LA PROVINCIA / Diario de Las Palmas opens a space for debate every Monday, in collaboration with eSport Talent Canarias, on the practice of electronic sports (eSports) written by gamers, psychologists, teachers, lawyers, economists, doctors and sports specialists, in audiovisual communication and new technologies, which will offer an exhaustive and innovative analysis to discover an activity that is not only sporting but also has important educational, economic, legal, cultural and social repercussions.
It was almost the summer of 2016, camera in hand I was ready to record a concert in the Jameos del Agua auditorium, exercising the profession in which I have lived for almost a decade, when I received the news that the Tenerife Lan Party began its eleventh edition in the month of July.
My taxes, like that of all the Canaries, were destined time and time again to technological macro events on the island of Tenerife. There was nothing beyond. Gamers who wanted to enter the competitive world of video games in person had to take a plane ticket, travel to Tenerife, pay for accommodation and, of course, pay for the entrance to the event. As always, I felt like a second-class Canary living on the easternmost outlying island of the archipelago, more than 400 kilometers away from Tenerife.
The complaint of a good part of the gamer community of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, which began to burn in forums and WhatsApp and Facebook groups, promoted the birth of what is today the largest network of face-to-face video game tournaments in the Canary Islands; the sports Competition.
An electronic sports competition that from its beginnings fled from the trends of the large esports industries and focused on reaching those places where nobody wanted or dared to go. The objective? Find the best esports players in the Canary Islands by holding municipal tournaments where players and teams fight to qualify at the island level and later represent their island at the regional level.
They called us crazy. The big companies in the sector made fun of those four nobody who, from a small island outside the capital of the Canary Islands, wanted to organize a video game league just as the gamers wanted.
There was and is hardly any budget. None of us lived or do live in the esports sector, but the whole team had and continue to have something in common: we are gamers and we really want to.
This is how a producer of television programs like me, got together with an events producer, an audiovisual producer and a sound, lighting and animation company (4 friends) to together create a network of tournaments from the bottom up, with talks training and educational, with workshops throughout the year and with the impulse that the community needed to start creating a 100% Canarian league that would encourage the creation of local teams and that would recognize the talent of gamers from every corner of the archipelago.
Arrecife was the first municipality, to which Tinajo, Yaiza and Teguise joined together with the Lanzarote council through which we face all four in an island qualifier.
Fuerteventura was added with La Oliva and Puerto del Rosario as well as Tenerife with La Laguna.
Many others repeated (Arrecife for the third time, Yaiza for the second time…) and each time the project was expanded with educational talks in institutes led by professionals such as Nira Santana (graduate in Fine Arts and Master in Feminist Studies, Gender Equality and Violence Policies by the University of La Lagunaand Expert in Video Game Design from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria ) and of course I cannot forget the Training Workshops, a project that municipalities such as Arrecife hosted with the aim of training local youth in the formation of electronic sports teams, teaching them to play, getting to know each other and also give them the opportunity to compete with the teams formed in the workshop and qualify in the final of the Esports Competition that year.
It was also important our effort to pressure the town halls to allocate public premises and gaming material for the training of local esports players and teams, in person, allowing the young people of the municipality to have a place to go. The result of this was the commitment of the Arrecife City Council, which has ceded until June a public and open space with consoles, gaming laptops and board games, energized with monitors and open to any young resident of the town every Friday and Saturday afternoon.
Stepping on the street, talking first-hand with the players, who are, after all, the weight on which the entire electronic sports industry rests, has allowed us to understand the importance of continuing to fight to create a local community of sports teams. esports and continue to recognize the talent of gamers and professionals in the sector residing in the most remote municipalities of the Canary Islands, achieving today, and inadvertently, attracting attention even outside our borders, where there are several companies in the sector that look at us. , they ask us and above all, they cross-question, curious to understand how it is possible that we have done what we have done, four crazy people from Lanzarote.
