SLAS Times 2018/2019 Fall 2018 | Page 13

E-Sports Are Coming to SLAS by Andrew Park O f the numerous after-school activities E-Sport athletes are required to communicate avaiable at SLAS, there is one special only in English, the common language of the Wednesday activity causing a buzz on campus school, so that everyone can understand each right now: E-Sports. other. E-sports at SLAS involve many games such as Recently, SLAS bought high power computers for League of Legends, Counter Strike, Vainglory, E-sports purposes. They are located in the first and Dota 2. row of the computer lab. “I was waiting for the activity, E-Sports, and finally my dream came true!” The specs of these computers are Intel i7 CPU, liquid cooling system, 16 GB of RAM, and GTX 1080 GPU. With these specs, gamers should not experience any “lag,” or system slowdown, due to process- ing limitations. The monitors of the computers are curved because curved monitors allow gamers to concentrate more on their games. Many students feel positive about E-Sports as an after school activity. Tom Domyo, a gamer in the 9th grade, said, “I was waiting for the activity, E-Sports, and finally my dream came true! I think it [E-sports] will be fun.” Not all students have positive attitudes toward E-Sports. Some students think that the games offered are very limited. “I want to play Overwatch, another first person shooting game, instead of Counter Strike.” Tom Domyo lamented. A harsher grade 9 critic, Rita Park, said, “The school is wasting money on E-sports. School is for ed- ucation, not gaming.” She also said, “This [E-sports] would also cause students to have bad eyes.” Every sport poses some sort of risk, and to date there have been no recorded injuries or psychologi- cal complications due to E-sports on campus.