Boulogne-Billancourt (AFP)

With the spectacular growth of esports, more and more teenage video game fans dream of becoming the next Gotaga or the new Bugha. "Our role is to bring them down to earth," Gaëtan Godin, Fortnite coach of the Gameward team, told AFP.

During the summer, its team based in Boulogne-Billancourt in the Paris region welcomes dozens of children and adolescents in its training center. On the program: video games in the morning, sports in the afternoon, all supervised by animators.

Like Gameward, other esports clubs have been realizing for some time the need to provide a framework for the practice of video games among the youngest.

The MCES or ROG Esport teams organize courses during the school holidays and recently, Vitality, the leading esport structure in France, announced the launch in August of its first Summer School dedicated to young people aged 12 to 17. For a week, registered teens will have the opportunity to slip into the shoes of a professional gamer.

- In contact with the pros -

"(They will be able to) see what it is like to be an esports player, develop their practice, learn, be in contact with pro players, coaches and enrich their knowledge of the game", describes Nicolas Maurer, co- founder of Vitality.

But "it is not a question of promising all the young people who are going to come to the Summer School that they will become professionals, not at all", he warns.

Because as esport develops, the profession of gamer arouses more and more vocations, amplified in recent years by the phenomenal success of the Fortnite video game.

Last year, the American Kyle Giersdorf, alias "Bugha", won the Epic Games World Cup at just 16, pocketing a check for $ 3 million in the process, and no doubt inspired a many teens to follow his path.

"Today, there are a lot of young people who say to themselves: + I want to become pro +. It's very good to have dreams, but they do not realize the reality at all", continues Nicolas Maurer.

"(Young people) are attracted by the fact of playing and by the fact of seeing that there is a perspective, that they can transform this passion into a profession", analyzes Gaëtan Godin. "But our role is also to bring them back down to earth by explaining to them that it is very elitist."

- Educate children, reassure parents -

“Becoming pro will only be for a very small minority of extremely talented young people,” confirms Nicolas Maurer. "There are a lot of kids who have these dreams but there are very few people who explain to them what it really is."

Supervised courses to educate children therefore, but also to reassure parents, sometimes reluctant to let their children play for hours on the console.

"There is sometimes a negative perception around video games and esports. There can be addiction problems that worry families," said Pierre-Christophe Baguet, the mayor (LR) of Boulogne-Billancourt, partner from the Gameward team. "These internships can precisely help to control these perverse effects."

"I learned to position myself well, to have the legs straight, the back raised, the keyboard straight, not tilted because otherwise you can get injured. I did not know that at all", says Redha, 14, who attended an internship with Gameward.

"It is one of our major fundamental subjects at Vitality to explain that video games can very well be done in a healthy way, that it can be supervised, and that it can be very positive", declares Nicolas Maurer. But "we are not going to change the image of the video game in two blows of a pot spoon", he admits.

© 2020 AFP