The Esports & Gaming Venue is designed to be our community space with full day operations and open to the entire campus. During select events and timing of the year it will also be open to peer K-12/collegiate peers, friends and fans of the university, and specific audiences such as tailgates, weekly & monthly events, and other unique programming.
Our walls are filled with the history of our 2016 origins, events, milestones, and more. We encourage any visitor to take some time to look at our celebration of student founders to present. We even have a wall by the listening station which shows photos from the current school year. Knowing we were going to renovate these spaces in the near future allowed us to focus on maximizing value and opportunity while ensuring we were only investing our resources in direct impactful resources.
Location: 114 4th Street, Suite 126, Norman, OK 73072 (Google Maps Link)
Want to plan your next event with gaming or have your event streamed? Whether in our venue or elsewhere on campus, we’ll work to make it happen. Whether you are an individual student, staff, faculty, student org, university department, or campus partner hit the button to go to our OU home for daily operations, pricing, and membership package information.
Join over 3,400 students, faculty, staff, alumni, and fans of OU's gaming efforts. This also is the source of the most current news around our venue as well as events across our developments.
Playstations, Xbox, Nintendo, Retro Oh My….
Consoles for many households are the starting point into gaming together and individually and we cherish that. The arguments between PC vs Console is irrelevant to us as they both have their strengths regardless of the amounts of those strengths on one side or other.
The OU Gaming Club is about welcoming all gamers regardless of what you play, where you come from, or what you're studying. We celebrate video games! That means we emphasize acceptance in our areas, we embrace difference, and we absolutely wreck each other in Mario Kart, respectfully.
It is because of this intention that the OU Gaming Club represents one of OU's largest single topic interest groups at over 3,400 members in 2024.
The PC Gaming spaces are designed to allow gamers to explore the world of PC gaming whether it is for the first time or as a seasoned gamer. We preload the games we develop on our intercollegiate esports side, but everyone is welcome to install whatever they want to play through game launchers like Epic, Steam, Blizzard. All popular game launchers are preinstalled and we actively welcome submissions for new games to keep installed at all times.
SIM racing is a unique opportunity in gaming, brought to life through student initiative and thorough justification in our culture. Our setup includes custom-built racing rigs, complete with high torque force feedback steering wheels, shifters, controls, and the same sort of chairs you would have in a real-world racing car making it an extremely authentic and thrilling experience.
The inclusion of a SIM Racing Rig and VR at launch was because of student advocacy and work put in to justify them. Many collegiate venues stick to some PCs and a few consoles and stop there. OU students said otherwise. What else would you like included?
The VR Space is designed to give enough room for two(2) gamers to explore and play in the virtual space simultaneously. Popular games like Beat Saber and SuperHot are preloaded and we continuously add to our catalog as we see demand from the community.
For many of our current and prospective students they only know the era of streaming music services and instant access to music with a click of a button. These are great advancements in entertainment, however emphasizing the power and hold video game, anime, and sci-fi movie music and soundtracks holds over our souls is irrefutable. Welcome back to the 90s and older with a growing collection of vinyls aimed at celebrating the gamer music. Ever heard 8-bit music with the static of vinyl that isn’t modern “Lo-Fi”? Or maybe it’s a Halo, Mario, or Sonic anniversary day and we will fill the air with sounds of these themes throughout those days.
Come in, sit down, slap on the cans, and listen to our classical music. We provide a set of Audio-Technica Headphones or you’re welcome to connect your own. Our record player can connect to Bluetooth headsets or to analog 3.5mm physical headphone plug.
The student workstation space is two(2) all in one Dell PCs meant for study, homework, or research usages and will have no cost associated with them. Coming in an hour early for an event? Stay on top of your studies and just login and go with your venue account and free of charge, but they are first come, first serve. These are dual screen setups with a good amount of desk surface area to get work done.
Being able to stream gameplay is a standard now so making sure we have the capability to do so allows us to do fundraiser, provide more value for sponsors, and create more perks for student orgs and departments to leverage our space for their events. For competitors, this is also a key bonus as they can go back review their gameplay and we can clip highlights for promotional material.
Everything we do is centered around student development. This venue is an extension of our Community & Labs program geared towards core foundational accountability, soft skill development aspects for students. However, this also means scaling up to full event logistics, tournament operations, production coordination, sponsorship solicitation, and contract management at full tilt.
The Multipurpose Room is intended to be used for the following functions:
BOOTH AREA
BEHIND CHECKIN AREA
Headsets: 2x Meta Quest 2
TV: 2x Vizio 4K/120hz w/Chromecasts
PC Games
Nintendo Games
Playstation Games
SIM Racing Games
XBox Games
VR Games
The OU Esports & Gaming Venue was originally a retail store that opened in 2018 as part of the new Cross Village four building complex comprised of upscale dorms and amenities for students and the area. In 2021, OU Esports & Co-Curricular gained a temporary office space within Cross B at the corner of 4th and Jenkins Avenue. In early 2023, access to the space became a reality and we started to plan how to maximize the space with it’s current power capabilities, space layout, and design which is now the OU Esports & Gaming Venue.
We always want OUr gamers to feel welcome and included! If you own a game that isn’t installed and want to use our space and hardware to play, then simply install it when you come in. All popular game launchers are preinstalled, just login to your account and install. We do not actively wipe our storage unless we need to free up space for basic functions or if we need to host an event with specific games and need the space.
For now, requests can be made in The OU Gaming Club Discord inside the venue text channels. Booking options for specific PCs will be available in the future – you will be able to reserve access to a PC that you know has a certain game predownloaded! Our venue has one of the fastest internet connections on campus as of Spring 2024. Our PCs leverage full 2.5Gb ethernet connections making a big game download like Call of Duty: MW3 a 10 minute download only.
We will be adding the ability to do this very thing, but not yet. Keep checking back and keep an eye on our socials as we notify everyone on new things as they come up.
Of course! Everyone plays and gets comfortable with their own input devices. All we ask is you respect our peripherals when you move them out of the way and then you move them back when you’re done. You can also ask our staff to disconnect ours for you if you’d like. We want you to feel comfortable and welcome in our spaces as priority one!
At this time we do not, and we do not allow food and open drink to be consumed at our desk stations. Around the corner and through the courtyard are numerous restaurants in Cross A & C. As a rule for drinks. We only allow containers that are sealable on the top, but we strongly recommend you place them on the floor next to your station or in your bag to avoid any problems. Things happen, but that will not excuse any damage to our inventory.
For right now head to our online merch store HERE. We’ll be adding several more items in middle to late 2024. Keep looking!
All of our current pricing can be found on the complex front page.
For right now you join our Discord and/or follow our socials (@ouesports & @ou_gamingclub). We will be introducing an events calendar on our website over the Summer.
For general use, Saturdays and Sundays are open to the public. Certain events throughout the year will be open to the public. Reference our facilities page to see costs and hours.
With our venue being exclusive to OU students, staff, faculty, and campus partners only for the remainder of the Spring 2024, the only requirement will be that you register your account with your OU or campus partner email address.
For us, an arena is a space that celebrates competition and in that intent sacrifices some square footage to create a space that is often not used for it’s full intent many times in a single school year. With our growing list of partners on campus, if we need bigger spaces to put on an event like a tournament or competition with a stage we have more than enough places across campus to leverage for those one-off events that typically don’t exceed more than 10-20 times a year. This remains true even in our upcoming renovation intent and why we call this a venue that can deploy some additional seating for real small events, but with stadiums down the street, ballrooms up the street, and our previously designed Black Box Theater (BBT) in the adjacent Cross building, we have plenty of resources for showcase events in the future.
SENET is a robust cloud based lab management software by ENESTECH. It is geared towards the growing esports and gaming spaces everywhere but especially in educational environments. Allowing for automation of gaming hardware to aid in keeping software updated, workflows efficient, and analytics documented, SENET is invaluable to organizing our venue.
In June 2023, The OU Board of Regents approved our project proposal to renovate our space on campus. As a quick action measure we worked through Summer 2023 and early 2024 to bring the spaces online as a preview of whats to come.
OU Esports:
OU Gaming Club: