Designed to Play: The College of Design Makes Its Mark on Esports at NC State

At first glance, competitive gaming and design school might seem like they’re worlds apart. But at NC State, those two disciplines are syncing up with increasing precision — and changing the way the university approaches storytelling, competition and student experience.

In spring 2025, NC State hosted the College League of Legends (CLOL) and College Valorant Championship (CVAL) Grand Finals — a nationally streamed esports event featuring top teams from Maryville, Ole Miss and Winthrop. With more than 30,000 viewers tuning into the main Valorant Twitch stream and hundreds attending in person, the event put the university’s emerging esports program on the national stage.

To support the tournament’s rollout, the esports team partnered with the College of Design’s Virtual Production Lab (VPL) to produce a series of promotional videos. Built using real-time rendering tools like Unreal Engine, the VPL’s immersive sets and cinematic polish brought a new level of visual energy to the project.

“My vision is for NC State to be the leader in collaborative esports opportunities and event support for the state of North Carolina,” said Cody Elsen, director of the university’s esports program. “We want to support every avenue in gaming and esports, including the creation of the games themselves.”

The videos were produced in collaboration with Riot Games, GGTech, Visit Raleigh and ExitLag, and gave students hands-on opportunities to work in a high-pressure, professional setting.

Matt Maharaj, who spearheaded the College of Design’s participation in the championship as the project’s creative director, said the opportunity to blend gaming and cinematic storytelling was a personal highlight.

“I’m a ’90s kid — I grew up on video games,” he said. “When the grant came through and we started building out this infrastructure, it immediately caught my attention. We wanted to elevate this project to a level that’s comparable to the effort and intentionality of a professional esports league’s visual identity. That’s where virtual production really leveled it up.”

Cinematographer and virtual production manager, Ryan Khan, said the students involved left with more than a project credit.

“A lot of students came into this project thinking it was just going to be a green screen shoot,” Khan said. “What they left with was a real understanding of how environments are built, lit and composited.”

For Elsen, partnerships like this aren’t just exciting — they’re strategic.

“The biggest asset is the students being in tune to the trends and demographics of the gaming industry,” he said. “That insight is invaluable.”

As NC State moves toward launching officially supported esports teams, design is expected to play a central role — from team branding and highlight reels to motion graphics and livestream design.

“Every single event provides some level of collaboration across design disciplines,” Elsen said. “From our side, we want to showcase the College of Design any chance we get.”

With plans for team development underway, Elsen says he sees continued opportunity for collaboration.

“We’ve started the process of creating our own university-supported teams,” he said. “I think collaborating on how to showcase these teams would be amazing.”

Whether that means custom-built player identities, storytelling campaigns or new production workflows, the future of esports at NC State is looking more like a multidisciplinary sandbox — and the College of Design is helping shape what’s possible.

“We weren’t just demoing tech,” Khan said. “We were building an experience.”