Get in the game
By now, we've all heard the endless recitation of numbers: the hundreds of thousands of viewers, the gigantic prize pools, and the billions of man-hours churned in game servers owned by Blizzard, Valve, and Riot Games. eSports has quickly grown to be a major landmark in gaming culture, and as witnessed by the rampant outgrowth of Multiplayer Online Battle Arena games trying to catch a ride on League of Legends' shockingly successful coattails, it's throwing around a ton of weight.
It's helping build better gaming communities
The competitive gaming community gets saddled with a bad rap for toxic behavior and antagonistic player interactions. This is especially true for MOBAs like League of Legends, where the game is balanced as such that a bad player can be the direct cause for his or her team's defeat. Frustration make tempers run high, and words get exchanged that a player would normally not use on even his or her worst enemies.
It requires as much teamwork as other sports
The common public perspective of a professional gamer is that of a kid in his parent's basement, bedecked in a gigantic headset as he stares at a monitor for hours, clicking and typing away like a jackhammer during an earthquake. Nothing about that image elicits professional athleticism, and the US government's recent decision to streamline the acquisition process of an athletic visa for competitors in the Riot League Championship Series program garnered an unsurprising amount of skepticism. It's not as if they were real athletes, right?
The cyberathletes bust gamer stereotypes
While ease on the spectators' eyes isn't the most important factor when judging eSports, it certainly helps its cause that a good number of its players are, to put it simply, highly attractive specimens of the species. League of Legends players John "Hyrqbot" Velly and Stephen "Snoopeh" Ellis topped Reddit's Ladyboners section (yes, that's a real subreddit), to the delight and appreciation of its salacious ladies and gentlemen.
There are big prizes and fueled by passion
Thus far, we've avoided citing the more commonly expressed numbers, like stream viewership or prize pools. But the fighting game community has at least one worth mentioning: approximately 130,000 viewers for the Super Smash Bros tournament at the 2013 EVO Championship Series. While not the most jaw-dropping viewership number in eSports history, it is noteworthy for the totally community-driven nature of the event. The twelve-year-old game was included in this year's EVO by weight of its fans' donations to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, winning with a total contribution of over $93,000, yet was nearly canceled at the last second by Nintendo's legal department. With the legal hurdle successfully passed, Melee's EVO 2013 presence became its most popular in its entire history.
The casting and announcing is spectacular
Even in Starcraft 2, where the oozing green and gory glory of a beautifully executed Baneling bust is exciting for players of all skill levels to see, a total newcomer to tournament streams will have almost no idea what's going on, and absolutely none as to why.
It has more heart than you'd expect
"Out of the four of you, you're my best friend," said Marcus "Dyrus" Hill, choked up and tearful, as he and former Team Solomid player Shan "Chaox" Huang shared a last heartfelt embrace before the latter's forced departure from the team. And everywhere, viewers of Gamespot's GameCrib series echoed Redditor brbwinning's exclamation: "I can't believe I cried to a League of Legends reality show!"
It's only going to get bigger
eSports' history is laden with a plethora of hurdles. The sudden collapse of the Championship Gaming Series by DirecTV, as well as the Cyberathlete Professional League's twisted and murky legal history and status, had stalled out the western scene's growth, while the combination of a gambling scandal among Starcraft: Brood War players and the rough transition into Starcraft 2 chilled the once-white-hot Korean scene.
