The Red Bulletin Oct/Nov 2020 (US)

“This is a whole different dynamic
these days. Gaming can really
bring you career opportunities.”
FULL SAIL UNIVERSITY
Members of
Armada, Full Sail
University’s
varsity esports
team, go up
against their
Overwatch
challengers.
at a venue they have over at a Buffalo
Wild Wings.”
Alpizar tells Hernandez and Danaher
about Arslan Ash, the Red Bull-sponsored
Tekken player from Pakistan who
seemingly came from out of nowhere to
beat a South Korean master named Knee
at the 2019 EVO event and took the
mantle of world champion. Tekken had
opened doors in unexpected ways for
Pakistan and its people, he explains; a
country often in the headlines for stories
about terrorism or geopolitics was now
making news about video games. “It was
just an excellent thing in esports,” he says.
“There’s no negative connotation for
people from Pakistan ’cause the common
person doesn’t care. People that play
games don’t care. With esports being
global now and picking up steam, it’s so
easy for any community to just step out
and be like, ‘Oh, hey, we’re opening to
make it more public. Hey, we’re from
Pakistan. Hey, we’re from Jordan. Hey,
we’re from all these places, all who can
play.’ There’s a 7-year-old girl who won
a Pokémon grand final from Indonesia.
It’s like this is our path to world peace.”
Full Sail’s Hall of Fame week has
been an annual celebration for
more than a decade. A select
coterie of graduates who have done well
in their chosen field and given back to
the school in some way are invited back
each year to be inducted and speak to
current students. In that sense the school
feels like the pipeline it advertises itself
to be—a place where people who know,
more or less, what they want to learn are
connected with a workplace that wants
their skills. “Everybody wants everybody
to move,” Kitelyn says. “Everybody’s
almost all in together to keep building
and providing some infrastructure to
the industry. Because obviously the
economic impact has been huge so far.”
One graduate being honored in
March is Erin Eberhardt, who graduated
a decade ago and now works at Blizzard,
the L.A.-based gaming giant. Raised on a
7-acre plot in rural Ohio, Eberhardt was
a free-range child, but in the evenings
the family gathered to watch her father,
an air traffic controller, game with
friends. “We had chairs sitting behind
Dad, and we’d be all like peering over
and would pop out, just screaming like
maniacs, like little kids.” Eberhardt went
to a traditional university but found it
uninspiring. She got a Full Sail degree in
2010. When she entered the job market,
YouTube and other streaming services
were just ramping up. Twitch didn’t yet
exist. She got a job at Disney working in
development and then moved over to
PlayStation for five years.
Esports experienced a surge in 2016
when the Overwatch League was
announced. Eberhardt applied to the
game’s maker, Blizzard Entertainment,
and got hired. Since then she’s seen a
steady influx of professionals from other
sectors into the gaming world. “We’re
seeing a lot of people from traditional TV
and film coming in, a lot from the NFL,
the NBA,” she says. “We just have this
amazing nexus of these awesome minds
all working together on this product.”
She predicts that the next generation
of hires is going to come straight from
the world of collegiate esports. “This is
exactly what is growing the next future
generation of who is working in esports,”
she says. “It’s in the collegiate level.
Pretty much every single major [at Full
Sail] could find themselves working in
esports at one point because it’s kind of
‘all hands on deck’ right now.” Full Sail
is feting Eberhardt in part for her role
in staging a massive live event last year
around a game called Hearthstone.
Danaher, one of Eberhardt’s mentees,
views the Hearthstone event as a key
moment in her own development. “It was
perfect,” she says.
The arc of Danaher and Eberhardt’s
respective trajectories in some sense
mirrors the growth of the industry.
A decade ago, when Eberhardt was
entering the job market, gaming was still
an incipient industry. Full Sail didn’t
have an esports team. Now Danaher’s
options stretch out attractively in
multiple directions. Like Eberhardt,
Danaher grew up gaming. “I was the
nerdy girl that liked video games,” she
says. She did theater and sports, too, and
thrived on the team sports environment
and the human connection. Now she
Full Sail alum Erin
Eberhardt now
works at Blizzard
Entertainment.
THE RED BULLETIN 65