Silas White

Once relegated to seedy arcades and the basements of trade shows, the world of competitive gaming has since grown into an international phenomenon. Esports, competitive gaming at the professional level, has millions of fans worldwide . Streaming services and sponsorship deals let some professional players earn serious salaries, sometimes in the seven figure range. While the stakes may be smaller at the collegiate level, the passion is the same.

Ansar Lemon, a senior at Cornell, is president of the Esports at Cornell club. The club was started in 2016 as an Overwatch and Starcraft club, but has since grown to be about esports in general. Lemon said the club has seen massive growth since its conception.

“We have 300+ members, and we have a variety of games,” Lemon said. “Overwatch, League of Legends, Hearthstone, Counter Strike: GO, and we’re still adding on games.”

Lemon first became interested in esports because he was a fan of Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft series, a sci-fi-themed real-time strategy game where players try to destroy an enemy player’s base while defending their own. The first Starcraft was released in 1998, and is frequently credited for starting the esports scene in South Korea. The second Starcraft game, released in 2010, is commonly considered to be the game responsible for popularizing esports internationally. In recent years the series has declined in popularity, due to newer and more technologically advanced games being released.

“Starcraft used to be the pinnacle of esports, it was like the example of esports,” Lemon said. “I really loved that game, I loved watching tournaments and competitive players compete. That got me interested in esports.”

Lemon became interested in Overwatch, also developed by Blizzard Entertainment, when it was released in 2016. He had wanted to start a club for the game, but instead decided to merge with the Starcraft club, which eventually became the current Esports at Cornell club as more games and teams were added to the roster.

Esports at Cornell is sponsored by Tespa, a network of college esports clubs that provides members with event support, merchandise and cash prizes, including scholarship money. Tespa has over 270 chapters across the U.S. and Canada, and is one of the largest organizers of collegiate tournaments.

Lemon said many teams compete against other collegiate teams in official tournaments. Last semester the club had four separate Overwatch teams enter into an official Tespa tournament, but they failed to be among the top performers. As an Overwatch fan and player himself, Lemon said improving the Overwatch teams is one of his goals.

“Our A team is actually very good, but the semester is very busy for everyone …  we try to have plenty of time to practice but finding the schedule that works for everyone is tricky,” Lemon said.

Some colleges, like University of California at Irvine, offer scholarships for esports players. Lemon said he expects more colleges to offer scholarships and officially recognize esport teams in the near future.

“Some tournaments are already being shown on ESPN,” Lemon said. “I think that’s going to become the norm. At the collegiate level, I think more and more schools are going to offer scholarships for esports teams, and have dedicated coaches hired by the university itself.”

According to ESPN, more than 50 colleges already have officially recognized esport teams, and the number is continuously growing. If the numbers are any indication, esports are here to stay.

Esports is making its way to Ithaca College as well. Manny Sanchez is a freshman at IC and part of the college’s unofficial League of Legends club. The club doesn’t hold official meetings as it is still going through the process of legitimizing itself, but members like Manny are passionate about the game.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the most sprawling, massive video games to be released for a Nintendo console. It’s a game designed to eat entire weekends, as players spend dozens, or even hundreds of hours finding every little secret the world has to offer. Finishing it is a serious time investment.

For Ithaca College senior Benjamin LeBlanc, it’s Tuesday.

LeBlanc is a speedrunner, somebody who plays a video game as quickly as possible to finish the game in a fraction of the time it would take someone playing the game normally. Typically this is accomplished by having advanced knowledge of the game’s mechanics, or knowing how to perform certain exploits. Speedruns for games are sometimes split into two or more categories depending on certain criteria, such as the amount of content that needs to be cleared, or whether or not specific software bugs are allowed. Software bugs, commonly just called bugs, are unintentional failures in a game’s code that allow for scenarios not planned for by the game developers.

LeBlanc is the world record holder in one of several categories for Breath of the Wild speedrunners, the all-shrines run, which requires a player to clear 120 mini-challenges within the game. His time is seven hours, 38 minutes and 49 seconds. LeBlanc said one of the hard parts of the run is staying focused for such a long amount of time.

“Sometimes you end up making a big mistake, and it’s kind of rattling when you know you have so much more to go,” LeBlanc said. “That’s one of the challenges. It’s very easy to perform all the tricks, but it’s another challenge just to be able to perform well for that long.”

The first game to be widely played for speedruns was the original Doom in 1994, during the early days of the internet. Since then the community has grown. The website speedrun.com, created for posting the time it takes to finish a game, has 174,294 registered users.

Even though LeBlanc holds the world record for Breath of the Wild, he still attempts the run roughly once a week to try and improve his own time. He said one of the barriers of performing the run is its length, because he must balance schoolwork and a social life.

“I have to plan everything ahead of time to know how much time I can actually spend playing the game,” he said.

LeBlanc also livestreams himself performing the run on Twitch, a livestreaming platform owned by Amazon. Twitch users typically stream themselves playing video games, although other creative content is also supported. LeBlanc streams under the username ILoveVark, and has 4,614 followers.

“It’s kind of humbling, and kind of cool that a lot of people like to watch it,” LeBlanc said. “It’s something so dumb to me, that anyone would actually want to watch it, but I think it’s pretty cool people like to watch one of my interests.”

LeBlanc has done speedruns of other games in the past. He said the game he took most seriously before Breath of the Wild was Luigi’s Mansion, a game about capturing ghosts and exploring a haunted mansion, for Nintendo Gamecube. LeBlanc held several world records across multiple categories for Luigi’s Mansion through 2017, but all of his times have since been beaten.

LeBlanc is planning on attending the next Games Done Quick, a semi-annual charity marathon where gamers speedrun games to raise money for non-profits. Speedruns are streamed on Twitch for viewers at home, but the event also serves as a mini-convention for speedrunners to network.  LeBlanc attended a previous GDQ held in January of this year, where he said he had a positive experience.

“It was really fun … you build a certain friendship [with other runners], and it was really cool to go for the first time,” he said. “A lot of them are my age and also going to school and living normal lives outside of [speedrunning].”

LeBlanc said he might speedrun other games in the future, but for now his sole focus is improving his time for Breath of the Wild.

In the video, LeBlanc shows us a trick to save time. Normally this shrine would take a few minutes, but LeBlanc said without explaining himself step-by-step his process takes 30-40 seconds.

Horror. Fantasy. Science fiction. The supernatural. The seventh annual Ithaca Fantastik film festival will have it all.

This year the festival will be returning to downtown Ithaca from Oct. 26-Nov.4, and will feature a selection of independent and vintage films screening at Cinemapolis. The community-driven festival started in 2012 as a three-day film festival and has since grown into something larger. In its current iteration, the festival will also feature art shows, live Q&As with filmmakers, virtual reality experiences and special events like a  Drunken Cinema night.

Justin Langlois, a panel moderator and programmer for the festival, said festivals like Ithaca Fantastik are appealing because they expose audiences to something new.

“These genre festivals… bring out these true and really fantastic perspectives that you don’t regularly get in the multiplexes,” he said.

Langlois said cult movies hold a special appeal that traditional films don’t always have.

“It’s a unique experience to get a taste of fresh talent, a taste of a cult classic that maybe didn’t get it’s play in its day,” he said. “It’s cool to see it on a big screen instead of on a torrent or something … the communal experience of seeing something in the theater is always fantastic.”

Mike Skvarla, another volunteer for the festival, said genre films reach audiences in ways that traditional films sometimes can’t.

“This genre of film is so extreme, it’s so outlandish, it’s two steps above what other movies sort of settle for,” Skvarla said. “This fantastic genre can go above and beyond and really challenge the audience in terms of what they think about things.”

Langlois has also done volunteer work with the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. He said his experience working for Ithaca Fantastik has given him the chance to have a louder voice.

“Fantasia is just huge and ever-growing, but Ithaca is great because there’s more breathing room,” he said. “It’s really nice to have a seat on the big boy’s table… and have my two cents go really far. I suggested the Drunken Cinema night, and now we’re doing it.”

Langlois said film had always been a passion of his, but he didn’t used to take it seriously. He used to host zombie movie nights for his friends, and as a high school teacher at Chateauguay Valley Regional High School he started teaching a class on film, which made him realize he could pursue film as an academic field. Langlois pursued a master’s degree in film from Concordia University in Montreal and has continued to study it.

“I’ve just been so drawn to horror and genre cinema that I’ve just consistently written about it,” Langlois said.

Featured films are curated by Langlois and other programmers. Films are grouped into series connected by theme, such as Cinema Pur, international, and throwback thrillers. Nellie Wallace, a writer for the festival, said members of the curation team go to other film festivals and pick films they think the Ithaca audience will gravitate towards. Some movies are followed by a Q&A panel with filmmakers, producers and actors, which Wallace said is part of the festival’s appeal.

“It’s a great way to get some educational information about films and the filmmaking process while you’re enjoying these great films as well,” Wallace said.

Skvarla said the festival is possible in a town like Ithaca because of the open-minded population.

“This town has a lot of creativity, a lot of arts, a lot of people who think differently,” he said. “We just want to show them a wide variety of things and expand their mind and get their creative energy fix.”

Below is my video coverage of Ithaca Underground and Ithaca Fantastik’s Fright Nite at Sacred Root Kava Bar.