CAN IT BIGGER THAN BASKETBALL?

• Author: White, April
• Position: ESPORTS

IT IS A SUNNY May afternoon in Los Angeles, Calif. S0ren Bjerg, a slender, pale 21-year-old with chunky glasses and a black hoodie, is sitting in the den of the house he shares with a half-dozen other guys. It looks the way you might expect it to: lots of technology and energy drinks and not much else. Bjerg is staring at his computer screen. He adjusts his two monitors and fiddles with the speakers as he awaits the start of his next League of Legends battle. As he does many days, Bjerg will sit here playing the popular video game for the next eight hours.

As the game begins, Bjerg guides a blue-haired magician named LeBlanc across the Fields of Justice, hurling spells at the enemy's minions. He narrates the chaotic game, often profanely, as he and his four teammates confront their opponents, another team of gamers. Each is trying to reach the other's "nexus." A half-hour later, Bjerg's team suffers total defeat when their glowing blue nexus is shattered.

"Okay, now I'm going to read out some subs and resubs," he says without missing a beat. Each of the nonsensical screen names he reads is that of a viewer who has been watching him play. Bjerg is a professional gamer from Denmark known as Bjergsen. Several thousand people are watching him play LoL, as the game is known, right now on the streaming service Twitch, and tens of thousands more will watch the video of the game later.

To guarantee that Bjerg, a longtime fan favorite on Team Solo Mid, reads your name and maybe your message aloud, you need to "sub," or subscribe. In the 90 seconds before his next game starts, Bjerg announces the names of some 30 subscribers, each of whom just pledged $4.99 to $24.99 a month to support the player. Meanwhile, ads for energy drinks and car insurance appear at the bottom of the screen, and a link on the right offers Team Solo Mid gear. A constant stream of fan comments races alongside the game and, on archived videos, flashy beer ads periodically interrupt the action.

Each month, Twitch says, more than 100,-000,000 people will log in to watch an estimated 23,000,000,000 minutes of professional esports players and amateur gamers streaming video game play. By year's end, market analyst New zoo forecasts the online global esports audience will reach 385,000,000 people with revenues of nearly $700,000,000.

If all of this seems a little crazy to you, you are not alone. As Jeffrey Glass, a serial entrepreneur and co-owner of an esports team who earned his MBA from Harvard in 1994, explains, "Esports is the most gigantic industry that nobody's ever heard of."

To understand esports, the first thing you need to know is that competitive video gaming has been around a lot longer than you think. On Nov. 10, 1980, five...