Gaming site helps Chinese students get into top US universities

Video games are sometimes stereotyped as a waste of time, but two students of Chinese descent have recently defied this thought and set up a competitive gaming site that has helped them gain acceptance to two of the US’ most prestigious universities.

Argentinian-born Carlos Xu, whose family is from Guangdong, and Shanxi province native Bill Luo are recent graduates of Vancouver’s St George’s School. The two launched the site GGS Tournaments a year and a half ago. The site, which describes itself as “a novel platform on which gamers of all skill levels can hone their gaming abilities and win fabulous prizes”, is designed to host competitive tournaments for the popular PC game League of Legends. It currently has over 1,000 registered users and generates income from three advertisers.

Xu and Luo first had the idea to start a competitive gaming site in their second year at St George’s, where the school hallway during lunchtime would always be “flooded with swarms of laptops that belonged to eager gamers.”

“It was sort of an annoyance to the school staff,” Xu said. “So Bill and I pitched the idea of starting a school gaming club to the club coordinator at our school, and she could sense our enthusiasm.”

Xu and Luo won permission to start the club, and their school halls quickly became decongested as St George’s gamers congregated in the school’s computer lab at organised times. As the club grew in success, however, technical issues arose.

“The school’s [local area] network could not support such intense [gaming] activity,” Xu said. “We took this disappointing fact as an entrepreneurial opportunity.”