While “Man City v Chelsea: live” sits plastered across their homepage, The Telegraph seem to have forgotten to upload their coverage of Major League Gaming’s (MLG) Rising Stars Invitational.  I could chalk this up to embarrassing oversight, but I’m willing to bet that few among their staff have laid out beer, ordered pizza to the door and invited friends round to watch an eSports final.

Because games don’t sit well with classic conceptions of sport (faking an ankle injury is next to useless), the professional leagues are uncharted territory for even the most savvy of living room gamers.  Going in I knew nothing, but my research for this brief exposition of gaming’s abstruse innards has been something of an eye-opener.  Propelled by investment from developers and corporate sponsors, professional gaming is becoming big business.

These days you don’t even have to be Korean.  While we’ve yet to see the kind of fanaticism that led to the foundation of Ongamenet, South Korea’s 24-hour pro gaming channel, the West is waking up.  America’s MLG, from its humble origins as a two-man team in ‘02, has seen a 636 per cent rise in live viewership in the past two years.  In 2012 it played host to 11.7 million spectators, and the 2013 season promises to be larger than ever before.

In announcing the development of Dota 2, Valve, the creators of Half-Life, Team Fortress and Portal, threw their considerable weight behind the rise of the eSport.  Central to Dota’s design philosophy is its amenability to professional play – the capacity to host matches and spectate tournaments is hard-wired into its systems. Going far beyond the simple provision of a competitive arena, Valve also funded the most lucrative prize in gaming history at Dota’s inaugural tournament, The International.  Winning team Natus Vincere took home a cool $1m from the total $1.6m purse.  Not bad for an afternoon’s button-clicking.

Such tournaments are broadcast in multiple languages, live-streamed on sites such as Twitch and uploaded to YouTube.  eSports require no pitches, no primetime TV slots, and the professionals needn’t even leave their home country.  The internet is their natural environment, and because of this top-tier gaming has never been required to compete for viewers with traditional sport.  Those of you hell-bent on dismissing the idea of the professionals as good ol’-fashioned ‘sportsmen’ are entirely correct to do so; eSports are something novel, and they are assembling their own stage.

So perhaps The Telegraph didn’t forget their League of Legends coverage after all, but while few Super Bowl rituals will be developing around the DreamHack final, professional gaming is being hauled from obscurity by the industry’s biggest names.  In the truest sense of the phrase, this is entertainment as we have never seen it before.

Angus Morrison runs a channel on games and their critical reception at www.youtube.com/RErollGaming

Read Angus' column from last week, on mass appeal and monotony, here: http://www.varsity.co.uk/culture/5682