What is e-Sports?

E-Sports is a term meaning Electronic Sports, also known as competitive video gaming. This includes any competition in just about any video game between teams or individuals in a tournament setting. Generally there are some sort of prizes in these tournaments, whether it be computer parts and accessories, or cash. These tournaments most often have an entry fee, and a percent of those fees goes toward the prize pot. There are online and offline tournaments. Online tournaments have the players play from their own home against other players over the Internet, organized through a website. Offline tournaments will have registration over the Internet, but the actual play happens in convention centers or anywhere there is plenty of space to set up several rows of computers and maybe a stage. 

Gaming Tournaments
There are several major e-sports tournaments and leagues, enough to have some sort of video game competition going on at any given time throughout the year. There are online tournaments or leagues for just about any game you can play online, free and pay-to-play. Online leagues are considered practice for offline tournaments. They will typically have a regular season followed by playoffs. Offline tournaments, also known as LAN (Local Area Network) tournaments take place all around the world but support a limited cast of games. Many players see a drop in their play in offline tournaments because they are playing on a machine that isn't their own in an extremely loud setting with many people watching. Here's a list of some of the gaming events:

• Major League Gaming, the most established and probably the most well known league, supports games like Halo 3, Gears of War, and Super Smash Brothers, World of WarCraft, and StarCraft 2. They are currently holding an event in Raleigh, North Carolina. To give an example of the money involved in these tournaments, here are some of the prize winners.
  The team (4 players) that won first in Halo 3 received $20,000.
  The team (3 players) that won first in World of WarCraft received $9,000.
  The player that won first in StarCraft 2 received $2,500.
• Electronic Sports World Cup is an event similar to the FIFA World Cup. Always held in Paris every summer, the event invites one or two teams/players from each country that wishes to participate. The games played at the event vary from year to year, but they have had Counter-Strike and Warcraft III every year since 2003, the first year it was held. Wikipedia's ESWC page shows who won what in each game since 2003.
• World Cyber Games is another international event that holds qualifier tournaments in many countries  around the world to determine who will play in the event. For the first few years (2000-03), a Korean company named World Cyber Games held the event in South Korea, but it has since been played in the United States, Singapore, Italy, Germany, and China. This tournament started a few years after the release of StarCraft, which became immensely popular in Korea. This event has a few different games every year, but it has always had StarCraft, Counter-Strike, and FIFA Soccer.
• Cyberathlete Professional League is now in the process of rebuilding, but for many years it was the tournament to win if you were to be considered the best. This company lead the way for every video game tournament to come after it. Fatal1ty made himself one of the most recognized video game players in America by winning this event in three different games. SK Gaming made itself one of the most successful gaming organizations in the world by winning first three different times in two years in Counter-Strike. Their Counter-Strike team is still one of the best in the world today. This event was held twice a year, always in Dallas, Texas. The CPL also held an online league called the Cyberathlete Amateur League, which was for many years the definitive way to measure how good you were at Counter-Strike and a few other games. 
• World eSports Games was another international event featuring Counter-Strike and Warcraft III that invited its teams/players based on performances at other tournaments like ESWC, WCG, and CPL. This event was different in that it lasted several months, compared to the typical two to three days. All the players lived in South Korea for the duration of the event, and they played a regular season worth of matches followed by the playoffs and finals. 
• World Series of Video Games was an event that gained popularity as the CPL lost popularity. It featured the same games, but there was a tournament every month for several months. They took place mostly across the United States. The event was the first to feature World of WarCraft, launching the game into e-sports. 
• Championship Gaming Series was an event similar to World eSports Games in that it had a regular season followed by playoffs in the typical sport fashion. Apart from that, this event was quite unique.It was the first gaming tournament to be shown on television, but only on DirectTV. There were six organizations, all representing a different major city across the United States. Each team had a general manager, all six were influential people in the e-sports community, and each organization had four teams for four different games. The games were Counter-Strike: Source, FIFA Soccer, Dead or Alive 4, and Project Gotham Racing 3. The league held a tournament they called the combine for scouting out the players, similar to the NFL combine. Then they held a draft, where each organization chose who would represent them in each game. They used a unique point system to determine who won each match that I won't go into. The league only lasted two seasons, the shortest lived of all the major video game events, but it was trying to revolutionize e-sports. The CGS team explained that "it became increasingly clear as this ambitious project evolved, that profitability was too far in the future for us to sustain operations."

Tournament area during ESWC 2006

Good Competitive Games

As you can see, there are common games across these tournaments. Counter-Strike, StarCraft, WarCraft, Quake, and Halo are some of the key games in e-sports. Without the massive communities for these games, there would be no tournaments, and without a great game to begin with, there would be no communities. So what makes a great competition game? First, it has to be multi-player. Sure, you can player a single player game and then compare scores, but that is so 80's. A single player game will never give a person the same adrenaline rush a multi-player game will. Outsmarting and outplaying a computer player simply does not compare to the real thing, especially when you just outsmarted one of the best players in the world. And by multi-player, I don't mean that death-match mode that was thrown into a game just to say it has multi-player. Second, the game must be more complex than simply trying your best to kill your opponent. Think I just described Quake? Watch this video, it's a finals match between two top Quake players, with the winner explaining what he's doing and what his thought process is during the match. The video gives you a look at how complex the game is. Any team game like Halo and Counter-Strike require a great amount of teamwork and chemistry, on top of individual play and strategy. Last, the game needs to have continuing support from its developer. All the games I listed above are continually updated to fix bugs and fix balancing issues. Chances are when a game is released, it isn't going to be perfect, especially if the developers didn't have professional play in mind when designing it. 

You might be wondering how a bunch of nerds playing video games against each other can possibly be considered a sport, but that must wait for another time.