Are you ready?!
This could be the world championship of a major traditional sport. But it's not because
this is eSport, possibly the first major new sport to be invented in over a century.
And whether you like it or not competitive video gaming is sweeping
the world.
Shoreditch, London. Hip, cool and trendy. This is the base for Fnatic, probably the
leading western eSports team and brand. I've come to meet Sam Mathews, founder and owner
of Fnatic. In the bunker, their concept store where you can buy all sorts of eSports related
equipment as well as replica team shirts. One of the things I wrote in the manifesto
when I was 19 was to turn youthful enthusiasm and entrepreneurial passion at the infancy
of a new world sport into a global brand. So that was the mission statement back then
and one of the things that still resonates today. When I think about sports, there's
only really one sport which I think is truly global and that's football. And I think for
eSports there often is no barriers, it just depends where that game is available. Games
like League of Legends are pretty much global, completely global and so I see this as the
new world sport.
Fnatic have more than 50 gamers based all over the globe. I went to Berlin to see their
League of Legends team in action but more specifically to see their star player Martin
'Rekkles' Larsson. Each week for most of the year he and his team mates have a match in
a TV studio on the outskirts of the German capital. The live audience may be small but
the online one is huge.
Usually our weeks are six days of playing League of Legends and one day of not playing
League of Legends. But most of the people play it on the seventh day anyway but it's
just a hobby of ours as well. That's how everything started.
Whenever people ask at home I don't necessarily say that I'm an athlete but I would not consider
myself anything less. I think in many ways I'm just as much of an athlete as in many
other sports and even though it's not socially accepted yet I think it's just a matter of
time before people open their eyes and realise that's this is going on without them even
knowing it.
Katowice, Poland. The Spodek Arena. Welcome the world's biggest eSports tournament. In
this former mining town thousands of people, but mainly young men, gather to watch the
Intel Extreme Masters final, basically the Olympics of eSports.
The authorities in Katowice realised the potential of this new sport five years ago and now it
has reinvigorated the city.
Most people thought we were crazy. People don't understand the concept of why you would
compete like in a traditional sport in a video game. How would that work? For me as a player,
for us as people who are from this generation, who grew up with video games, it was the most
normal thing on the planet. That's why we ended up in stadiums because we always believed
people have to be playing in front of big crowds. There was no blueprint for this. Katowice
became this unique place which you can compare to Woodstock, it's easily the largest eSports
event in the world. It's like an expression of the movement and the liberation of video
games, of the acceptance of video games. And this is where people from all over the world
come and celebrate this.
Prize money is several hundreds of thousands of dollars nowadays in one game discipline
because you have to look at it like in classic sport, the various games are basically the
various sports disciplines. We broadcast now in at least eight languages and I'm pretty
sure that over the whole event we will reach more than 10m people. It's by nature a global
audience, that's the nice thing about eSports, it's inherently global. Global audience and
global players.
Everyone has told me the heart and soul of eSports is South Korea. This is where is
originates from, this is where it is so ingrained in society that it could be seen as the national
past time. Korea has one of the fastest and most developed broadband networks in the world.
Back at the turn of the millennium the Korean government actively encouraged the setting
up of a huge network of internet cafes or PC bangs to promote gaming. Now they are so
popular that they are not just cafes but the parks and playgrounds of South Korea. Schools
increasingly saw that pupils were avoiding classes in order to play eSports at the PC
bangs so one headmaster decided to take quite radical action.
Is there anybody here who doesn't want to become a professional game?
The eSports stadium in Seoul is unlike any other
stadium I know. Korea's top team, SK telecom are playing League of Legends versus ROX Tigers.
But I, like most of the spectators, are there to see one man play. Faker, known as God to
his legion of adoring fans, is the world's top player and has a contract worth a
cool $2.5m.
Players like Faker are seen as heroes and role models but there is a down side to this
adulation: addiction. The National Centre for Mental Health used to deal mainly with
drugs and alcohol addiction. Now it's all about gaming.
Since 2000 gaming addiction has become the top-ranked addiction amongst young people
and 90% of the addicts are young male teenagers. That is why in 2011 the South Korean government
passed a law that forbid children under the age of 16 playing computer games from midnight
until 6am, the so-called Cinderella Law.
But it's not only addiction that eSports is scared of. Cheating, corruption and drug-taking
are now a part of the professional scene.
I think eSport has a unique opportunity to look at Fifa, IAAF, ICC and go: 'we don't
want that, but if we don't want it, what do we want?'
The gaming industry, desperate not to make the same mistakes as the old sporting world,
have turned to a lawyer who specialises in sporting corruption. He is eSport's first
Integrity Commissioner.
I've been accused more than once of building a highway for cars that don't yet exist. The
trouble is I know the cars are coming because I've spent 20 years looking at them and basically
what eSport appears to want to do is wait until they've been run over by that car and
then build the road. And I'm trying to persuade them that's not a clever thing.
So far 22 countries have made eSports an official sport. Another 24 are in the process
of recognition. In Britain we are just started out on this eSports journey where traditional
sports, or analogue sports as they like to call them in Korea, still dominate. But new
evidence of change is appearing almost daily. Last month it was announced that the new Tottenham
Hotspur stadium will host live eSport matches with possible crowds of 50,000. It might seem
that this revolutionary new sporting world is far away but it's not.