Almost every university has their own sports fest and for UiTM, it’s KARISMA.
As most of our eSports marshals are students, we’ve been eyeing on university festivals to include eSports as part of their yearly competitions.
We started having coffee talks with them about the benefits of including the electronic games and as usual, many are interested but few actually responded to the calling.
After 1 year of doing various electronic games-based activities at UiTM Shah Alam through events such as J-Fest and SUKOL, they finally opened up to their decision on including eSports in their big event.
Let’s get deeper into how the events unfold…
What is KARISMA XXV? – UiTM’s Legendary Sports Fest
Sports is a right that every student needs to take part in.
Ever since its first launching, UiTM saw the potential problem of everyday studies faced among students – They would eventually get lazy and would give up altogether in sports, especially the future generations of bumiputras.
Hence the birth of the Sukan KARISMA series.
It is a huge sports fest that unites all the well-known sports like futsal, badminton and tennis to instill the spirit of sportsmanship amongst the students.
Think of like it like the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games – Only that this one is of a smaller scale restricted only to UiTM students.
The Sukan KARISMA is done once a year and the locations vary too since UiTM has many campuses – 12 huge anchor campuses (Like UiTM Shah Alam), and 21 smaller scale satellite campuses (Like Tapah) as of 2018.
Since Malaysia has a growing need to fill the immense void for eSports events created by the influx on professional players not to mention the various eSports events outside popping up everywhere, they decided to finally add in eSports as part of their 25th Sukan KARISMA. Yaay!
The location this year is in their newest campus so far, UiTM Tapah.
The campus space is so huge (Bigger then MSU and Unisel combined!) and they are still in the process of building it!
This year’s Sukan KARISMA was to be made there because they wanted the crowd and traffic to liven up the place in celebration of the big things that are about to happen there soon.
It looks barren now with several blocks of buildings, but I think it’ll definitely be one of the huge state campuses in due time.
Time for Esports to Step in!
The sleepy town of Tapah was shocked by the first ever eSports event ever done there.
As we were taking a break while setting up the event there, we had Teh Tarik at the local warung and everyone flocked to us asking thousand and one things!
“Adik datang dari KL?”
“Kenapa gerak awal? Stay la lama sikit”
“Adik dah kawin? Makcik ada anak dara ni…”
The owner sat with us at the table, the cook came outside of the kitchen to sit with us, even the other guests at the table beside us chatted with us.
Such hospitality! I forgot how cheerful everyone is in the village, and for one moment we were stuck in the chill zone and wanted to lepak all day.
Okay, coming back to the work part.
For the eSports game in UiTM Tapah, we got a place called The Greenhouse which is basically one of the rooms for the classes.
We converted that into an eSports room which fits nicely with these babies:
- 10x Stations for FIFA
- 1x PlayStation Virtual Reality game set
- 1x Nintendo Switch game set
- 1x Stage
- 1x Projector and Screen
Everything set for the ultimate eSports experience for 2 days!
Of course since this is UiTM’s first ever eSports experience, they chose to do FIFA 18 since that is actually the most common game that the majority of Malaysians play here besides DOTA.
There were 5 stations for FIFA on both sides for a uniformed battle but on top of that, we also added two free-to-play sections for players to enjoy and relax while waiting for their next turn in line.
The Virtual Reality set was definitely a hit because even with its popularity, not many people have actually tried it due to the fact that it costs even more than the PlayStation console itself.
The line was crazy and all of them wanted to try because this is the first time they’ve ever laid their hands on one.
We added Nintendo Switch with four brand new platoon joy cons and the crowd went crazy with the new Mario Cart game – Everyone loved the Zelda update with that rad iron horse motorcycle.
Definitely will be bringing that back up the next time around!
Final Word
Despite the negative thinking that most people have about eSports, in the end it’s only just a game.
The community and the players are what affects the image of a certain game so if we were to make a better Malaysia, we can start gaining more acceptance toward eSports events by banding up and protruding a healthier gaming lifestyle amongst our local players.
Many universities and government bodies are starting to accept electronic games as a subset of sports and though the type of games they recognize are only but a few, I hope we can impress them enough so that our next event with them would include a lot more tournaments rather than the usual FIFA.
For more info on what we do, check out our services here.
What game would you like us to propose to UiTM? Let us know and we’ll try to make it happen 😉
