What If You Could Get a Degree in Esports?

The University of Bath is known for producing Olympians. Through Team Bath, it has spent decades studying performance, coaching elite athletes and building the environments needed to compete at the highest level.

But what if that same thinking were applied to competitive gaming?

Esports has grown into a global industry built around professional teams, live-streamed tournaments, digital communities and sophisticated broadcast production. Behind the players sits a wide ecosystem of skills and technologies: performance analytics, live media production, event management, digital marketing, platform engineering, data, coaching and team psychology.

So what would it take for a university to support that world?

In this conversation, Tom Dore, Vice President at British Esports, joins Emily Salvidge from the University of Bath to explore the practical questions universities are beginning to ask. What skills actually sit behind esports? What careers exist beyond the players on stage? What kind of facilities, teaching expertise and technology infrastructure would be needed to support it?

For a tech audience, esports offers a fascinating case study in how modern digital industries are built. Competitive teams operate like high-performance organisations. Tournaments require sophisticated broadcast and streaming infrastructure. Global communities form around platforms that blend gaming, content and social interaction.

For Bath Digital Festival’s “What If?” theme, this session takes a step back and asks a bigger question.

What if esports is not just a new form of competition, but a window into the future of digital skills, technology infrastructure and emerging careers?

Join us for a conversation about the realities behind competitive gaming and what it might teach us about the next generation of digital industries.

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