President of UNLV Rebel Gaming, Hayden Gomel plays the game, Overwatch at the new Tonopah Esports Lounge, located within the Tonopah Residence Complex at UNLV on Wednesday, January 24, 2024.
Friday, Jan. 26, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Chelsea Acdan used to spend a lot of time in UNLV’s Lied Library — just not for the reasons other students were there.
Acdan was the manager and president of Rebel Gaming, UNLV’s esports team and the seven-time Collegiate Esports Champions.
Team members would settle for gaming on computers at the library, even though they weren’t suited for games like Valorant and League of Legends. A slow computer, Acdan explains, affects how the game runs for the competitive group of students.
For the past year, the 20-year-old has worked as a tournament director for the HyperX Arena in the Luxor, where both local and visiting gamers can pay to hop on gaming computers for hours at a time. She’s used to seeing many of her Rebel Gaming friends make the trek to practice on the Strip.
Gaming enthusiasts will now have their own space on campus, courtesy of HyperX and Allied Esports — a gaming and esports entertainment service that runs the HyperX Arena.
“We had (esports) teams here, and a lot of people come to our events that love video games, so it’s like a community aspect where it brings together different people of different (backgrounds),” said Acdan, a business major. “This is like a gateway … it’s taking college esports at UNLV to the next level.”
The new Tonopah Esports Lounge, located in the Tonopah Residence Complex off University Road, was a group effort between Allied Esports, UNLV and HyperX.
HyperX donated from $70,000 to $100,000 worth of ultramodern gaming equipment to UNLV, said Mark Green — chief operating officer at Allied Esports. That includes 25 PCs, gaming monitors, headsets, mouse pads, gaming mouses and gaming chairs.
UNLV used this donation and worked with Allied Esports to transform a social lounge into a high-tech gaming center for both the experienced esports athlete as well as the passing enthusiast.
Nicole Loo, director of development under UNLV’s Student Affairs team, reached out to Green about building the esports lounge, and it took about three-to-four months to bring it to reality, he said.
President Keith Whitfield, who said he had prior experience with esports from his time at Wayne State University in Michigan, has been excited to welcome the industry to campus these past few years.
In the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality, students can take a class on the evolution of esports and its regulation, or they can get involved with esports research at the Sports Innovation Institute — which connects sports researchers from across various majors and colleges on campus. UNLV was one of the first universities in the nation to have an esports program, Whitfield said.
UNLV is also home to the Nevada Esports Education League, an organization “that educates (and) empowers students through esports, video game design, streaming, coding broadcasting and computer skills.”
The university hosted the first-ever Mountain West Esports Showdown in 2018, and drew regional institutions like Boise State University to the event.
And next year, the president hopes to welcome a new program called Dreamscape that will utilize virtual reality technology to create immersive classroom experiences for students. Think: biology students getting to explore a virtual Amazon Rainforest, pointing out some of its native animals and getting a page of quick facts on the species.
The Dreamscape program is currently only running at Arizona State University, Whitfield said.
Esports and related technology, despite some of the health concerns surrounding gaming, “exploded” in 2016. Whitfield said there’s many educational and personal benefits to esports, as well as an increasing economic gain.
Teamwork, critical thinking and problem-solving are just a few of the skills Whitfield believes people can gain from gaming.
“Problem-solving can be taught in any discipline, any place on this great campus and so it’s how you do it which is different,” Whitfield told the Sun. “We want to keep enhancing all of those things so that as you develop, it’s like the other set of tools that you learn — the intellectual tools that you learn — to be able to go out in the world and be successful.”
Green has seen firsthand how big the esports industry has become and how similar the industry is to traditional sports, especially through Allied Esports’ collaborations with UNLV during the past 5 1/2years.
People like Acdan and many of the other UNLV students employed at the HyperX Arena share a similar passion for gaming as he’s witnessed in basketball or baseball fans, Green explained. Their experiences with esports through UNLV have helped them nab their jobs, Acdan said.
Traditional sports and esports also share profitability.
The esports market was valued at $1.45 billion in 2022 and is only expected to grow from $1.72 billion in 2023 to $6.75 billion by 2030, according to Fortune Business Insights.
North America “dominated the global market” with a share of about 30% in 2022, bolstered by companies like Twitch, Activision Blizzard, Riot Games, X1 Esports and Entertainment among others — all of which call the region home.
Despite esports being a relatively new field, many different industries are tapping into them, from betting companies like DraftKings to academic institutions like UNLV.
And the proof is in people like Acdan or Lee Sang-hyeok — also known as Faker, a 27-year-old Korean League of Legends player whose net worth sits around $6 million, according to Green.
“When I first joined (Allied Esports), I realized the synergy or the similarities between traditional sports and esports and job opportunities,” Green said. “The importance of having (the esports lounge) here is it’s an amenity for the university, trying to recruit kids to come in … and I think this is just the start.”
At one time, students interested in esports had to find ways to get from UNLV to the HyperX Arena, which Acdan and Green said posed some challenges.
Now, when you walk into the former computer lab on the first level of the Tonopah Residence Complex, you’re greeted with the school’s signature black and red paint across the walls with “Play Like a Rebel” written across it.
Red glowing keyboards will beckon students — for recreation or some practice time — to the various setups programmed to run games like Overwatch and Rocket League. Following a ribbon cutting Wednesday, students immediately took their spots and booted up their game of choice.
To Whitfield, this lounge is not only a “significant investment,” but a big step for the future of esports at UNLV as well as the way teaching can be done on campus, he said.
“I do think we’re at a critical tipping point where there’s going to be more and more of this,” Whitfield said. “We’ll have better gamers because they’ve got a better facility (and) it’s a recent history in a way, but it’s one, as I think about the future, it’s just a piece of how students learn.”
