Filtering by
- All Subjects: Balkans
- All Subjects: Scrimmages
- Creators: School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership
- Creators: Houck, Bennett
Esports is a rapidly growing virtual competitive space that is projected to surpass physical sports in the near future. Given that Esports is considered to be in its infancy, it has only been recently introduced at the high school level. Our group connected with local high school Esports teams in order to evaluate its efficiency. We found that players at this level are lacking a connection to other competitive teams and consistent practice. In the Esports world, practice with another team of equal level is called a “scrim”. In an effort to combat this issue, we created a platform named Clear Scrims to connect high school and collegiate Esport teams across the country with other teams of equivalent level. This platform will allow individuals to sign up, register with their competitive team, and provide available times to scrim. The platform then would be able to use their self-reported ingame rank to match them with worthy opponents for the most quality scrim experience. Teams playing into the growing sector of Esports need a structure like Clear Scrims to increase skill level and communication. In addition, our platform has a review component where teams and individuals score their opponent to see if they played as advertised. This component will help specify our matchmaking program but also work to dismantle the culture of bad manners or toxicity in Esports. Our site, Clear Scrims, will engender more competition and thus more opportunities for players to practice and hone in their skills.
Esports is a rapidly growing virtual competitive space that is projected to surpass physical sports in the near future. Given that Esports is considered to be in its infancy, it has only been recently introduced at the high school level. Our group connected with local high school Esports teams in order to evaluate its efficiency. We found that players at this level are lacking a connection to other competitive teams and consistent practice. In the Esports world, practice with another team of equal level is called a “scrim”. In an effort to combat this issue, we created a platform named Clear Scrims to connect high school and collegiate Esport teams across the country with other teams of equivalent level. This platform will allow individuals to sign up, register with their competitive team, and provide available times to scrim. The platform then would be able to use their self-reported ingame rank to match them with worthy opponents for the most quality scrim experience. Teams playing into the growing sector of Esports need a structure like Clear Scrims to increase skill level and communication. In addition, our platform has a review component where teams and individuals score their opponent to see if they played as advertised. This component will help specify our matchmaking program but also work to dismantle the culture of bad manners or toxicity in Esports. Our site, Clear Scrims, will engender more competition and thus more opportunities for players to practice and hone in their skills.
As evidenced by the 1991-5 War in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia, culturally-relevant and internationally recognizable symbols of culture, like Stari Most in Bosnia and the Old Town of Dubrovnik, were destroyed with the purpose of manipulating the physical memories of the communities, thereby directly affecting the cultural identities of the communities residing there. As it stands, scholarship on the subject of memory in post-war areas has failed to consider the effects of space/place on memory, consequently failing to provide a viable theoretical framework to explain the interplay of space/place, memory, and identity. This paper is an effort to connect the current scholarship on memory, its function and effects on identity, with the realities of the physical environment in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia and their function of imposed confrontation, and thus recollection, of the War. The purpose of my thesis is to put city landscapes (private, uncrated memories) and museum narratives (public, curated memories) in communication to demonstrate how influential a factor space/place is in determining collective memory in a Balkan context. Cultural memory is at once incredibly vulnerable to reconstruction and massively determinate of group identity, thereby necessitating a deeper understanding of its determinant factors and the present uses of such factors.
