( December 14, 2012 ) — Deep inside the convention centers and auditoriums of China, Korea, Anaheim and even Las Vegas, the underground tradition known as electronic sports (eSports) is evolving. ESports has attracted a massive following, appearing in TIME magazine and Forbes articles that tried to decipher the mystery behind what makes eSports so popular. Recently, North America and Europe have been home to the largest growth of eSports, even gaining regular news coverage from mainstream news websites, even receiving television coverage from time to time. The basic idea behind electronic sports is simply playing video games competitively for money. The most common genres associated with eSports are first-person-shooter, fighting, real time strategy and multiplayer online battle arena. The concept of eSports began when Microsoft held an official tournament for Doom’s sequel with a prize pool of roughly $10,000. Similar to traditional sports, regular participants of eSports naturally formed teams where they could practice with each other and prepare for future tournaments. These teams have become so successful that they gained sponsors from large companies such as LG, Dell, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, Intel and deviantART. With the rise of eSports, several students from Clark have been following the ever-growing scene by becoming part of the online community and even attending several events. Senior Hasnain Shanim has been following the eSports scene since the beginning of 2011, and has watched almost every major eSports event. “It’s entertaining and cool to watch people compete with mental skill and decision-making instead of just physical skill,” Shanim said. “It’s also a lot more international than regular sports. Sometimes, I find myself cheering on French players, Canadian players and Korean players more than American players.” Due to the majority of online gaming done through the Internet, players are able to compete overseas, as well as through “offline” events where they compete in person. Through the Internet, American players can compete in European tournaments, creating zero flight expenses. The popularity of eSports is hard to be denied. The official Facebook page for League of Legends that posts daily feed on eSports, events and conventions currently has 4.1 million likes and continues to rise. Riot Games, the developer behind League of Legends, updates its game client daily to advertise upcoming eSports events to the 12 million of daily active players. Major League Gaming (MLG), one of the largest eSports organizers in America, has experienced a 636% percent growth in live viewers over the last two years, according to their official website. This year, MLG Anaheim became one of the largest eSports events in California. It was one of the most advertised events as well, even attracting Clark students. Junior Nick Cragnotti attended MLG Anaheim as his first eSports event and quickly grew to follow the scene more closely as well. “I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Cragnotti said. “I expected to go with my friends and find a couple dozen seats. But when I got there, I didn’t realize that hundreds of people were into this.” The most profitable and popular games in eSports are Starcraft 2, League of Legends, Dota 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.The Major League Gaming Spring Championship featured Starcraft 2 and League of Legends as its main games and accumulated 1,300,000 unique online viewers by the end of the 3 day event. In comparison, the Rose Bowl happening the same weekend of the Spring Championship only peaked at about 700,000 unique viewers on cable. The record view count was broken two months ago in the IGN Pro League: Season 4, where all six live streams collectively gathered 3 million unique viewers. On Nov. 29, the fifth season of the IGN Pro League gathered over 5 million unique viewers on all streams. With these rising statistics, eSports is clearly going nowhere but up in popularity. The popular streaming website TwitchTV broadcasts every single major tournament and has sponsors from all over the world while continues to rise in daily view counts. “I can definitely see eSports being televised in the future,” Cragnotti said. “It’s going to expand very quickly, maybe even in the next five years. The online community is going to get a lot bigger.” As eSports continues to rise, the events just get larger and larger. Major League Gaming has jokingly stated on their website that they always run out of seats for every single event, no matter how many more they bring. “As the playership grows, the viewership eventually will too,” Shanim said. “IPL5 even reached college basketball viewership levels, which is crazy. I definitely want to attend MLG Anaheim next year because it’s really close and it’s just one of those big seasonal tournaments that everybody has to watch.”