After practicing how to do an interview and taking notes to multimodally compose an essay I had to start researching my future field working assignment

Stiven Hernandez 

Writing for The Social Sciences 

April 5, 2022 

When it comes to video games there is a lot to talk about. Some people see it as a waste of time, others see it as a way to entertain themselves or to have fun, and some see it as a career. I remember playing video games for as long as I have memory. Everything from old phone games like snake or tree Column races to VR games. I have owned consoles from Nintendo, Xbox to PlayStation. I even use my own desktop computer to play video games. Gaming has always been a part of my life and that is why I decided to fieldwork professionally gaming, it is the only area of gaming that I have not been part of. 

Professional Gaming has been an enigma for me. I do not understand how people can stare at a screen for so long practicing their aim, going over strategies, and checking out the new “meta.” As a gamer, I enjoy playing games for extended periods of time, but when you are spending 8+ hours playing games, it seems excessive. However, these players are not spending all of those hours just playing games, they use dedicated apps to improve specific things. When a player has “aim” is when they are able to put the mouse crosshair in a certain place with accuracy. There is an app I am familiar with, Aimlab. With Aimlab you can practice your aim without being in a match, becoming a very unique tool to save time and keep you away from losing a match while trying to improve your aim. 

The team I will be observing will be Tidewater Esports. Tidewater Esports is a small competitive team in North America (USA) competing to become one of the big teams in the world of competitive gaming. This team’s main focus is on the game Valorant by Riot Games. Riot Games is a well-known company, being the creators of League of Legends, a game that has been in the top played games for over 10 years. I will be conducting my observations on the Discord platform. Discord is a common app in the gaming community. On Discord, you can create a server and have text chats and voice chats. During games or just when you want to hang out with friends, you can join the voice chat as if it was a group call or you can text in any of the chats as if it was a group chat. The best part is that there are no limits to how many people can enter a Discord Server. I will be joining the players in individual voice chats for their interviews so they can be themselves and keep everything we talk about between me, him, and my professor. There will be three team members being interviewed about their own experiences and how their lives have been affected by the decision to play games professionally. There are many things that we do not know about the players, like what drives them? What do they want to accomplish and why? What are some struggles they have to go through when dedicating their life to this? Discord allows the users to share their computer screens, this is how I will be able to observe their practice matches.