Video game tournaments powering up in the library
As a way to give students an opportunity to participate in non-academic activities on campus, the Cedar Shoals library hosted a Super Smash Brothers tournament on August 16. This event is only the beginning of others to come in the rest of the school year.
While the library is a place to check out books, read and study, there is a wider variety of activities to do there. One may be surprising: video games.
“There’s a lot of emphasis placed here on academics, athletics and sports but not everyone wants to do sports, and not everyone is completely in love with academics. Although you can love sports or academics and still love gaming, I think that we need something that’s a little bit for everyone,” Kerry Hogan, Cedar Shoals Media Specialist, said.
Introducing video games into the mix of activities to participate in at school gives students the opportunity to interact with each other on common ground.
“It’s something new, you know what I’m saying? It gives people the chance to connect with each other,” tournament participant and sophomore Joseph Gray said. “It’s all fun.”
When the Cedar Shoals media center first started incorporating video games into extracurricular activities in the early 2000s, the idea was new and mostly unheard of. Video game tournaments may be accepted at school now, but that was not always the case. When the idea was introduced, it was met with criticism.
“At the time though it was controversial, some people had a real problem with it because they were like, ‘Libraries are for reading and learning. What are you doing?’” Hogan said.
Some difficulties in organizing the tournaments have arisen in the past, such as choosing which games to play as some are too long or not appropriate. Game consoles such as the Xbox One becoming obsolete or less popular has been another issue to overcome.
This year, in order to increase the accessibility of the tournaments and fix issues surrounding using older game consoles, the decision was made to start using the Nintendo Switch.
“Most people have played on a Switch at least once. Not everybody has an Xbox. Some people do PlayStation, some people just do online gaming, but everybody at some point has touched a switch,” Hogan said.
The tournaments being built in a way that a wide variety of students can enjoy only further makes this a good opportunity for students to participate in something they’re interested in at school.
“I think it’s important because it gives people the opportunity to unleash the built up rage that they have at school,” Gray said.
The Mario Kart tournament, which started October 2, named sophomore Ellis Garrett its winner on October 9.
