Valor: Esports Demystified Valor Esports

In today's episode of Esports Demystified we're joined by Boltzy, a talented and aspiring Valorant player. Boltzy has experience in professional esports with Team Serenity. Currently Boltzy is a free agent and developing his profile as a player.

Today we want to explore what life looks like for an up and coming esports athlete. What options are out there for people who have talent and a desire to play at the highest levels? How do you navigate the esports scene when you are just beginning your career? Is it a matter of just grinding away until the opportunity arises or is there a pathway with direct steps?

Kate is an accomplished video game and esports attorney, who on a daily basis deals with everything from intellectual property and trademark issues to developer agreements and esports contracts. Her work in the esports industry has been cited dozens of times by subsequent authors. Kate also recently volunteered for Gamers Outreach, a charity that empowers hospitalized children through video games.

It comes as no surprise then, that in her spare time Kate enjoys video games, an obsession which in a 2015 paper she said her family “endured ... with tireless resolve”.

NOTE: This interview was recorded in late 2020 and René has since began working as a coach for Wylde and Lycus Empire.

René is a high level gamer specialising in Rocket League, currently working as a Rocket League coach for Wylde and Lycus Empire. He also has experience as an esports caster for Rival Esports. Currently René is the chairman of the esports club at Groningen University in the Netherlands.

Today Esports Demystified is joined by Miles Harvey, PhD. Miles is an esports coach, media literacy educator, and teacher educator at University of New Mexico. Miles is also a huge advocate for digital game-based learning within the education curriculum.

Miles has built a course, based on the studies of new literacies and digital game-based learning strategies, called media literacy. The course uses virtual and augmented reality technologies and virtual spaces to explore what it means to make meaning in new places.

With Miles' expertise, we dig into the exciting prospect of changing education curriculum through gaming.

Playing online has a dark side: Toxicity. Many players suffer in silence and we wanted to highlight this issue by giving a voice to Jess "Sif / Siferra" Chan, a gamer who has suffered from it and is now using their experience to raise awareness. To all of us, it's our responsibility to listen and put forward the voice of victims to help educate and ultimately build a more positive and inclusive esports world, particularly for marginalized individuals.

Duran Parsi is a young entrepreneur in the esports world. While still at university in his twenties, Duran founded Collegiate Starleague, also known as CSL, the world's first collegiate gaming organization. Over the past 11 years, CSL has hosted competitions for over 100,000 college students across 2,000 universities. Duran helped provide over $1 million in scholarship funding to student gamers. In 2015 Duran sold CSL to World Gaming. Currently Duran is the Director of Collegiate Esports at FACEIT which is an esports platform with over 15 million registered users. FACEIT was founded in London in 2012, and is one of the top gaming league administrators in the world. We are truly lucky to have Duran join us today to discuss the challenges of building a business in esports and also where the world of collegiate esports started and where it's heading.