Passion fuels the LSU Smash Club, and it’s the kind every sports fan can relate to — the spirit of competition.
Despite what club president and biological sciences junior Tyler Causey describes as sometimes being overlooked and not taken seriously as an organization, LSU’s Smash Club, a group dedicated to competitively playing the many versions of the game Super Smash Bros., is part of a growing gaming community that thrives on a global scale.
Causey said the club has seen constant growth since he founded it his freshman year. It was Causey’s ambition and love of the game’s competition that led him to create the club.
“I played a lot casually with friends, and we went to an RA-run tournament they put on in one of the halls one time, and it was a lot of fun,” Causey said. “It was just very poorly run and a lot of dumb decisions were being made. I was like, well I can do a better job than this, so I did.”
Causey printed out flyers promoting the club and placed them all over his residence hall. Then he brought in televisions, Wiis and GameCubes to play in the hall’s activity center. Once people caught wind of the club, which holds weekly Super Smash Bros. tournaments, it didn’t take long for them to start joining.
The club’s vice president, math junior Diego Kaptain, was one of the people who joined Causey’s club and the two have been friends ever since.
Kaptain and Causey have maintained one goal for the organization, and that is to never be unwelcoming to new members or to charge dues, otherwise they wouldn’t be true to themselves.
“We never want to become a club that forces its members to pay fees or attend regular meetings because we feel that would make our club exclusive and detract from the community,” Kaptain said.
For Kaptain, the Smash Club’s focus is to grow the University’s gaming community.
Causey said sometimes it’s hard for those outside the organization to understand why they’re so passionate about the game, but it’s because they don’t understand how much goes into playing, or the game’s positive effects. He often compares it to the passion sports fans have.
“Our community is very comparable to sports,” Causey said. “Some say why do people watch other people play video games? Well why do people watch other people play sports? It’s the same thing, for the same reasons.”
Kaptain added that the technical aspects of the game, including its challenging mechanics, fluid movement, combo system and tournament scene, also contribute to the passion and its addictive quality. However, he mostly believes it’s a perfect break from reality.
“One of the biggest draws is that it’s a great way to de-stress and escape from the real world,” Kaptain said.
Regardless of stigmas and stereotypes revolving around the gaming community, Causey said it grows exponentially every year and he looks forward to seeing that growth reflecting on