Team:Tec-Monterrey/LOL
Arena Gaming: 5v5 League of Legends Tournament
The video game industry has a huge impact nowadays; a single game like League of Legends can be played by millions of people every day. People meet and communities are created around video games, making this impact even greater. However, few among them are aware of the potential source of e-waste that are video games. Devices are changed every couple of years, and gaming systems are no exception, where new hardware is released to please the community regularly.
We organized a League of Legends tournament to approach the gamer community in our city. We chose League of Legends as it is immensely popular, with over 67 million active players every month and over 27 million every day. The community in Monterrey is almost 10,000 strong just in the Facebook page, while in our university there are more than 300 active players. Thus, we reasoned that it would allow us to reach the most people possible.
Our approach was to create awareness about e-waste within the tournament. We reasoned that this was the best way for them to vinculate the gaming hardware they use to our pollution problem. The fact that this was done while having fun in an healthy environment where people can get along proved that they don’t need to be scientists or activists of any sort to get worried about our community and change their habits. Additionally, a poll was made for them to answer during the event.
After the tournament, some people approached us to share with us how the project showed them the importance of being socially responsible with nature and society. Importantly, a group of locals wanted to do an e-waste collection campaign on their events in the near future.
A poll was also conducted on the participants of the event to generate awareness regarding the electronic waste generated by video game consoles. Our population size was of 121 people, mostly university students of the age 18-21. First we asked about how many video game consoles have they bought in the past five years, and we got a mean of 2-3 consoles, and a total of 269 acquired. And when we asked for the amount of non functional consoles we found out that most people have between 1-2 and a total of 261. Almost as much as new consoles bought in the last 5 years. This brings up an issue clearly evident in the question: What do you usually do with your electronic waste? Here the most common answer is to store it indefinitely.
One could blame it on carelessness, but the poll also revealed that 19% of the people do not know what to do with their electronic waste. So it is more a problem of knowing about the issue than not taking action. For example, 17% of the surveyed do not consider that video game consoles or computers generate e-waste. So we sent all the interested people information of what to do with their e-waste and urged them to make the issue known to everyone they know.
Brought to you by iGEM Tec-Monterrey 2016
