University of Ottawa Esports Showcase Week a great success at the Brian Dickson Law Library

Today we kicked off Esports Showcase week which is a collaboration between the library Professor Thomas Burelli and the uOttawa Esports Club. Here in the Brian Dickson Law Library we have a computer lab of 40 seats um 18 of which have been loaded up with uh games for Esports. There’s League of Legends, Valorant and Dota 2. 

The aim of Esports Week is really to open up a space for a limited time to try and gauge interest from the student community and show the potential of a space like this on campus in terms of welcoming special guests, in terms of improving performance for the students of the university’s esports club. So to see what it would look like if we opened a facility of this nature on campus.    

Part of the pilot project is to see how an Esports Showcase Week can work along with the library’s academic mission and how the library can support student success through an Esports initiative. 

There are many ways to describe uOttawa Esports. I see it as a community of many diversities, cultures, ages, and interests that come together to play together and have that one passion of gaming. I see it as a safe space for people to come. We have both in-person and online events; bi-weekly tournaments, we do sometimes LAN tournaments as well. In person events we do movie viewings or we do events where people can come and show their cosplay of a game or they can just come play tabletop games or any type of card games that we have. We also this year had a really big event against Carleton Esports, it was the Panda-monium event. So we had many of our competitive teams going against their competitive teams and we did it sort of like the Panda game that we know and love, the football one. We thankfully ended up winning, so yeah! 

This week we have finally had the chance, an opportunity, to have a hub where casual and competitive players can come in to uOttawa and play games with other students. We’re so excited to have had this opportunity and I’m looking around at all these gamers and they’re playing their games, and they’re having fun with their friends in person. Because what we had before was mostly strictly online so having all these players physically together playing it just adds a sense of camaraderie and we’re so grateful to have this opportunity. 

Playing video games is absolutely not a waste of time, especially competitive games, because to excel at the level of some of the players in the University of Ottawa Esports Club, who rank in the top 0.01% in North America for certain games, you need to have developed some very, very, very important qualities. You need to have a very extensive knowledge of the game, you need great dexterity, you need to be extremely intelligent for tactical games, to make the right decisions at the right time, sometimes in very tense moments with a lot of pressure. So these are very interesting qualities. Qualities that can easily be transferred to the workplace.