Be on your best manners, students
Great news if you live in Norway and go to the Garnes Vidaregåande Skole in Bergen: your school is going to offer an elective class in eSports starting this August. This will be offered parallel to sportsball-based classes such as soccer and handball. If enrolled, you’ll be studying eSports for five hours per week over a three-year program.
Don’t think you’re just going to come to class and play games all day — you’ll be doing physical exercises focusing on your reflexes, strength, and endurance. What kind of exercises aren’t exactly known, but maybe you’ll be arm wrestling or doing wrist curls, who knows?
You’ll be graded not only on game knowledge but also skills, teamwork, and communication, so you better ‘carry hard’ or otherwise you might not pass the class.
“Why did you fail your eSports class, little Ingrid?” your father will probably ask. You’ll be forced to reply, “Because papa, I’m a bad kid, a feeder, and a shitty noob. I probably should uninstall the game and just stick to something a little bit more my speed, like Barbie Horse Adventure. At least, that is what the other kids in my class and my teacher told me.”
Even if you’re sucking, you’ll be sucking in style as the school will be providing gaming chairs and high-end PCs with Nvidia GeForce GTX 980Ti video cards. However you’ll have to provide your own mouse, keyboard, and headset, so you better go in debt because no one wants the kid with the non-mechanical non-RGB keyboard on their team. “Get loud or get out” is the motto my non-existent friends and I use. If we can’t hear your keyboard overpowering your voice in our Discord chat, you are committing keyboard blasphemy.
The games you’ll be studying haven’t been finalized, but at least two will be on offer the first year and popular titles such as Counter-Strike, League of Legends, StarCraft, and Dota 2 are being discussed. Sorry, Solitaire players, there is always next year!
With eSports growing ever larger, I believe this is a trend that will continue and not just in Europe and Asia. Surely this will lead to the eventual downfall of the NFL, right? I for one can’t wait to chant, “Sportsball is finally dead, long live eSports!”
Norwegian high school puts e-sports and gaming on the timetable [Ars Technica]
