Dallas school district starts video game teams on 64 campuses

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2019/10/13/friday-night-bytes-dallas-isd-starts-video-game-teams-on-64-campuses/

by danso • 7 years ago

105 108 7 years ago

dallasnews.com

huherto• 7 years ago

I rather have my kids play sports outside. But I guess this is a case of "if you can't beat them join them"

mensetmanusman2• 7 years ago

Best e-competitors need body training, this could be motivating.

dmix• 7 years ago

Why not both?

kkwak• 7 years ago

considering that this is organized, I would think you'd get the best of both.

Where kids will learn about rsi and how to mitigate, also how to keep their body in peak condition, etc. Much better than just gaming at home without guidance.

mensetmanusman2• 7 years ago

Competition of the mind, yes!

KirinDave23• 7 years ago

I get the sentiment, but I don't think video game competition isn't deeply physical in nature. Sure, experience and kinetic intelligence matter a lot in video games, but as any fighting game player can tell you: some folks just have fast reflexes and can train their bodies to react to even your best setup. Games build in cooldowns, frame locks and combos to help smooth out these ability curves but there is a lot of raw physical ability in pro gaming.

But I have to ask, isn't the pointless, manufactured competition actually the worst part of all this?

Games could recreate any universe we can imagine. Worlds without scarcity, worlds without conflict, worlds deeply simulating fantastical aspects of an alternative universe where any experience is possible. Weirdly, all those games end up with people pointing guns at one another.

Even a lot of AR games try to recreate all the "fun" of urban warfare by manufacturing. It's pretty depressing, if you ask me.

CDSlice4• 7 years ago

Games could recreate any universe we can imagine. Worlds without scarcity, worlds without conflict,

The thing is, all that is _boring_. If there is no scarcity, there is no progression. This can be OK if there is other sources of conflict like in Kerbal Space Program sandbox mode where you have an unlimited amount of parts and Kerbals to build with but you have to overcome environmental challenges inherent in flying a ship to another planet and back. Even so there are people (like me) that find sandbox KSP not very fun because there is no progression/scarcity.

If there is no conflict of any kind there is nothing preventing you from achieving your goal immediately without having to do much of anything, which isn't exactly very fun.

worlds deeply simulating fantastical aspects of an alternative universe where any experience is possible.

This is a description of the environment of a game, not a game itself. Very few people want to play "games" that are solely experiencing the environment with no real goals. The only games I can think of that are like that are sandbox games like Minecraft, and TBH I don't think sandbox Minecraft really counts as a game anymore than building a stick fort does in real life. (Also, survival mode in Minecraft is very popular. And guess what it has? Conflict with the environment and players)

Weirdly, all those games end up with people pointing guns at one another.

Because (most) people need to have goals to work towards both in real life and in games. If you don't give a player goals, they will make their own, often being "make the most money" or "be the best at combat." Combat as a game is far from modern, the only modern thing we've added is making it virtual combat.

bilbo0s2• 7 years ago

Nah, that's still Model UN and Math Olympiad. Video games goes more under "sports".

invalidOrTaken3• 7 years ago

I hope this spreads.

Team games---LoL, DotA, Overwatch---have been twisted and distorted by their respective companies to try to fit the wishes of their playerbase, who generally play these games solo. Thus team games steadily become less and less team-oriented, or more team-oriented, at the cost of ham-handed algorithmic authoritarianism (e.g. role queues).

But if stuff like this takes off, maybe companies will be more true to their vision and less pliable.

JRKrause• 7 years ago

At least in the case of Overwatch, role queue feels more like an attempt to assure a minimum level of viability for each team and less like an authoritarian approach to controlling how the game is played.

a_t48• 7 years ago

Basically this - it reduces variance in the games you play, along with increasing MMR accuracy. There’s some unfortunate side effects (it’s a long wait to solo queue as DPS, some strategy options are reduced), but overall I’m happy with the results.

diminoten2• 7 years ago

In Overwatch, role queue is such a departure from the original vision of the game that it's hard to argue with a straight face that it's anything other than a ham-fisted attempt at short term solutions to long term problems.

The message a role queue sends is, "Ignore the problems around you and focus on only providing one part of the team's solution" instead of, "Do whatever you can to help the team win." You can't pick up someone else's slack, you can't play unique/innovative styles, you can't adapt to new strategies; it cuts off a huge creative aspect the game used to have.

It's a terrible lesson to teach children.

invalidOrTaken3• 7 years ago

Sure, and adding more engineers is an attempt to speed up a project.

UserIsUnused• 7 years ago

Valve has been trying to make Matchmaking a good team experience.It even resulted in some recet outcries.

airstrike• 7 years ago

Well, I suppose they ought to try harder because CSGO MM is absolute ass...

KirinDave23• 7 years ago

I don't see a problem with this if there is demand. If anything, this is schools catching up with reality. Kids share their gaming experience with one another. It is a social thing, and they've been using Twitch and Youtube to create alternative media choices for some time. Kids even stage up Roblox and Minecraft videos to tell stories and present shows.

Still, I do think it's sad that the bro culture has completely erased every other kind of competitive video games. Most of our top competitive games (particularly those made in the US and Europe) replicate some of the worst aspects of human society. Lethal conflict, industrialized warfare, conflict over scarcity, imperialism simulators, and a view of science as a tech tree with resource unlockables. It's a fairly toxic view of the world and it taints a lot of kid's viewpoint of the world.

chrisco2555• 7 years ago

Violence is entertaining on some level. Even cutesy games like Mario have him stomping on mushrooms and turtles and avoiding deadly obstacles. I've also heard it said that all good stories involve conflict. It's a part of human psychology for better or worse. It's why we watch sports. It's why we play video games. It's why dogs play fight. It's deeply embedded in our chemistry.

learc8310• 7 years ago

Conflict doesn't require violence though. It's just that physical conflict is the easiest kind of conflict to represent.

KirinDave23• 7 years ago

Violence is entertaining on some level. Even cutesy games like Mario have him stomping on mushrooms and turtles and avoiding deadly obstacles.

Sure, but so are lots of things. It's just a cultural artifact of the west's love and expectation of violent solutions to conflict that we glorify this activity over others. For example, a game of Go is surely a conflict between two people, but unlike a game of Overwatch or the like it involves a lot fewer guns, bombs, and patchy plots about world governments authorizing unilateral violence.

I've also heard it said that all good stories involve conflict.

This is a cultural lens. Lots of stories don't have an external conflict and they can be great. You know what's a great example of this? The Moive Jacob's Ladder. It was about someone reflecting on their life with pride and regret, not actual conflict.

People frame this, unsurprisingly, as "Man vs Nature". But we might as well also define it as "Human Overcomes Hardship." And that line seems much more natural. Surely much of our hardship is inflicted by our peers, but is it a deliberate "versus" scenario? I suspect not.

bilbo0s2• 7 years ago

Violence is entertaining on some level... a part of human psychology

So is sex, but I'd wager there are people who would be against schoolkids playing video games simulating it. I think that's the same sort of argument that HN user 'kirindave' is making with respect to violence.

I make video games. Violent ones. But it's fair for people to question whether we, as an industry, can come up with something other than death as a metaphor for success. Particularly as we try to grow the tent and move games from being just video games to more, sort of, cultural artifacts.

asdfman123• 7 years ago

Violence is entertaining on some level

Maybe more generally, I learned through improv training that changes in relative status are entertaining to humans. It's interesting when a peasant pulls one over on a king.

Maybe we are inherently interested in things that threaten to change social hierarchy. Observing changes in it is important!

me_me_me2• 7 years ago

Most of our top competitive games ... replicate some of the worst aspects of human society.

I dunno if it true in every case, current 2 times Dota champions literally built their team upon friendship and support for each other.

So its not all doom and gloom yet. But I can see this type of behaviour fade away as more money and celebrity start pouring in.

KirinDave23• 7 years ago

I dunno if it true in every case, current 2 times Dota champions literally built their team upon friendship and support for each other.

Dota is a game where folks play avatars that come together to contest a pointless battlefield, murdering each other over and over while also murdering useless "creeps" that have the trappings of anthropomorphism but are explicitly considered value-less by the Heros.

It's not a boring or bad game, but the fundamental principle is "me and my friends murder your face with our amazing tactical teamwork for no special reason while our grunts carry on fighting like robots."

So its not all doom and gloom yet. But I can see this type of behaviour fade away as more money and celebrity start pouring in.

You're kinda behind on this. It depends a lot on the initial community. An example of a bad community is the Overwatch community. It's toxic even in the competitive place. An example of a community that is struggling to make a nicer and more civil gaming environment is Smash Ultimate, which has kicked people out for excess behavior and started to make outreach for kids and women who are typically excluded from the spaces. Unsurprisingly, the Overwatch community models a convincingly fatal combat scenario much more convincingly than Smash, where you're explicitly pretending cartoony action figures are fighting in a magical arena where the worst that happens is you get bounced off into the distance.

pm902• 7 years ago

Video games provide an escape hatch to reality. You may have a personality that is attracted to violent mechs and gunslingers, or you may like the whimsy of being a warrior in a MMORPG. This doesn’t mean that you want to bring that into your real life... it’s important to remember that.

I hold the opposite view to yours on this subject. By allowing an escape hatch, video games are allowing kids to live out their wild fantasies in the digital world. And doing this socially makes it a more socially acceptable activity and a way to bond with other kids who are attracted to similar things.

smhost2• 7 years ago

maybe, maybe not. other animal species use play as a way to simulate potentially dangerous scenarios in order to learn certain behaviors. i think it's naive to assume that there's nothing instructive happening within core video game experiences.

KirinDave23• 7 years ago

You fundamentally misunderstand my argument if you think that I'm saying video games are causal. I think they're a symptom and they help normalize ideas, but causal? No.

That's the argument people are used to having, so I can see how you might be eager to address it. But I'm not interested.

crooked-v2• 7 years ago

The mention of Minecraft makes me think that it could be used for artistic competition purposes (not explicitly framed that way, to go easy on the nerves of the kids who are 'bad at art'). Have teams compete to make the most interesting or coolest map, and have teachers sneak in tips on perspective (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr0USak_IB4) or on historical architecture styles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPxcldEDHts).

KirinDave23• 7 years ago

There are actuall 0 direct conflict Minecraft games. Tons of them.

One of the more interested and open designs is the "Race For The Wool" concept where elaborately constructed obstacle courses are replicated in parallel in a void world and teams navigate their own miniature world using any means necessary to recover several colored wool blocks hidden on the map. Sometimes there even is direct player conflict when the two courses are open, allowing arrow and TNT cannon fire across the gap at one another.

strictnein• 7 years ago

No idea what "bro culture" has to do with what you're listing. All of those game types existed 25+ years ago. One of the first big competitive video games, with large prizes (Carmack's Ferrari), was Quake, which came out in 1996.

KirinDave23• 7 years ago

Video game culture before FPSs and an anti-woman sentiment in the industry was very different. That's what I grew up in and I miss that generation of games very much.

Even the war games were rich stories with detailed systems. While I respect the tech aspects of what came after, it's well-accepted that game design contracted in on itself as the majority of the money in PC gaming went to FPS games.

TulliusCicero10• 7 years ago

And yet, violence in the US started declining right around the same time more realistically violent video games started becoming a thing, like Mortal Kombat. It then continued declining even as we got Doom, and Quake, and Call of Duty.

it taints a lot of kid's viewpoint of the world.

Is there any actual evidence of this? Because so far based on your comments elsewhere, it sounds like you just have on some rose-tinted glasses about retro games, and harbor some personal antipathy to modern popular competitive PC games.

sneak3• 7 years ago

This should not be something cash-strapped schools are spending $450,000 on. This is just public-private transfer into the coffers of Blizzard, Nintendo et al.

If it has merit, it has merit with free software.

soared2• 7 years ago

There is no mention of being cash-strapped in the article, unless I missed it?

sneak3• 7 years ago

Public schools in the US are almost universally cash-strapped. Regardless, my point stands: no school should be spending a half million in tax money on corporate video games.

There are plenty of cheap/free games that could serve the purpose just fine, if indeed there is any educational merit whatsoever to this initiative (which I highly doubt).

cthalupa2• 7 years ago

This is meant to be a way to keep kids out of trouble, not teach them physics. The goal is to keep them in a controlled and safe setting until their parents are home and able to pick them up, rather than unsupervised for hours at a time.

Kids don't want to play Tux Racer, they want to play Fortnite. There isn't any free software games out there that are going to attract the attention of these kids the way the AAA titles like Fortnite, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends do, and that means that without having access to those titles, the kids aren't going to join the club, and aren't going to be in that controlled and safe setting.

lern_too_spel• 7 years ago

Madden is cheaper in terms of liability, game day costs, and grades than real football. I don't buy the cost argument.

sneak3• 7 years ago

Neither one has anything to do with education.

arioid• 7 years ago

At just ~$7,000 per campus for an after school program that likely requires staffing, some equipment, software, etc. I don't see it as a ridiculous thing for them to justify. It provides a community like any other sports program would, at a significantly lower cost, and to a completely different audience, who wasn't participating in the other extracurricular offerings.

helloSirMan• 7 years ago

I really like this idea. I bonded with friends over video games in highschool. I would have probably benefited if a coach were involved - informing and teaching me and my friends about teamwork, strategy, and training skill/tactics.

The competition and comradery of playing against other teams in the area seems to me like it would make for higher stakes (involving pride and an in-person level of gamesmanship). I'd argue these are important skills in living a social life.

I also think that including some level of physical exercise, even if just as an ante to participate under the school's charter of the sport, would make students more healthy. I don't know if any research or statistcs exist correlating cardiovascular health to markers associated with better video game performance. But it would not surprise me if a lap or two around a track before a practice or competitoin would sharpen minds, reflexes, nerves, etc. If nothing else, it would reduce apprehension to adminstrators sactioning kids playing video games.

arminiusreturns• 7 years ago

When I was in the Marine Corps, I developed a "gaming workout routine" to keep in shape and still have time to play video games where I didn't even have to leave the desk, and it worked wonders. I have always thought it would be awesome to somehow make it a more popular thing. For a while I have thought VR might be the killer app that makes it a reality.

For those interested, it was mostly just bodyweight exercises, eg between counter-strike rounds do crunches at desk, pushups, dips, etc. When I finally buy a house I have this idea that I want to design my computer desk to also be a workout desk... pullup bar and everything.

crooked-v2• 7 years ago

Desk treadmills for office-style work are fairly common (the main downside is the extra background noise from the belt), but I'm not sure how well they work with the twitchier focus of gaming stuff.

kbar13• 7 years ago

my friends and i used to play workout games (similar to drinking games) where if you die you do x pushups, if you get a kill everyone else does pushups, if your team loses everyone does pushups, etc

soared2• 7 years ago

Quote pulled for critical context - The schools want everyone involved in an extracurricular activity. This solves tons of issues - bad home life, gangs, loneliness/depression, etc.

Finding a niche for all students to participate in an extracurricular activity is one of the DISD’s key goals. Trustees made extracurricular participation a major priority in 2017, setting a districtwide goal of 78% participation by the 2021-22 school year.

lotsofpulp• 7 years ago

This solves tons of issues - bad home life

Not at all. It's just more excuse to babysit teens. Bad home life will only be fixed by raising living standards, by reducing number of hours parents need to work, providing vacation time, etc. But that would require redistributing wealth instead of raising property taxes a couple percent.

jungturk• 7 years ago

It seems like there's an awful lot of useful improvement in the space between "doing nothing" and "redistributing wealth", so I commend the DISD for not letting perfect be the enemy of good.

anon1m0us• 7 years ago

Babysitting does improve home life.

nameless912• 7 years ago

Hey so I'm all with you on the fact that inequity is the real problem here. But I also volunteer at an after school program at the school my wife teaches at because these kids often don't have a stable home life to go to after school. It does make a difference, and in my experience it's been very effective at helping the kids (elementary age) in this school get their homework done on time, it's reduced behavior problems, and it gives them a reason to like school. Ours is a 2 day per week program where the kids can choose to be in one of about 25 different special interest clubs (I run the computer science club) and the kids get snacks and two extra hours of time they can be safe at school instead of (often) alone at home.

cko• 7 years ago

Dallas and most of Texas have some of the highest property taxes in the country. Raising property taxes a couple percent would be... unreasonable.

tpmx• 7 years ago

The headline made me think it was about creating some kind of competition to create video games, rather than playing them. Alas, not.

I still think that could have been an exciting idea.

chess93• 7 years ago

Hopefully this helps make video gaming a more community oriented activity instead of something done at home alone.

point78• 7 years ago

Something that makes you think "Why the hell didn't we have this 30 years ago!"

shawndumas• 7 years ago

“Interscholastic sports spread rapidly from the 1930s through the 1950s, at a time when the medical and physical education communities were opposed to competitive sports for elementary and junior high, and occasionally high school, students.” — https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2443/Sports-Scho...

duxup• 7 years ago

I would really like to see them emphasize sportsmanship and in a small way help try to make the gaming related community on the internet a bit nicer.

baby• 7 years ago

Finally a college team I can get behind!

markus_zhang• 7 years ago

I'd say it might be more educational if they are on C64 machines.

wgerard• 7 years ago

This is a really interesting phenomenon we noticed as started doing some research into esports: There's a ton of interest in organized game teams as perhaps an alternative to traditional sports for students with different proclivities.

This is just one example, but I suppose what I'm trying to say is that this will likely become the norm not the exception.

Dallas school district starts video game teams on 64 campuses

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