right now. There'll be a lot more in black and white, and I really think that this is, this is going to take a hold, and it's going to be the future of sports. Yeah, how about the Olympics? Yeah, there's already discussion about having virtual reality in the Olympics, so absolutely I don't want to say why not. Wow, wow. Anything's possible. Okay, I have my future question for you to reach out. Oh no, here we go. Okay, because you, you, you strike me as a kind of person who is into, you know, the interstices of these games, the programming logic of these games, the code of these games. You're calling me a nerd, sir. Indeed I am, and in the nicest possible way. Fair enough. But where are they going? You know, they're pretty sophisticated what we saw on the screen. Yes. Way more sophisticated than what's five or ten years ago, but where are they going in the next five or ten years? Oh, five or ten years, it, that's a long time when you're looking at technology, to be completely honest. We jumped from just 2D video games to 3D video games. We have VR, we have augmented reality, and that's all within less than 10 years that all of these jumps, yeah. So asking me what is going to be in five or ten years, it's really hard for me to say. Now I'm not trying to dodge the question though. I asked our last question, what was going to happen in North Korea in the next five years? You can imagine the struggle he had with that question. No, but really, we definitely see a growth in education and just connecting the two between video games, education, and then of course careers. You know, right now esports is its own, like, business itself. It's an industry, but it's going to definitely expand just because we can incorporate it in almost anything. Yeah, you know, in school nowadays, kids are learning just how to type, you know, age five, age six, and by then they can already play video games. They've already had a Game Boy or some Nintendo Switch or something in their hand by that age, basically. So, you know. So if in your after hours, you know, you play a little bit, and just suppose you win one of the big pools, you're like, say, 4.5 million. Will you share that with Dominique and also Cody? Are you talking about me? Oh, well, we're on camera, so I can't really say that because I don't want to be bound to anything. Of course, I mean, I don't see me being a professional gamer, at least at that level. If I ever get there, it would be a blessing. So, for sure, I would love to share it. Okay, well, we'd like you to come back, all of you, come back and do more with us on this, whether or not you win big. It's okay, either way. So, the last question is, how much of what Cody said, do you read and Dominique, do you agree with? I don't think he said anything I don't agree with. 100%. Always. Okay, all right. Okay, I think it's good. Yeah, I think it's good. Thank you, Cody. Thank you, Dominique. Thank you. Good to have you. We'll do it again. Yeah, cool. Thank you. Thanks for having us. All right. I love you guys.