Like school graduations in the US, Chinese graduations also have commencement speeches; speeches where possibly famous or respected people give a “pep” talk of sorts to inspire the new grads. In one university in China, the commencement speaker took to a slightly different route with his speech, to urge new grads to stop playing video games.
During this year’s commencement at Wuhan’s Huazhong University for Science and Technology in Hubei province, university president Li Peigen gave a commencement talk about growing up. In his speech, he told his 8000 graduates to “grow up and forget about school”, and, most importantly, to lose the attitude that life is a “game”.
Below is a translated excerpt of Li’s speech. Note: It’s very hard to translate Chinese poetry in English with it’s prose and imagery.
Li: “When you leave these halls, you must say good bye to dorms that don’t have air conditioning.
Say goodbye to the unbelievably cheap canteen that didn’t make one cent off of you.
Sleeping in is very sweet,
Playing DOTA is so very awesome,
Cutting classes feels so fine.
Choosing classes is a pain,
But life continues one,
You just have to say goodbye forever to this mentality that life is but a game.
One of the students at the commencement captured Li’s speech and posted it online. Tencent’s own reporting of the video has garnered over nine million views since the video surfaced this weekend.
Li, a professor of engineering with a name that sounds like bacon in Chinese, has been giving poetic commencement speeches to university graduates for the last three years. Every year’s topic has been different. This year’s speech caught the eye of the general public in China not because Li called out Defence Of The Ancients but for his interesting way of speaking to his graduates.
In video interviews with the graduating class of 2013, the students all seem very receptive of Li’s speech for them to grow up and work hard. However no one’s come out and said they’ll follow Li’s advice and stop playing DOTA.
Comments
7 responses to “Chinese Professor Calls For Graduates To Give Up DOTA”
My girlfriend would love it if they’d quit playing DoTA2, I think the fact that she barely ever gets English-speaking teammates is going to drive her out of her mind soon…
on a completely, totally unrelated note can YOU PEOPLE at Kotaku please change your cookie timeouts? It’s a video game commenting system, there’s no need to have them expire unless someone hits “logout”.
That’s weird, I never get time-outs on my desktop PCs, only my mobile.
Happens to me on both. Drives me banana sandwich.
Mmmm…. sandwich….
That’s actually really good advice and I wish my lecturers had taken the time to commit to poetry or song the exhortation that I give up gaming – the first time I went to uni.
(The second time I was a fair bit older and ‘that guy’. Having coffee with the lecturers out of class and such.)
Wow bit of a misleading headline grab.
I would of been more interested in “Chinese professor uses gaming reference in graduation speach”
It really does affect the integrity of this publication when you sensationalise articles and use loaded titles.