It is 11am on the first day of term and the second years will soon be blearily rolling on to the Nishikasai campus after an all-night video game binge. It is hard to imagine students more fiercely devoted to the rigours of modern academia.
For the rest of the day, about half of the year group will put in another six hours of tireless gaming, punctuated with meticulous discussion of strategy and tutorials on mental preparedness techniques. Their student peers — equally passionate about games, but less able to click a mouse at a competitive pace of five times a second — will immerse themselves in the theorems of game analysis, commentary broadcasting, cheat-detection and event management. This is how Ivy Leagues are born. By the time competitive video gaming and all the associated razzmatazz becomes a $1bn global industry (in about two years’ time, according to some estimates), Tokyo’s Jikei Gakuen may already think of itself as a venerable seat of “e-sports” learning.
At one level, the founding of Japan’s first e-sports academy fits comfortably (if eccentrically) into the breathless evolution narrative of professional gaming and the increasingly lucrative market in which it thrives. Through a decade of economic and technological waves — powerfully amplified by social media — the competitive playing of online games like League of Legends and Defense of the Ancients 2 has become a global spectator sport with an active audience estimated at 400m and total revenues of about $650m.