In a second-year university class, almost all the hopes and confusions of the e-sports education and e-sports industry are concentrated.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Geek Park (ID: geekpark), author Wan Mingyu, Song Desheng.
Like basketball and NBA, football and the World Cup, the e-sports event has become a sports project that extends the life cycle of the game, and is highly technological and ornamental. The complete industrial chain with complex division of labor supports the value of 10 billion. E-sports “eyeball economy”.
As the capital brags about e-sports, the industry is expanding rapidly, and the demand for talent in the market is becoming more and more urgent. According to incomplete statistics, the current number of practitioners in the e-sports industry is 50,000, and the number of job vacancies is 260,000. By 2020, the talent gap will be expanded to 500,000.
In this context, the Communication University of China opened an e-sports related major in 2017 (Digital Media Art Digital Entertainment), which is the first professional in the e-sports education wave with 211 undergraduate certification. .
The first, one class, twenty students. In the second year of enrollment, the school invited senior e-sports practitioners to teach as a mentor. The students began to have full contact with the industry. They had courses related to the competition and began to engage in deep contact with the organizers of the e-sports. Hold some small competitions.
This class is like a test field for general education in the e-sports industry: the company is exploring a reasonable mechanism for cultivating counterparts and forming a reserve army to deal with the explosive development of the e-sports industry; teachers are thinking about how to construct an e-sports discipline. Industry experience translates into more theoretical subject knowledge; students are in the ivory tower that determines the direction of life, to clarify whether they want to become, or become an e-sports practitioner.
The first “eat crab” player
As a mentor, Zhang Rongcai, 33, was “smashed” by his students at the “Electronicity Course” of his first university. In his opening remarks, Zhang Rongcai presupposed that the students “do not understand the e-sports industry” judgment, which caused a few students to “reverse”.
Although he manages a large team in the leading electric competition company in China, but to convince the students of this room and pass on the knowledge and experience that survived the professional experience, Zhang Rongcai needs at least one whole semester.
It’s the industry that is called “e-sports”, which is what is called “e-sports” – it’s the “ninth art” in the hearts of a small group of people, and it’s another group’s “most” Do not work and “electronic heroin.”
The long-standing polarization perception has continued for many years, and until recently it has become a commercial turmoil under capital. This will inevitably make today’s students, and once Zhang Rongcai, sensitive to every label and evaluation.
In April 2019, the National Bureau of Statistics and other three departments officially released 13 new occupations to the society, among which e-sportsmen and e-sports operators were among them. According to incomplete statistics, the current number of practitioners in the e-sports industry is 50,000, and the number of job vacancies is 260,000. By 2020, the talent gap will be expanded to 500,000.
From the overall planning and implementation of the event, to the live broadcast of the event, video and audio production, the e-sports operator covers the entire process of the event; and the e-sportsmen are not only participating in the e-sports competition, but also the e-sports project sparring, research The e-sports team dynamics provide new requirements for e-sports data analysis.
Under the gap, a slogan of e-sports education that is mass-delivering talents to the industry is on the rise. By the end of 2018, there were more than 50 colleges and social institutions involved in related fields in the country–the commercial institutions mainly focused on e-sports training, and launched services such as youth training, e-sports art test, and anchor interpretation training. The colleges and universities Opened a three- or four-year program in the field of e-sports.
Cooperating with e-sports industry organizations is a common mode for universities to start related majors. Zhong Chuan cooperated with China Head Sports Competition Corporation Quantum Sports VSPN (hereinafter referred to as VSPN) to launch the first professional with 211 undergraduate certification. Zhang Rongcai is the industry instructor from VSPN.
In 2017, the major was enrolled for the first time, and 20 students stood out from more than 900 candidates through the art test, becoming the first “crab-eating” player.
Zhang Rongcai and the digital media art major (digital entertainment direction) class students take photos | Photo source: Quantum Sports VSPN
First class
In early March of this year, Zhang Rongcai and his students met for the first time. In the professional class of the first semester of the first e-sports major in the middle school, the course name was “Electric Competition Planning and Production”.
Standing on the podium, Zhang Rongcai, who is tall and tall, with broken hair, speaks softly and whispers, reminding 20 students to prepare for class. Zhang Rongcai did not teach from the pastTest. In 2004, with five hundred dollars in his pocket, he took the train on the train to Shanghai, and went to participate in the selection of a small e-sports club, thus entering the e-sports industry.
For more than a decade, Zhang Rongcai has had a short professional career experience. After that, he started a copywriting promotion at the E-sports club, and then began to get involved in the live broadcast of the competition, video production, etc. Now he is the head of the VSPN OBS department, managing The team of more than 150 people led the planning and execution of major domestic electric competitions.
In the classroom, in order to quickly get acquainted with each other, Zhang Rongcai proposed that each classmate take turns to talk about their respective “types of games” and “if they enter the e-sports industry, the employment direction of interest”. At this point, a male student with a childish, thick bangs covering his forehead suddenly raised his hand.
Because he was slightly dissatisfied with the judgment mentioned by Zhang Rongcai, he bowed his back and threw a series of questions. “Why do you think we don’t know much about the e-sports industry?” “How do you know?” “Who told you?” In the classroom, more than 20 people brushed their eyes to look at the boys, and then they focused their attention on the podium, waiting for the teacher to answer.
“This is not to disparage everyone. There are many young people who love e-sports to come to our company for interviews. Although they have successfully entered the job, in my evaluation system, they are also newcomers, and there are too few things in contact with the industry. “Zhang Rongcai said that he was very comfortable and determined.”
There is a page in the PPT course prepared by Zhang Rongcai. The modules of different colors define the most important three types of division of the VSPN e-sports team – creative planning, event production and execution, and project management. Among them, the number of positions involved in the production and execution of the event is the largest, a total of 25. VSPN has a studio system inside, and the team independently undertakes different types of events. The studio manager is called the producer.
So, Zhang Rongcai also regards the whole class as a small studio. According to their respective advantages and interests, each person is divided into different parts of the event production. In advance, Zhang Rongcai will finish the knowledge points of the execution of the event; then the questions will be discussed by the students in groups, and they will come to the stage to talk about their respective solutions; finally, they will lead the students to plan a campus electric competition.
Electric competition Professional-grade broadcast equipment | Source: Quantum Sports vs. PNPN
Everyone loves to play games, but e-sports companies can’t recruit people
As the first Chinese e-sports practitioner, Zhang Rongcai first directed a large-scale electric competition in 2007. At that time, even the OB car could not afford to rent, he just scoured a second-hand switch.Taiwan, ready for other live broadcast equipment, drive from Shanghai to the venue Wuhan.
With Zhang Rongcai, there are only three or four people in the event planning team. Zhang Rongcai took all the big things, such as moving boxes, loading equipment, subtitles, animating effects, guiding broadcasts, and so on. He also completed the entire process of the event. In the interview, he reached out and made a stroke, about a centimeter thick. Nowadays, the success of a large-scale event has not been easily won by a grassroots team composed of several people.
The e-sports industry has experienced explosive growth in recent years, and the scale of the audience is tens of thousands. In July 2017, Zhang Rongcai led the team to complete the electric competition for the first time in the Shanghai Oriental Sports Center. At the end of 2017, it was also a million people. Under the premise of successful completion, game manufacturers have higher requirements for the visual presentation of the event.
“The cost of the project is getting higher and higher. It used to be 10,000 or tens of thousands, and now it is tens of millions or even billions.” Zhang Rongcai explained, “The industry is developing rapidly, but the industry can also train talents. Maintaining the same, the speed of talent delivery is completely different from the speed of business development.”
Zhang Rongcai divides VSPN’s event directors into three levels – as a person in charge of a large department like himself, a generation with more than 10 years of experience; as a studio director, he is able to independently undertake projects of 10 million or more. The second generation; executive directors who are slightly lacking in the experience of a million-level project are generally three generations.
“It took me nearly ten years to train three second-generation directors,” Zhang Rongcai said to Geek Park. Traditional e-sports talents are like masters. This kind of training is to explore potential in project execution. Newcomers continue to give him more stress-prone projects. “The efficiency is too low, and now most of the three generations of directors are struggling to face a million-level project. But concentrating on cultivating professionals has also become VSPN. A big competitive edge.”
Building a career in e-sports with colleges and universities is a way to improve the efficiency of talent transfer from the roots. The academic community also pays attention to the development of the e-sports industry. Quantum Sports VSPN COO Zheng can remember that in recent years, the teachers of the School of Animation and Art of the Communication University of China have visited the company several times. The staff led them to visit the venues where the events were produced, to understand the planning process and the shooting process of the eSports reality show.
As an academic seminar, VSPN even systematically presented them as a business secret work form and technical documents for the execution of the event. In the middle school class, another producer of VSPN, Zhang Yuchen, showed an Excel table to the students. The text content has been vaguely processed, and it presents a document that a staff member needs to implement and submit in a large-scale e-sports event, “a total of 154.”
The teachers were “very surprised” after learning. “I didn’t expect a commercial company to be like this.”