Taking Her Turn A look at how FAU female gamers view women’s increased presence in the video game community.
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FAU student Dominique Mobley doesn’t identify as a gamer girl, but rathe r as just a gamer.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS November 29, 2016 | VOL.18 | #8
FEATURES Taking Her Turn
UP STAFF EDITOR IN CHIEF Ryan Lynch CREATIVE DIRECTOR Ivan Benavides ASSISTANT CREATIVE DIRECTOR Celeste Andrews WEB EDITOR Richard Finkel PHOTO EDITOR Patrick Delaney COPY DESK CHIEF Carissa Noelle Giard ASSISTANT COPY DESK CHIEF Kerri-Marie Covington COPY EDITORS Natalie Tribbey, Ben Paley NEWS EDITOR Joe Pye SPORTS EDITOR Brendan Feeney FEATURES EDITOR Tucker Berardi OPINIONS EDITOR Miller Lepree FICTION EDITOR Sabrina Loftus CONTRIBUTORS Bilal Qureshi, Andrew Fraieli, Lee Pritz ADVISERS Neil Santaniello, Ilene Prusher, Michael Koretzky COVER PHOTO BY Andrew Fraieli COVER ILLUSTRATION BY Celeste Andrews
How FAU female students view their role as gamers in the video game world. BY JOE PYE | PAGE 8
PC gamer and junior computer science major Dominique Mobley. Photo by Andrew Fraileli
SPORTS
FICTION
Pay for Play
The Life of Death
A case for why college athletes should be paid.
BY BILAL QURESHI | PAGE 15
BY RYAN LYNCH | PAGE 4
Why Pay the Privileged? The case against paying college athletes. BY BRENDAN FEENEY | PAGE 6
OPINIONS Millennial Wake-Up Call Donald Trump’s victory leads to misplaced anger among young voters. BY MILLER LEPREE | PAGE 12
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SPORTS
PAY FOR PLAY College athletes deserve fair compensation in return for bringing money to the NCAA. Ryan Lynch | Editor in Chief Illustrations by Ivan Benavides 4 11.29.2016 University Press
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he NCAA is a multi-billion-dollar nonprofit that does not pay its employees, and I’m not talking about the men and women in crisp office attire who manage the organization. I’m talking about the countless athletes who compete at one of the hundreds of schools that fall under the NCAA’s jurisdiction. For college athletes, the case has been constantly made that for all the money and donors they bring to the school, an education at the university is enough compensation to justify the amount of time they put in. On its website, the college athletes organizing body states, “The NCAA membership has adopted amateurism rules to ensure the students’ priority remains on obtaining a quality educational experience and that all of student-athletes are competing equitably.” The problem with that rule is that between practicing every day, missing classes due to traveling and working on school work, students can’t take advantage of their education and deserve compensation to make up for it. Here’s the case for student athletes to get a little extra pay.
Learning isn’t the focus College athletes may be given access to tutors
and have first priority when it comes to selecting classes around their athletic schedule, but they are not given scholarships to “play school.” Athletes often take general studies majors that allow them to focus the majority of their time on their athletic careers. While there are exceptions to the rule — including athletes who take on graduate work while still playing — most do not have enough time to focus on both academics and athletics at the same time. Using Florida Atlantic as an example, its most recent Graduate Success Rate — a measure of how many college athletes graduate within a six-year window — was listed at 79 percent for the 2015-16 year and ranked FAU 261 out of 351 schools. While the GSR is the best ever in the school’s history, it should be much higher if FAU puts more of an emphasis on academics over athletics. When players do well in the classroom, coaches can receive bonus money in their contracts. According to former head football coach Charlie Partridge’s contract, he could have made up to $45,000 in a single season if his team had reached certain milestones, such as a team GPA being over 2.7 or ranking in the top 10 percentile for collegiate football teams in the nation. The case could easily be made that this is unfair for students because they are generating money both on and off the field but do not see it directly.
While some just dismiss it as a consequence of being in the system, I believe that the standard should be much higher than that.
Not being able to work Most athletes do not have the time to get jobs on
top of their course loads as they spend an NCAA mandated maximum of 20 hours per week on practice alone. Add coursework, games, mandatory community service opportunities and sleep to that, and suddenly there is a lot less room in an athlete’s schedule for a job. Even if players had that extra time to get a job, NCAA rules don’t allow for one that pays over $2,000 annually, to the point that the extra stress is not worth a few bonus paychecks. With that inability to pick up work, some student athletes are left at a disadvantage from their counterparts in the regular student body who can work. A scholarship does not cover every cost that a student may run into, especially if it is not a full ride to the school. The realization that a scholarship isn’t enough has caused a change in philosophy with the Power Five conferences. At FAU, that change is already apparent. To put itself on par with other national programs that offered a cost of attendance stipend — which provides athletes with extra money for things like transportation and other costs outside of school — FAU moved during the spring of 2015 to provide $4,650 stipends to all student athletes at the school at a cost of about $1 million to the program. “When it comes down to it, any additional financial aid for our student athletes we’re all for at the end of the day,” FAU Athletic Director Pat Chun said to OwlAccess. Adding that cost of living stipend is a step in the right direction, but athletes should be able to fight for a bigger chunk. According to NCAA rules, athletes can’t unionize which severely limits their ability to collectively bargain for the same rights — such as a better work environment or more compensation — that a union does for its members. This creates a situation where student athletes have no direct say in anything that happens to them and are forced to play by the NCAA’s rules, which may not always prioritize their players’ rights. If we don’t give athletes a voice to get a piece of the revenue they generate, then there is something wrong with that system.
money is not there yet to do that. The minor league entry level salary for baseball is $1,100 a month in the first year, meaning most players sit under the federal poverty line during the first few years of their careers. Even if they take that chance, student athletes often cut their academic careers off early to try and go pro. A college football or baseball player will have to wait three years to be drafted if he decides to play for a university, thereby suspending his earning power while at school. Whether the NCAA agrees with it or not, it has become the de facto minor leagues of both the NFL and the NBA when it comes to young talent. It’s become evident that with billions of dollars worth of revenue, college athletics are no longer about academics but are instead a vehicle for schools to make more money. It’s only a matter of time before the NCAA will have to start paying its athletes, and schools like FAU should be preparing for that transition by making a plan for the change.
Alternative paths The alternative that exists is that kids would have to play overseas in a professional league or in a minor league to circumvent the system, and the
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SPORTS
WHY PAY THE PRIVILEGED? College athletes already reap more benefits than the average student, so why do they deserve more? Brendan Feeney | Sports Editor Illustrations by Ivan Benavides
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ollege athletes are on a stage that most youth and high school athletes dream of reaching. They get to play their dream sport, have access to top-notch tutoring, training and medical staffs, all while travelling around the country — sometimes crossing international borders — and spending weekends in cities most students can only imagine visiting. Just this year, the Florida Atlantic men’s basketball team travelled to the Bahamas and Hawaii. Still, a number of people believe that college athletes deserve a payday for the revenue they bring their respective schools as well as the NCAA. But the problem with that is the athletes already receive multiple benefits that should be more than enough compensation. So why should they deserve an additional paycheck? Simple answer, they shouldn’t, and here’s why.
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Value of a college education
The apparent conflict in college sports is that the athletes are the ones that bring a profit to the NCAA and yet they don’t see their fair share of money. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t being compensated in other ways. A student who attends FAU with no financial aid, with a full-time 12-credit-hour schedule and no housing, pays at least $24,154.80 for the necessary 120 credits to graduate, according to the school’s tuition fee breakdown. If that student comes from out of state, it costs $86,380.80. An athlete has the advantage of receiving the same academic scholarships offered to most general students, but can also receive distinct athletic scholarships. Just like in professional sports, if an athlete is one of the best, he may receive more. Less is given to the lesser players and so on. Athletes also have the privilege of not always needing as high of a GPA or SAT score that a general student would need to get accepted into an institution, opening educational opportunities that some would never have the chance of obtaining without athletic abilities. That opportunity to obtain a college education has its own value. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average person with a bachelor’s degree makes $566 more per week than one with a high school diploma — which adds up to $29,432 more over a 52-week period. If players don’t take advantage of this, it’s their own fault. While players usually are not allowed to have a job during the season, they’re permitted to have one the other eight months out of the year, which is more than enough time to make pocket money. Yes, they may not have a lot of free time, which makes it difficult to pick up money on the side, but the same is true of other college students with full schedules. Take for example a fraternity member who has to do community events, a student newspaper editor who has to put together an entire issue every two weeks plus oversee web content or an actor from the theater department who has to learn lines, build sets and put on plays. Three football players on this year’s team are working toward a master’s degree. Last year’s team had 46 players earn a GPA of at least a 3.0. Sixteen of FAU’s teams had a collective GPA over 3.0 and 13 individuals managed a 4.0. So why should we feel bad for those who choose not to take advantage of the privileges being given to them? If someone hands you two $2,000 tickets to the Super Bowl for free and you decide not to go, because
you just don’t feel like it, you blew your opportunity. You’re not entitled to another handout worth $4,000. It is no different than blowing an opportunity at a college education.
How would the payment system work?
FAU has 424 athletes, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s equity in athletics data analysis. Who would determine which of those athletes get paid? How many hours would each athlete get paid? Would it be just for games, for their 20-hour practice weeks or for both? Would they all be paid the same amount? Would they get paid in the offseason, which is when a lot of athletes consistently say the real work is put in? If all 424 earned minimum wage — which is $8.05 an hour in Florida — and clocked 20 hours per week, the collective salary of the group would be $68,264 per week. If their pay schedules were limited to a 15-week semester, athletes’ salaries would cost over a million dollars per year. What about in 10 years time, when that jumps to $10,239,600 spent? Imagine if they were paid for the full academic year, let alone a 52-week year. How would the school have enough money to continue to pay that, especially when some schools are already cutting athletic teams due to financial issues? Where would that money come from? Would it raise tuition costs? The one thing it would do is create an imbalance of power. How would a school like FAU, which had $7.5 million worth of revenue in 2014, compete with the University of Texas, which brought in a little south of $75 million? If college athletes aren’t all paid the same amount, who would decide which sport deserves compensation and which sports don’t? How could one justify paying the swim team that doesn’t financially benefit the school? In fact, no women’s sports team other than basketball brings any revenue to FAU, and the men’s team brings in more than twice as much. So would we only pay the men, even though the women put in the same amount of time? Would the backup quarterback make as much as the starter or as much as the starting linebacker? Would a player who sits on the bench for a team that brings in revenue, such as the football team, make more than CJ Chatham — Conference USA’s Baseball Player of the Year and a second round pick in this summer’s MLB Draft — who played on a team that brings in no where near as much money as the football team?
One argument is the fact that the NCAA is a multibillion dollar industry. The problem is, they don’t necessarily make money off schools like FAU. Instead, they get their money from the Notre Dames, Alabamas and Michigans of the world. Therefore, why would FAU deserve the same amount of money that athletes from those schools are bringing in? It would be like saying that Apple should put as much of its efforts into its headphones as it does into its iPhones. There is no ethical way to choose who would get paid and even if it came from the NCAA, would there be enough?
Stipends
The biggest reason I’m against athletes getting paid is the fact that they already are. And I’m not talking about the value of education they already receive. College athletes receive stipends — a predetermined amount of money to help pay for expenses. A former football player who graduated prior to this season said that players are now given $3,000 in stipends — $1,500 per semester. These athletes are playing on a stage that a lot of people would pay to be on while receiving a college education. They are getting paid for it, not much, but more than any other student. Now I do agree that players should be compensated for anything bearing a person’s likeness that is sold as an individual’s brand, such as a jersey or the rights to a video game. But not when it comes to being paid to play. They are playing a game — the same game they played when they were kids for no other reason than love and passion. On top of that, they are receiving an education that is worth tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds, or more. So why do they deserve more? Will it ever be enough?
Economic benefit of a college education
The breakdown of how much an athlete can save with a full scholarship at FAU, as well as how valuable a college education is. In-state athlete that receives full scholarship saves $24,154.80 over college tenure ut-of-state athlete that receives a full O scholarship saves $86,380.80 over college tenure Salaries with a bachelor’s degree make $29,432 more per year on average than without
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FEATURES
Taking Her Turn FAU female gamers offer their perspectives of women’s impact on the video game community.
Joe Pye | News Editor Photos by Andrew Fraieli
Background photo courtesy of Wikipedia
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Student and gamer Dominique Mobley poses as a commonly found video game character that wants the player to follow them to the next stage.
K
icking back in her recliner in front of her high-definition TV is Jamie Kapp. Blue Moby headphones and PlayStation 3 controller in hand, she’s staying in for the night after class to play video games. Kapp considers herself a gamer in a world where nearly as many women play video games as men but twice as many men are likely to refer to themselves with the term, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study. “My first gift for my fourth birthday was a pink Game Boy Color,” said the Florida Atlantic senior elementary education major. “I’ve been playing online games since I was like 12-13 and I got my first PlayStation 3 at 16.” According to the Pew study, 60 percent of Americans assume gaming to be a male activity. This may be caushe video game industry has long been marketed to men specifically with ads and packaging. However, 48 percent of women in the study say that they play video games on some kind of console, PC or device compared to 50 percent of men. Out of those polled, 15 percent of men compared to 6 percent of women call themselves gamers. Kapp is like many other women who, despite stereotypes, play video games and have done so for most of their lives. “I’m not really into things like most girls, I don’t care about clothes or anything like that. A lot of my friends played video games when we were younger and that’s kind of how I got into it and I found that they can be really fun. It’s kind of like a second life,” said Dominique Mobley, a junior computer science major. “I feel like we are a little bit more rare due to our upbringing.” Mobley feels that many young girls grow up without exposure to video games because others find it more acceptable for boys to play them. “There were a lot of times when I was younger I realized my mom was more OK buying console games for my brother than for me,” said Mobley. “Males typically drifted more to video games in a similar sense of the girls to Barbies or boys to cars kind of deal. Not anymore, you see a lot more girls now.” Online gaming has grown more popular since the early 2000s with the rise of World of Warcraft, League of Legends and other massively multiplayer online role-playing games. First-person shooters like the Call of Duty games have become popular as well. “My first real online experience was Mass Effect 3, which was out of necessity because that’s the only way to play. You have to play multiplayer to get the best ending in the single player campaign,” said Kapp. “My favorite character to play as in that
Console gamer and senior elementary education major Jamie Kapp plays Mass Effect 3 on her PlayStation 3 at home.
game was an Asari Vanguard, which is an all-female character and I never played on voice chat. There is no need for it, if I do I will probably get upset.” Kapp said she feels that online gaming can sometimes lead to online bullying and sexual harassment, possibly due to the anonymity of not playing in person. “When I did play people would just assume there was a guy on the other end. I would get messages saying, ‘Nice’ and ‘Good game.’ When I decided to plug in a microphone to see what would happen, I started talking and all their comments started having really sexual connotations to them,” said Kapp. “At first I kind of enjoyed it, I thought it was funny, all these guys liked that I was a girl who played video games. That was only the beginning, a lot of it was positive, the rest was sexual. They would make their game characters make sexual gestures towards mine.” For Kapp, when other players learned she was female, they would often base their negative comments around her gender, especially when she
“They would make their game characters make sexual gestures towards mine.” - Jamie Kapp, senior, elementary education major
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played poorly. “When it got tough was if I moved up a higher rank, some days I was just awful. I would get bad comments when they thought I was a guy, they’d call me a retard, a moron or faggot,” said Kapp. “Then when they found out I was a girl, they called me a slut, a bitch and a whore. It was interesting to see the shift in name changes. It went from I was a stupid guy to I am stupid slut, bitch or a whore or I’m a dyke.” Though not all male online gamers go out of their way to bully other players, this atmosphere has been acknowledged before in the gaming community. “I would say that most interaction with females with guys have been fine, but I can completely understand why a girl wouldn’t feel comfortable in certain situations because of males I’ve met online,” said Kyle Wehrs, senior commercial music business major and president of College Gaming League. As a gamer himself, he doesn’t see a reason to discriminate against a player but does feel that individuals who voice their sexism wouldn’t do so in person. “I don’t care what your gender is, I care if you’re good at the game and I know a lot of guys have that same sentiment,” said Wehrs. “I think that having the ability to be anonymous gives guys who are sexist the ability to do that and ... I’m very sure that the guys who talk like that to girls online don’t do
that in real life.” However, not all women who play video games have experienced harassment, with some noticing that there are males who treat them differently than how they treat other male gamers. “When people realize I’m a girl, I notice some things change. They’ll be a little more friendly or they won’t be as crazy. We once brought a person into our chat service who was in the game with us, and as soon as he heard me talk, he was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a girl in here. I didn’t know you guys existed,’” said Brittany Ferrendi, an FAU alumna and former University Press features editor. “He was just kind of goofing around … and I kind of went with it. I wasn’t completely uncomfortable, he was just making a big deal about it.” In pop culture, the term “gamer girl” is used to define women who consider themselves gamers. However, many women would prefer to just be referred to as gamers so that their gender doesn’t separate them from the community. “I kind of cringe at the term ‘gamer girl’ — I think it’s really silly and unnecessary ... I feel that is just
an attention grabber,” said Mobley. Ferrendi isn’t as bothered by the term and acknowledges the difference between her and her male counterparts, but emphasizes that gamer girls are still gamers. “I’m not inherently offended by the term ‘gamer girl,’ but I don’t consider myself a gamer girl just because I’m a gamer, period. But I understand that being a girl and a gamer is kind of different than being a guy who is a gamer,” said Ferrendi. “... We’re not less abundant in the community; it just feels like it is to a lot of people, so it differentiates us from the community as a whole. It’s not necessarily something that’s a bad thing — it can be embraced, but just because you’re a gamer girl does not mean you’re not a gamer just like everybody else.”
“Im not inherently offended by the term ‘gamer girl,’ but I dont consider myself a gamer girl just because Im a gamer, period.” - Brittany Ferrendi, FAU alumna Gamer and FAU alumna Brittany Ferrendi says her favorite video game is Witcher 3.
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“There were a lot of times when I was younger I realized my mom was more OK buying console games for my brother than for me.�
Brittany Ferrendi holds an Xbox 360 controller.
- Dominique Mobley, junior, computer science major
PC gamer and junior computer science major Dominique Mobley plays Hotline Miami in the Student Union.
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OPINIONS
Millennial Wake-Up Call It’s time for young, dissatisfied voters to take action. Miller Lepree | Opinions Editor Illustrations by Celeste Andrews
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D NAL O D R AND P IS OU !! T M N TRU RESIDE TP NEX
I
t came as a shock, a cannonball through the window. Donald Trump is the president-elect. Many young first-time voters — including college students and millennials — simply did not see this coming. I woke up to a Facebook feed full of outrage, disbelief and sadness. Leading up to the election, most polls and pundits agreed that liberal establishment candidate and political bulwark Hillary Clinton would surely win and everything would essentially be the same for the next four years as it was for the previous eight. This sentiment was echoed throughout my conversations with peers in the days and weeks leading up to the election, as Clinton was ahead in almost every poll. Nobody gave Trump a chance but his voters came out, and they came through. Their voices were ultimately louder, their passion stronger and their vigor and desire for change overwhelmingly insurmountable. Young liberals like to think of themselves as the future of the country, the voice of moral reason, the defenders of the disenfranchised and the crusaders of equality. However, their resolve was pushed to the limit and they lost. We lost. Where I take issue is in the excruciatingly unproductive and reactionary protests, flag burnings and Twitter rants. “He’s not my president.” Yes, he is, and he will be for at least the next four years. It’s time for us to be productive within this reality, to be emboldened by the outcome of this election — not to shrink and devolve into the same outwardly critical and vulgar misanthropes that we claimed to oppose leading up to the election. The liberal philosophy is all about acceptance and progress, values that have been hard to find in the days after the election. If we resort to hate and aggression, and voice our frustration with nastiness and combative superiority, the changes we seek will surely never come. If you find yourself unhappy and lost in the results of this election, start working. If anything was proven by this surprise victory, it was that the democratic party is more out of touch than we thought. Clinton failed to relate to enough working-class voters and did not captivate enough liberals to prevent a Trump presidency. This goes both ways as it was the people’s responsibility to get out and vote in a year where Clinton received six million fewer votes than Barack Obama did in 2012. This was a reaction to establishment politics and a backlash to corruption and greed. This was a revolution, and not the kind Bernie Sanders had in mind. The important thing is that hope is not lost for a pushback to the Republican majority. There will be another election in two years, a
smaller one, but your power is not lost in voting for Senate and House chairs. Find someone you identify with and help them get to Congress. Your First Amendment rights allow peaceful protests, but in this case it’s hard to see any worthwhile outcome as a result of yelling in the streets. I would recommend donating where you can to organizations that protect the rights you believe in, be it Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP or any other outlet that you deem worthy of support. Let this election serve as a wake–up call, a call to action and a call to progress. We cannot wallow in defeat. It is time to show how resolute we can be and that we are as dignified as we are gracious. If you want your values reflected in your society and on the ballots of your fellow Americans, it’s critical to do a better job in communicating that message in a peaceful and relatable manner to those who oppose you.
Donations
How to Prot est Peacefull y
2016: U.S. House of Representatives Florida Edition
U.S. Senators 2016:
Florida Edition
My Vote Counts: How to reac t when my candidate doesn’t wi n
The Big Book of Election Dates: 2016-17
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DONT BE LEFT IN THE DARK
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The Life of
Death
Bilal Qureshi
Power beyond understanding Life fading by a simple touch I feared my own destructive abilities Then I saw you Beauty beyond compare So I walked beside you The more I watched The more I loved you Years gone by now Life long lived and your time has come I refused, but you insisted Rain begins to pour As I witnessed the life in your eyes fade I fell to my knees crying. Alone and empty, once more.
Illustration by Lee Pritz 11.29.2016 University Press 15
! R E S N S E N I R P W Y T I BE A VERS I N U E H T T A
S G N I M P T 2 E T E AY A
MEVERY FRID
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