Boot camp
Esports training providing summer fun for the budding pro gamer in your family
PHILADELPHIA — While some parents send their kids off to summer camp to run and play outside, others have plunked down more than $4,000 to send their kids off to play video games.
For two weeks this summer, about three dozen kids from around the country, and even some from as far away as Asia, came to Philly to sit in front of computer screens and play and learn all about the esports industry at a summer camp offered by N3rd Street Gamers and Julian Krinsky Camps.
Trinity Wright is one of them. She's from Denver, and she started playing video games because she was bullied at school by other classmates. For her, online gaming offered her a safe space where she felt free and alive and did not suffer the same social anxiety that made making friends at school so difficult. In video games, Wright, 14, found a life, and perhaps a future.
Her dream? To be a professional gamer one day.
“It's our thing now. It's our clique,” she says. “It's like being on a football team or a baseball team or being an actor. If you are a gamer and an aspiring esports player, you are almost guaranteed to find other kids that are interested in the same thing.”
Another camper, Oliver Whitehouse, 16, is from North Carolina. He says he used to like tennis because of the strategy, but he soon found there is also strategy in video games. It's also a lot more comfortable inside during the summer.
“When it's 100 degrees out with 97 percent humidity, I don't want to be out there playing tennis for four hours,” he says “With this, I get to play something that requires strategy without killing myself in the heat.”
Whitehouse's daily schedule during the school year? Homework, food, video games.
He plays “scrims” or scrimmages for hours into the night. Like Wright, he also hopes to one day become a professional gamer — and those scrims are necessary building blocks in his evolution as a gamer, no different from shooting free late into the night.
“My parents understand that it's definitely a career path now and it can get you into colleges,” says Whitehouse.
From Boise State to Western Kentucky, there are over 90 schools with varsity esports programs offering a total of about $7 million in scholarships. There are also professional playing and coaching opportunities for the very best gamers, as well.
“It's so aspirational as a fan,” says Nate Nanzer, the commissioner of the popular 12-team Overwatch League that's holding its Grand Finals at Barclays Center July 27-28. “I don't need to win the genetic lottery to be in the Overwatch League. I don't need to be LeBron, who is 6-9, 220 with 4 percent body fat to play in the league. I need to be great at Overwatch and it doesn't matter if I'm a boy or a girl, where I'm from, how big I am, how fast I am. You need to be great at the game, you need to be smart and have great hand-eye coordination to be a special player who can play at this level, but it is so much more accessible.”
That inclusiveness is an attraction for many kids.
Some would be shocked that kids are devoting so much time to video games. But in Philadelphia, we found a group of bright, dedicated and passionate kids, breaking the stereotype that kid gamers are just lazy, mean slackers. This year, the World Health Organization classified “gaming disorder” as a form of addiction “to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities.” President Trump has also said, “I'm hearing more and more people saying the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people's thoughts.”
The young gamers we spoke to said that's all overblown fake news.
“I don't think there's another social group that's as welcoming as gamers,” says 16year-old Nathaniel Brooks, who hails from Chicago. “The notion that gaming is toxic or makes you a bad person just isn't true. The 1990s idea that video games rot your brain or make you want to shoot someone is just absurd.”
Adam Denton is an 18-yearold pro gamer from Georgia and a reserve for the Philadelphia Fusion, the local pro Overwatch team. A former football player, he signed his first pro esports contract at 16, before he graduated high school. He said he took classes online to get his diploma.
“Honestly, (my parents) were really for it,” he says. “They didn't know anything about professional gaming. But I told my dad about it and after I explained it, he was all for it. When I got my first contract, he was really excited and let me do whatever I had to do.”
Denton says he now spends about 10 hours a day playing video games.