Waiting for students to trickle into the Esports Dojo in Essex Junction after school one day, their sensei, Grant Patterson, looked positively monk-like seated in quiet contemplation in a dark hoodie. In one hand, he clutched an Xbox controller, ready to dispense the wisdom gained from a lifetime of gaming.
Patterson’s journey with video games began during his youth in Florida in the 1980s, when his aunt purchased a Nintendo console. Not long after, he witnessed his first video game tournament.
“I had just encountered Street Fighter II,” Patterson, 42, said of the massively popular fighting game. “It was the first time I’d seen real, head-to-head competition. That’s when I learned the truth of it: The real core of a fighting game isn’t that you’re fighting someone else. You’re fighting yourself — your biases, your patterns and fears, your own psychological responses to pressure.”
That’s a lesson he regularly imparts at the Esports Dojo. The gaming spot serves as an afterschool training center for kids in grades 4 to 12. Tuesday through Thursday, from 2 to 6 p.m., he welcomes students from area schools to pick up the sticks, as the saying goes. Building on their existing love of gaming, Patterson strives to teach them not only to up their scores but also to apply virtual lessons learned to real life.
“It’s super important that the parents understand this isn’t just a place where you pay for your kid to come and play video games.” Grant Patterson
Patterson’s gaming room is packed with different consoles and PC gaming setups. As kids arrived and drifted to stations in the dojo, he explained how he vets potential students and vice versa.
“It’s super important that the parents understand this isn’t just a place where you pay for your kid to come and play video games,” he said.
After an initial meeting, during which Patterson speaks to the student and their parents about their gaming history and skills they’d like to focus on, he maps out a lesson plan. “Maybe they need to work on comprehension and understanding — how every action in a game has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s not just button mashing,” he said. “Or maybe they need to game with other kids and be social and learn from their peers.”
One of Patterson’s young charges, an Essex Middle School student named John Coffey, was playing Street Fighter 6, a game he’s grown to love during his sessions at the dojo. With a deft flick of his thumb on the toggle of the game controller and a quick combination of button hits, the 11-year-old delivered a devastating finishing blow to his opponent. Though Coffey does play against others, that day he was more interested in playing in training mode, squaring off against an NPC (non-player character) and experimenting with new moves and combos.
“I learned this last week,” Coffey said with a small smile as the neon colors of the screen washed over his face. “I’d always go for a special move here, but I learned that if I combine that with a different attack, I can pretty much finish them off with one or two moves!”
His pride wasn’t lost on Patterson, who pointed out why video gaming can be vital to students like Coffey.
“As a kid, you’re always craving some kind of autonomy,” he said. “To have that in a virtual space — where you can make your own decisions and see the rewards of taking a good risk as opposed to what happens with a bad risk — is like gold.”
As if on cue, another student let out a whoop as he completed a particularly difficult maneuver in his game, vanquishing an online foe. Patterson glided over to look on with admiration.
“Did you try that counter I showed you?” he asked.
“If you button mash through life, well, that’s how you lose your house.” Grant Patterson
Patterson has a background in the tech industry and has written and edited for Syfy and the gaming TV network G4. He focuses heavily on decision making in his lessons, comparing those who play games with no education (“button mashers” to the uninitiated) to people fumbling aimlessly through life and taking unnecessary risks.
“Button mashing ends up with you as a player taking big swings but opening up yourself to damage, and the end result is you get your ass properly kicked,” he said. “But if you make intelligent decisions and go for low-risk, low-reward moves to eventually set up a big-risk move — if you’re patient and think clearly — you’re so much more likely to win. And that 100 percent applies to real life. If you button mash through life, well, that’s how you lose your house.”
Harriet Matthews was skeptical of the program when she and her teenage son, Luke, first met with Patterson.
“I was dubious, but after talking with Grant, I did a complete 360-degree turn in my mind,” she said. “Luke isn’t really into playing sports, and I loved that Grant wanted to set up something for kids who like gaming but haven’t had a chance to meet other kids like them.”
It didn’t take long for Matthews to notice the positive effects of the dojo on her son.
“He’s grown in who he is and how he deals with things,” she said. “I’ve noticed that he’s gotten better at applying himself, and the values that Grant teaches have come out in so many ways.”
Those values are posted for all tosee upon entering the dojo. A large poster titled “The Rules of Engagement” lists Patterson’s tenets, including “Everyone is worthy of respect,” “Anger is a liability,” and “We are here to have fun, and when we struggle, we help one another.”
Those are axioms that Patterson believes his students can apply to their lives as they age and their relationship with gaming evolves. And their futures as gamers hold much more potential than previous generations could expect, he noted.
Esports have grown to be as large as actual sports, with events such as the League of Legends World Championship Finals garnering almost 100 million viewers, roughly analogous to average Super Bowl viewership. One of the best gaming programs in the country is at nearby Champlain College in Burlington, which has already collaborated with Patterson on tournaments. He hopes to broaden that partnership, building what he calls a “real, definitive pipeline” between his dojo and the college’s video game majors.
In the meantime, his goal is to continue growing the dojo, which in addition to afterschool programs offers the Wednesday Night Fight Club, a series where gamers of all ages can test their skills against one another. Patterson also regularly helps plan and stage tournaments around the area, including recent events at Burlington Beer that packed the brewery with gamers.
Perhaps more than anything, he wants to shift the conversation about gaming away from the notion of kids sitting around and doing “nothing.” Think of it instead, he said, as “kids engaged in active decision making and self-refinement.”
“It’s such a radically different lens when you actually support kids and their gaming,” Patterson said. “If your kid has aptitude for it and drive, fuel that. The lessons they take from it will inform the rest of their lives.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “The Sensei | At his Esports Dojo in Essex Junction, Grant Patterson teaches life lessons through video games”
This article appears in The Tech Issue 2024.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!