By: Dakota Guy
Chase Bonstall remembers the first time he picked up a controller. He was 3 or 4 years old, standing next to his dad, playing Wii Sports for the first time.
Two decades later, he is running a competitive esports team at Georgia Southern University.
"Being able to have access to basically being able to talk to anybody and then having something you can bond over is incredible," Bonstall said.
Bonstall is the captain and manager of the Smash esports team at Georgia Southern's Virtual Collaboration Center, which opened in November 2023. What started as a childhood hobby has turned into something much bigger, like tournaments, road trips, and friendships that have lasted over a decade.
He is part of a rapidly growing movement. Since 2018, when the National Federation of State High School Associations officially recognized esports as a high school sport, more than 8,600 schools have launched competitive gaming teams. As of 2024, the North America Scholastic Esports Federation supports over 3,500 high school clubs across all 50 states, with additional participation in more than 70 countries. LTN
For Bonstall, the appeal was never just about winning. It was about connection. He said video games helped him make and keep friends during a time when that was not easy.
"I kind of struggled to make a lot of friends in middle school," Bonstall said. "I had some really good close friends that I'm still friends with right now."
Two of those friends he met entirely online. He has known them for about a decade. Last January, they met in person for the first time on a trip to Tennessee.
"It just makes you feel like you're there physically in a sense," Bonstall said.
That sense of belonging is something researchers have started to take seriously. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that playing video games has been shown to enhance a sense of belonging and increase relationships with family and friends. TM Broadcast International
Joshua Farara is a computer programming lecturer at Georgia Southern. He said the technology behind gaming has changed what is possible for everyday people who want to create games, not just play them.
He said artificial intelligence has made it much easier for a single person to build something that used to require an entire team.
"What took a full team of people to create a game, a single person or an individual can create just as robust a game," Farara said. "It kind of lowers the barriers to entry."
Farara said AI tools now allow people to learn as they build. Someone with no coding background can start a project, have the model explain the code and improve their skills along the way.
"The model can teach you," Farara said.
He said that shift matters because independent game developers have long driven some of the most meaningful work in gaming. Unlike big studios chasing profits, solo developers or small teams tend to put more of themselves into their projects.
Bonstall agreed. He said the games that have stuck with him most were not the big budget ones.
"Someone that poured their heart into it and then charged 20 bucks, maybe the graphics aren't that good, but the story and the message that they make is something that actually carries with you," Bonstall said.
Farara said he sees a possible downside to how fast AI is speeding up game production. He said so much code is being generated so quickly that the industry may not have enough experienced engineers to maintain it all.
"Junior-level programmers are producing a lot of code, senior-level programmers are producing a lot of code," Farara said. "It's usually the senior-level programmers who maintain this code."
He said that the imbalance could create problems for the gaming industry in the coming years.
The competitive side of gaming has pushed Bonstall to grow in ways he did not expect. His first big tournament came two years ago at a Smash Bros. event hosted by Bullock Solutions. Around 50 to 60 players showed up. He made it to the top eight.
One match stuck with him. He faced a player at his exact skill level. They went to game five. The crowd was watching. He won.
"Everybody is just freaking out and screaming," Bonstall said. "Even if I wasn't the player that people were cheering for, that is such an experience to have."
He has since traveled to tournaments at the University of Georgia and competed at DreamHack. He drives his teammates in his SUV, manages the logistics, and tries to keep everyone calm before they compete.
Mentality, he said, is everything in esports.
"If you're in your own head, then everything's gonna crumble pretty fast," Bonstall said. "It's a lot of micro decision-making that leads up to a lot of big impacts."
He learned that the hard way at DreamHack. He lost early to a top player from South Carolina. His hands were sweaty. He could not focus. He got knocked out of the tournament early.
He used that loss to change his approach. At the next tournament at UGA, he stayed calm and won his first match convincingly.
"That made me feel a lot better about where my mentality was," Bonstall said. "I understood that I overcame a hurdle I was struggling with."
Research supports what Bonstall describes. A 2025 study published in the proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems found that teen esports players tied their mental well-being to collective outcomes and social responsibility. Researchers also found that teens favored everyday coping strategies like taking breaks, reframing losses, and drawing on peer encouragement over formal support programs. LTN
Not everyone sees esports and gaming through the same lens. Hannah Abt is a 26-year-old new mother in Statesboro. Her son Titus is 2 years old. She and her husband have made a deliberate choice to limit his screen time during these early years.
"In a world of AI and technology literally everywhere, we try to limit Titus and how much he's on it," Abt said.
She said she sees too many young children being handed screens without much thought. While her husband plays video games and they have talked about introducing Titus to them when he is older, she wants to hold off for now.
"I don't want him to be behind the curve," Abt said. "But I don't think I'm going to allow him to have a phone for a while."
Bonstall said he understands that concern. He grew up with grandparents who were skeptical of gaming. But he said his experience tells a different story.
He credits video games with helping him stay emotionally grounded. He said learning to handle losses, frustration and pressure in a game prepared him for real situations where consequences actually matter.
"I've learned how to handle my emotions as a kid," Bonstall said. "I'm a lot more emotionally intelligent because of that."
For Bonstall, the goal now is to grow the esports scene at Georgia Southern and connect with schools across the state. He has already built relationships with players at UGA and has contacts at Georgia Tech. He is planning to take his team to Game Fest at Georgia Tech, a two-day tournament that draws top players from across Georgia.
He also wants to eventually build a full broadcast setup at the Virtual Collaboration Center, with cameras, microphones and live commentary.
"I would really like to be able to have a TV setup and a mic and be able to broadcast stuff," Bonstall said. "That would just be so cool to me."
Sources
Trotter, M.G., et al. "Examining the Impact of School Esports Program Participation on Student Health and Psychological Development." Frontiers in Psychology, Jan. 24, 2022. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.807341/full
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. "Becoming a Healthy Player: Exploring Teen Esports Players' Perspectives on Mental Well-Being through Participatory Design." 2025. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3772318.3791938