After he finished school this summer, Adrian Ma worked tirelessly to improve his ranking on the online game League of Legends. There were people, chiefly his parents, who felt that spending 15 hours a day slaughtering monsters might not help him to gain admission to a university.
They were wrong. Adrian, 17, from Houston, Texas, is now one of America’s first video game scholars and a star player on the newly formed League of Legends varsity team at Robert Morris University in Chicago.
Just as promising basketball and football players are lured to prestigious institutions with sporting scholarships, so Adrian, who is ranked third among the multitude of League of Legends players in North America, has been awarded a scholarship covering half his tuition fees and living expenses, worth about $19,000 (£11,500) a year.
The university had announced this summer that it would be recruiting “eSports” players. This had been the idea of Kurt Melcher, the university’s associate athletic director.
Besides football, basketball and track and field scholars, “we offer scholarships for non-traditional sports”, he said. There is a cheerleading scholarship for female applicants, and a similar award for ten-pin bowlers.
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This year Mr Melcher began looking at League of Legends. He noted the complexity of the games, the millions of players who competed around the world and its steady development as a spectator sport. Unofficial clubs had formed at some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the land. “I thought, if we could offer a scholarship, this would give us an edge,” he said.
In May, after giving a detailed presentation to the college president, Robert Morris announced that it was recruiting a varsity League of Legends team.
“I thought it was a joke,” said Adrian. “Then I heard from ‘AGeNt’ ” — the League of Legends name used by Ferris Ganzman, a top player who has been appointed as the university’s coach and is busy recruiting a squad of 45 gamers.