 What on earth would a real-life gaming school look like? Well, we're here at Yongping Vocational High School in Taoyuan City, Taiwan where they are currently accepting applicants for the brand new gaming program that will officially open its doors in September of 2018. So, I guess we're gonna find out... after this message from our sponsor! Private Internet access! It's the VPN that's entirely self-explanatory. It makes your access to the Internet more private. Look at the link in the video description to learn more. It's been a long time since I've had to go to the principal's office, and it was never voluntarily, but... As a parent, I've got a lot of questions walking into something like this. But while I might have started out thinking, excuse me, gaming school, I learned a lot during my meeting with the principal. First of all, Yongping is one of 400 vocational schools in Taiwan and is now ranked in the top 10 with around 6,000 students. So they do a lot more than just gaming. And I also learned that at this time, there isn't a full-time gaming track. Any of the 100 or so students who will be accepted into the gaming program will be expected to pick another of the vocations they offer, like automotive repair, food, graphic design, or tourism, as sort of like a double major. So, to make the obvious joke, it is not all fun and games, and the gaming program will be very demanding. To ensure that students have the right mindset, not only are the administrators and coaches going to be looking at traditional acceptance requirements, like grades on Taiwan standardized tests, but they're also going to be interviewing applicants and even, yes, you knew this one was coming, conducting tryouts with their gaming coaches to evaluate their skills. And that is skills with a Z. Now, the school already has an extracurricular e-sports team with a coaching staff of retired players, and they're building partnerships with affiliated local teams like J-Team and MS that will allow students to apply for e-sports internships. But to make the experience more school-like, they're going to have to think outside the box a little bit and beef up their staff to cover not just how to play video games, but also a broad range of gaming industry-related subjects. So as a private school, they have the luxury to build their curriculum. So students will learn to build and troubleshoot their PCs, they'll study the different PC components and their effects on gaming performance, they will learn principles of game streaming on platforms like Twitch, and even attend classes for less obvious things like the history of e-sports and gaming and some PR and marketing fundamentals. So inside here is one of their regular classrooms, where gaming program students will learn traditional core subjects like Chinese, math, English, and history, and also where, for example, a tourism double major student would study Japanese. But that is not to say that they won't also have a real bonafide Overwatch class where they'll cover map analysis, character pros and cons, individual strategies and techniques, and the teamwork and communication principles that are necessary for success in the highly competitive e-sports scene, along with, yes, actual homework assignments like achieve and maintain gold rank in Overwatch. As you can imagine, it would probably be beneficial to have sessions in a computer lab to practice the techniques that are being presented by the instructor. And I don't mean a computer lab like this one. I'm talking about one like this. This room cost $300,000 to build, and they'll be adding another one just like it before the students arrive in the fall. And man, this kind of computer lab would have been my dream in high school. There are about 25 gaming machines in here equipped with Core i5 processors and GTX 1060 6GB video cards. They've got a VR gaming space right smack dab in the middle of the room, and they've got a fantastic streaming setup in here, including RGB'd out gaming themed decor, pan tilt zoom cameras for the players and the commentators, and a quad TV setup down at the end for spectating in person. Like these guys do not mess around. They've got like 75 Hertz monitors, Cherry MX Blue gaming keyboards. Pretty much the freaking works. Wow. But as cool as it all is, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of you still think video game high school makes more sense as a web video series than as an actual thing. For you, I've got a challenge. Why don't you try thinking about it a slightly different way? So in the same way that not everyone who enrolls in a cooking vocational program will become a world famous chef, not everyone who enrolls in this gaming program will become a champion e-sports player. And that's okay because there's a lot more to the gaming industry as a whole than just playing games competitively. These days gaming bars are growing in popularity. Gaming and food program anyone? Gaming hotels are starting to spring up. Gaming and tourism sounds like a great background for that kind of work. And the gaming organizations that used to subsist on scraps are now playing tournaments in major sports arenas with organizations like Epic Games committing a hundred million dollars of funding and prize money towards their games. It's crazy. Even within the computer hardware industry, remember these are the companies that make gaming gear. I have personally experienced a huge need for representatives who actually understand gaming and gamers to help their companies address the growing market that they represent. You can learn about gaming after you enter the workforce, but if you know that that's what you want to do with your life, then this whole thing here starts to make a lot more sense. And I still haven't even mentioned the connections element. This is a huge and often undervalued part of choosing the right school. Attending a vocational school means that you graduate with a large cohort of passionate people with similar aspirations who can work together to get into the careers that they want and support each other as they enter the workforce. So I walked in here a skeptic, and I still have my doubts. I'm sure there's a lot of work to be done, but it makes far more sense to me walking out than it did walking in. So I guess I got taken to school today. Ha ha, ha ha, ha, terrible. But you know what's not terrible? 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If you want to learn about tech and you don't have a gaming school nearby.