RWU Esports Focuses On Community

The Roger Williams University Esports Team and the Tabletop Gaming Club collaborated through the RWU Community Bridge Builders fund! Retro Game Night was on Monday, April 27th, from 8-10 pm, and featured a variety of board games in the GHH Attrium alongside Wiis in G05. Attendees were given a ticket when they arrived to be used on a number of door prizes, ranging from a mouse to a TV. If you played any of the games, whether it’s the board games or the video games, you earn an extra ticket for the prizes. At the end of the event, winners will be pulled from each prize’s pool of tickets. With the event held through the RWU Bridge Builders Fund, the two organizations are aiming to create more community connections on campus. For example, even though both Esports and Tabletop are centered around games of different varieties, the two have never collaborated before. With the event, the opportunity was created for the two to come together and make gaming more accessible to RWU students.  All students were encouraged to come to the event, even if they weren’t interested in gaming. People were transported back to the arcades of their childhood, where they could look back on the games they used to play with their families, and got to experience them again with their college friends. While gaming is fun, it is also an amazing way to create unforgettable memories. Nights like those are the ones that you will look back on when thinking about your time in college, thinking about the quality time you spent just hanging out with your friends. It draws away from the antisocial stereotypes that surround gaming culture, and helps to bring eyes towards the real reason a lot of people play games: to have fun with friends. To understand how events like these can help break the stereotypes around gamers, I interviewed RJ Rood, an Esports team member, and AvaLei Yedynak, one of the co-heads of the Esport teams. 

What does this event mean for the Esports community?

RJ Rood 

This event allows for the Esports community to broaden their reach. Allows us to put our face out there, kind of show everyone that like, “Oh, hey, we’re here. We’re doing stuff, you should come join, come play games with us,” things like that.

AvaLei Yedynak

It’s a way for us to branch out, especially since not a lot of people who come to this school know we have an Esports team. It gives us more publicity, in a sense, and definitely puts our name out there.

and then pushing against the stereotypes that you see for video gamers, Esports players, of that, anti social nature. How does this event also kind of help you guys come out and show that you’re here and push against those stereotypes?

RJ Rood  

It allows us to push against the stereotypes by creating a place where people can be social. If you’re in Esports already and are slightly anti-social, come to the event and you can meet other people that like things like you, so you have something to start talking about, and then maybe you can make friends. Or if you’re not in Esports already and you like playing games, come to the event and you’ll meet other people that like games, you can see what games people are playing and maybe find people to play with.

AvaLei Yedynak 

Well, we definitely connect with each other, like we all become friends of sorts, and we have friends, obviously, outside this club, we come in all different ways, and from what I’ve seen, we’re not all like the stereotypes people perceive us as. 

Thank you. 

Trying to go against those stereotypes helps teams like Esports grow and find more players who are really interested in helping the sport grow. Events like these are great examples of how certain groups may look one way from an outside perspective, but once you get a look at what goes on behind the scenes, you get an entirely different view.

By: Brenna Medeiros and RJ Rood