By CSULB Esports Association
on Tuesday, October 1, 2019
After graduating, Jonathan “Ravarath” Garcia felt that he could still help out at CSULB Esports & Gaming Association. At first, Garcia was primarily one of the Discord admins. At the start of the 2018-2019 academic year, he decided to help create a Rainbow Six Siege team before also becoming the Media Coordinator for the club.
In this article, we discuss how he got involved with the club and how his major has and continues to influence the club’s media presence.
Everyone has a good story on their IGN origins. What’s yours?
I was getting into an MMORPG called EVE: Online and I needed a new character name but couldn’t think of one that I liked at all. So I ended up going to FantasyNameGenerator.com and went to Spaceship Names. There, I chose the words RAVager and wRATH and combined them into Ravarath. It kind of just stuck, despite how edgy it sounds. But recently, I’ve just shortened it to Rav.
Why did you join the club?
I’ve always been an avid gamer. My first game that I got to fully experience was Final Fantasy VIII because my uncle who lived with me at the time would play the game with me for hours. I managed to fully complete Final Fantasy X because of how much I loved the series. When I entered college, I actually didn’t even have a PC built yet. I was just an Xbox 360 player, trying to upgrade to a PS4 for Overwatch. I wanted to meet other like-minded people and caught wind of the Esports Association, which was under Cat Tompkins, a good friend of mine to this day. I just waltzed right into the first general meeting and had a blast playing Overwatch 1v1’s.
How does the club feel now compared to its early days when you were still a student?
When I first joined the club, the meetings were in the KIN (Kinesiology) Building, specifically the basketball court for some reason. It was intimate, but also really random. We all sat in the bleachers scrambling for outlets for our laptops while the President at the time, Cat Tompkins, used her connections with iBuyPower to get some AWESOME giveaway prizes from collectable plushies all the way to actual computer parts like mice and keyboards. I have always wanted it to be more than that so I guerilla-ed my way into the HSCI (Hall of Science) building and found out this giant room with outlets everywhere was open at the same time our meetings were, and we held the meetings in that room without telling anyone for a semester. It’s been there ever since!
Even though you graduated, you came back to help create and coach the Rainbow Six Siege team. What has that experience been like for you?
Even though we took 2nd in the inaugural season for CR6 (Collegiate R6), it was actually quite challenging. I always believed coaching was about making a playbook and helping your players improve, but it’s actually so much more than that. Having such a diverse cast of players with varying skill sets was definitely a challenge to work with, especially trying to find each of their preferences.
The funniest thing to me about this team was that each player was so innately good at the game that they could literally fill any role. This meant that most of the time, we would have different players doing different things each round…and yet we’d still win. I always enjoyed listening to the casters of our matches try to figure out what our players were good at, but their spontaneity kept throwing them off.
While on the subject of being 2nd in the entire nation, how does that feel for you, considering this was a new team and you were also new to this position?
It has a lot of pros and cons. We have a reputation to keep now, and it’s definitely a struggle trying to exactly pinpoint what we can improve on. It’s cool to brag about, but in the end, I think every single player on the team thinks that we got 2nd place through sheer effort. We all believe that we could have taken first if we relied solely on team play versus individual strengths. That’s gonna be something I’ll be working on this semester, by the way.
Speaking of this semester, what are some of your goals as media coordinator?
I want to market our teams in an official setting: team introductions, highlights on official matches, maybe even find people that might want to try their hand at casting, etc. I want to make these teams look super hype and fun as hell, not only to build the community but to also build interest in the teams since it’s something literally anyone could be a part of.
I also want to engage the community with each other in different games. I want to introduce people to different games and even show non-gamers what it means to be a gamer.
The biggest thing I want to do is remove the stigma that you can’t be a gamer in college or that video games take up too much time and you won’t be able to balance it with your schoolwork. People think we’re aggressively competitive, and while I’m not going to deny that we do want to win, I also want people to understand that it’s a completely inclusive community devoted to supporting each other in being passionate about video games we love. That’s why I enjoy how much the club has branched off from being a small bunch of gamers into an actually competitive scene representing the school in a professional setting.
I know you were a Film major in college. Do you think that had a strong influence for you to apply to be media coordinator?
There’s that one saying, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I love video games, and the many worlds you can get swept in with all the characters that you’ll love and hate. I love that I can lose my days immersed in a world created by someone else’s mind. I also love the filmmaking process as a whole: from being on set behind a camera to talking to actors who can make it big one day to sitting on your computer grinding out the project, trying to actualize the vision you have in your mind and make it a real and tangible world for others to experience. That fusion of video games and my passion for filmmaking would be an absolute dream to have fulfilled. To me, esports was the best outlet I could think of to chase it.
My experience in the film industry will definitely help and I want to use my knowledge to form my own craft. I can’t wait to produce content combining my film skills and my video game knowledge.
Thank you for answering these questions. Any final comments?
I’m aiming to provide more team content this upcoming semester. Since I’m no longer in college, I now have more time so get ready to see CSULB Esports everywhere!