UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Thanks to a second-year student from the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), the Penn State Esports club hosted its first in-person tournament last month. The Nittany Invitational, held in Alumni Hall, welcomed seven teams, 65 competitors and nearly 300 spectators in what the club said was one of the largest annual collegiate video gaming tournaments on the East Coast.
Christian Wasta, a human-centered design and development (HCDD) major, began playing esports during his first year at Penn State. When he became president of the club, Wasta said, he made it his mission to create a collaborative event for students with similar interests that reached beyond the University’s borders.
“I made it a goal of mine to run the new invitational,” Wasta said. “We want to support our students’ hobbies — so if they’re competitive at video games, we want to give them a platform to do that.”
With a prize pool of $4,000 and a sponsorship from the American Dairy Association North East “Powered by Chocolate Milk” campaign, the tournament attracted schools from as near as Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, and as far as Amarillo College in Amarillo, Texas. Over the course of two days, the schools competed in three video games: Rocket League, League of Legends and Overwatch.
The College of IST staged the event with assistance from other areas of Penn State. Students from the College of Arts and Architecture oversaw graphics and visual elements, and students from the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and the Smeal College of Business spearheaded the livestream production and logistics.
Wasta, who was assisted by fellow HCDD major Matthew Combs, credited his IST training for helping him keep the large-scale event running smoothly. He said he relied on the skills he learned at Penn State to resolve technical issues, like those that resulted from more than 700 virtual participants attempting to stream the tournament online.
“We had a faulty switch box on stage that caused some players to disconnect from the game,” Wasta said. “To fix that, we had to do trial-and-error and see what the solution was, and we ended up switching it out. It was a real-world networking and telecommunications class because we had to set up computers, work with Ethernet and make sure we knew the correct port numbers.”
Wasta said the College of IST offers students like him opportunities to see how their coursework intertwines real-world responsibilities with their passions. The Nittany Invitational is just one example of that.
“My two biggest interests are computers and art,” he said. “I wanted to combine them in a way that interests me the most, and I figured HCDD would be the best since I get to do both design practices and coding classes.”