Shelly Vitanza:
Welcome to the LU Moment! I’m Shelly Vitanza, the Director of Public Affairs at Lamar University. Each week, we showcase the great events, activities, programs, projects, and people at Lamar University. Well, happy Thanksgiving and happy holidays from Lamar University and the campus will be closed this Thursday and Friday in observance of Thanksgiving and we will reopen to finish the semester and have our finals. Of course, that’s every college student’s favorite time of the year, but it’s short-lived. We are going to close again December the 8th and students will be finished with the semester for the Christmas holidays. The spring semester will begin again January 19th. The last day to register for classes for the Spring semester, if you are interested, is January 21st. And you know what, it’s going to be a really busy Spring, because we are going to have basketball and football since we were not able to have or football season in the fall. We are going to have conference play in the Spring. So, the first home basketball game, let me just let you know, so you can plan, but we are going to be in the Montagne for the first home basketball game on December 15th. The men are going to take on Southern Mississippi. The first conference game at home is not until January 9th against Houston Baptist. The women’s hoops will play in the Montagne on December 5th, so they are a little bit sooner and again on December 16th. Their first home conference game is later in December as well. And of course, you can go to lamarcardinals.com and get all of the schedules for basketball as well as football. It’s happening beginning February 20th, how about that? February Football! I like it. The weather could be great. Maybe we won’t be so hot, you never know, February could be hot too, you never know, but it could be nice weather. The first game will be a conference game against Northwestern State in Provost Umphrey Stadium and we are going to have six games between February 20th and April 30th. I’m just giving you something to look forward to. Don’t we need something to look forward to? We’re going to have a little football, a little conference play. And speaking of play and games; that’s really what we are going to talk about today. At Lamar University, we game for fun, for competition, and now for a degree. We have esports organizations as well as a degree in gaming and I have the biggest gamers on the campus right here in the studio to talk to us about this. Dr. Timothy Roden, you’re the sponsor of esports and you’re also one of the ones responsible for getting a gaming degree here on the campus is that right?
Timothy Roden:
That’s right. As a matter of fact, you know, Texas is one of the biggest states in the U.S. for game development companies. When you look at the number of game development companies, obviously, you know, California has been the biggest in terms of the number of companies. For a while, Texas was third behind Washington, but now Texas is second, because we’ve seen the industry moving increasingly to Texas, especially the Austin, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth areas. Right now, if you wanted to stay in Texas and work in the game development industry, this is a great time to be looking for a job. Anyway, in Texas, if you look at all the public universities, and what they offer in terms of degrees in game development, you’ll find a variety of things and some of these degrees are more focused on the design aspect or the production, or something like that. What we have at Lamar is a degree specifically for people who want to become programmers. We have a B.S., a bachelor of science in computer game development degree at Lamar. This degree is specifically for people who want to start a career in the game development industry as programmers and it’s the only four-year degree in Texas like that. When you look at another university, you may see something that says “game” here or there, but those are not programming-intensive degrees. We’re the only one that has it and it’s growing big and we’re really excited about where that’s going.
Shelly Vitanza:
It’s in the computer science department? Is that where this degree is?
Timothy Roden:
Yes.
Shelly Vitanza:
College of Arts and Sciences.
Timothy Roden:
Yeah! In fact, going along with that, we have a couple of laboratories. We have a dedicated game development laboratory where students can go and work on and develop games complete with the latest alien-ware computers. We are really happy about that. We also have, as of about a year ago, an esports lab. So, our esports lab is attracting students from all different disciplines who maybe, they not only want to work on games, but they also want to come and play games and be competitive. This is really becoming a big draw for us.
Shelly Vitanza:
Okay, I want to back up a little bit. You talk about the programming degree at Lamar, but what are some of the other degrees that you can get to go into computer gaming and why is that so distinctive or important?
Timothy Roden:
Well, we have a regular bachelor of science in computer science degree, and as part of that degree, students can take four different computer science electives. If they want, they can take some of our game development courses that we have in computer science. And that’s totally fine, and that appeals to a lot of students who maybe aren’t sure after they graduate whether they want to go into game development or maybe some other type of programming and they want to leave their options open, so I think that’s a good tip for those people. But, there’s a certain core group of students that we see that their whole life is dedicated to creating computer games, and so for them, the dedicated degree is what they were looking for and it’s why we created it about a year ago here at Lamar.
Shelly Vitanza:
That’s really exciting, brand new and going Gamebusters. I understand the E-Sports group is one of the largest student organizations on campus. Jason Chambliss is with us who is president of the esports. Jason, welcome, so glad you could join us.
Jason Chambliss:
Thanks for having me.
Shelly Vitanza:
I know this semester is winding down and you’re starting to really get busy studying for finals and things like that, so I really appreciate you being here. So, tell us your path into the gaming and esports and why you choose that direction.
Jason Chambliss:
Well, I’ve always had a passion for playing video games. I’ve played games since I was really little. It was an obvious choice, sooner or later, but Lamar had E-Sports. I joined right away about a year and a half ago, and I’ve been president of the organization all semester. It was a great transition from playing casually to playing competitively. It’s been a great experience so far.
Shelly Vitanza:
I was really surprised when I started seeing some of the E-Sports competitions that you all were doing and the amount of money that the students were winning. I kind of told my son not to get into video games, but then I saw that. So, talk to me about the competitions and how those work and the level of competition.
Jason Chambliss:
Well, like any other sport, it takes lots of practice. There are people who play on these teams that practice for hours every day. It might sound like you are just playing video games, but it is serious practice and they are playing for money and they are very serious about it. It takes a lot of discipline to train for these games.
Shelly Vitanza:
How do you enter these competitions with other schools, how does that work? Talk to me practically about that.
Jason Chambliss:
Well, pre-COVID-19, there were some situations where we might have gatherings at certain schools. Our super smash brothers’ team, they would travel about six hours away to compete at a different school. Our other teams actually compete online, online tournaments, so colleges across the country will get together and compete online. That’s unique to E-Sports, to compete online. Other sports cannot do that. It’s really not a big transition into COVID-19.
Shelly Vitanza:
Have you had any interruptions as a result of the pandemic in your competitions?
Jason Chambliss:
There have been a few things here and there. Like many organizations, we had a lot of plans to do, but we’ve been able to pivot very into COVID-19 and we’ve handled it well. We still have plenty of tournaments. We’ve been pretty active.
Shelly Vitanza:
Is smash bros on of the main games that you compete in? What are some of those?
Jason Chambliss:
It is one of the main games. We also have an Overwatch team, Rainbow Six Seige team, Rocket League, League of Legends, and several other games.
Shelly Vitanza:
Now, there’s 300 students involved in this organization, does everybody compete?
Jason Chambliss:
Not everyone. We have about 40-50 active competitors in our tournaments, but there’s about 300 people who show interest and regularly play games even if they don’t do it competitively.
Shelly Vitanza:
What is your classification? Are you a junior, senior?
Jason Chambliss:
I’m a senior.
Shelly Vitanza:
And when do you graduate?
Jason Chambliss:
Fall 2021.
Shelly Vitanza:
And you’re getting a gaming degree?
Jason Chambliss:
I’m double majoring. I’m getting a bachelor’s in computer science and a bachelor’s in game development.
Shelly Vitanza:
Well that’s right because the game development degree didn’t come online until a year ago. You were well into your computer science degree, and so you just tagged on a little bit more schooling?
Jason Chambliss:
I did. I was happy to see that it exists because, like I said, I’ve always loved games and it’s a dream job of mine to be able to make games. It was a great transition.
Shelly Vitanza:
So, let’s talk about the job market out there. I would think, Dr. Roden, that that market wouldn’t be impacted by the pandemic because people are still able to play games so this seems like a pretty secure career path.
Timothy Roden:
Yeah. You know, I even think that going forward, we’re going to see more jobs in computer game development as people transition to more in-home entertainment activities instead of going out to the movies or something like that. And the other thing, just about a week ago, we have a new generation of consoles that have been introduced, for example, the play station 5. It’s already completely sold out everywhere, it’s impossible to find one.
Shelly Vitanza:
Good! Because I’m not getting one for my kids!
Timothy Roden:
The demand for these games, once a person gets one of these new consoles, people want new software. They don’t want just one game, they want several, so I really see that these events that happened this past year have just supercharged to the game industry and we see so much more activity. I’m reading about so much activity, it’s interesting. Even the board game industry is becoming sort of revolutionized. I see a merging of board games and computer games where you’ll have a game that has some physical components that you can sit on your table and some are digital components that you would run on your game console or your computer. To me, this is an incredibly exciting time. We’re witnessing really the golden age of board gaming because it’s becoming digitized. It’s becoming immersed in digital technologies and there’s going to be this merging and so, in the future you won’t be able to tell the difference in a lot of cases between something that’s a board game or a computer game, because it maybe has a little bit of both.
Shelly Vitanza:
Well, I’m thinking about my kid’s battleship. Battleship used to be just a board game and now, it’s computerized. Those are the kinds of things I guess that our Lamar students can program.
Timothy Roden:
Right, exactly. I’m even researching right now how we can introduce a new course that would teach students how to design games that have both physical components and electronic components because I definitely see that this is something that is in the future.
Shelly Vitanza:
Very good. Talk to us about what someone who is interested in finding out more about the gaming degree can do. What is the first step? What can they do to kind of plug in and get to know more about it.
Timothy Roden:
The first step would just be to go to our website: www.lamar.edu and on the top of the screen, just click on academics, and then you can click on departments, and then you’ll find computer science. The computer science website, you can browse and you can find some of the different faculty and the labs and so I would say poke around there and you’ll definitely find some information about a game development degree and then the next step would be, if you want to learn more, just click on the faculty section, and find me, Dr. Roden and send me an email with your questions and what you want to know. I will probably send you back a PDF file with some information and be happy to talk to you on the phone. I’m just super excited to meet students that are super excited about computer games because that’s really what got me into computer science years ago. I know computers can be used for a lot of things but it’s the computer games that really got me into it.
Shelly Vitanza:
Perfect, that’s great. And what about E-Sports? How can students at Lamar get involved in E-Sports?
Well you can contact Dr. Roden and he’ll probably turn it towards me. You could also contact me. You can contact me at jchambliss2@lamar.edu and I’ll fill you in on everything you need to know about E-Sports.
Shelly Vitanza:
Very interesting! Lots of gaming going on here at Lamar University. We appreciate both of you filling us in on that and the fact that we have a new degree here at Lamar that’s really helping students enter the job market in the gaming industry. Again, Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks for listening to the LU Moment. I’m Shelly Vitanza, the director of public affairs at Lamar University, the pride of Southeast Texas.
