Let the battle commence: While professional gamers overseas can fill stadiums, in Melbourne, thousands turned out to Federation Square to watch local stars battle it out at the launch of StarCraft II in March. Credit:Jason South Which is a little galling. Especially if you were a child of the '80s and '90s, and told by your parents that you'd never amount to anything if you sat around playing Super Mario 2 all day. Or maybe, like many gamers, you write off the odd bout of Call of Duty as a time-wasting pleasure. More fool you. Because you may not have heard of BoxeR, also known as Lim Yo-Hwan. Or Hong Jin-Ho, whose fingers are insured for £38,000 ($62,500). But they, and dozens like them, typify the rise of a curious new sportsman: the professional computer game player. People capable of earning millions simply for their ability to twiddle a joypad, or wrangle a mouse. Competitive gaming is nothing new: back in 1982, the American television show Starcade featured competitions among arcade game players. But during the '90s, multiplayer competitions really took off. It began with secretive LAN (local area network) parties where players would connect their computers directly and play the first-person shooter game Unreal Tournament. Later, as the internet developed past the squeak and buzz of dial-up, these parties could stretch across continents. But it has only been in the past 10 years that competitive gaming has seen star players and million-dollar sponsorships. That South Korea is the epicentre is no surprise. Ever since the government rolled out high-speed fibre-optic broadband in the late '90s, an estimated 4 million Koreans (from a population of 50 million) are playing online games at any given moment. And Starcraft – a PC strategy game that looks, to the untrained eye, like a bewildering combination of Risk, speed chess and a riot – quickly became the national sport.

Thousands turned out for the StarCraft II launch at Federation Square, Melbourne, in March. Credit:Jason South Today, three cable TV channels broadcast matches 24 hours a day. Samsung and Coca-Cola clamour for sponsorship deals, pushing prize funds to over £2.6 million. And players like BoxeR have cleaned up. His career prize money has passed £320,000. He has a fan club with 490,000 members. A DVD of his winning tactics in 2003 outsold the film Matrix: Revolutions. All of which has led many observers to ponder the question: when will "e-sports" mature from being some esoteric, nerdish peculiarity of the technophile East, and reach the mainstream media of the West? The answer is: it already has. Thanks to live streaming – allowing fans to watch tournaments online – e-sports has quietly become a multimillion-dollar industry in Europe and the United States, featuring major global events attended by thousands and watched by millions. It's something that T. L. Taylor, an associate professor at MIT, has scrutinised closely. As author of Rais-ing the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalisa-tion of Computer Gam-ing, she asserts that gaming has moved beyond a "niche" activity. "Competitive gaming is claiming a space similar to that of traditional sport," she says. "The rise of live streaming has turned on its head the idea that major networks need to be the ultimate venue for this stuff." So instead of the usual evidence of mainstream recognition – a slot on Saturday prime-time television, say, – competitive gaming has carved out a far more lucrative and loyal fan base online. Websites such as Twitch.tv or GameSpot (notably owned by American television network CBS) regularly attract audiences of more than 200,000.

Gaming's status is growing every year. The first-person shooter franchises – such as Call of Duty or Halo – are wildly popular. This year's Call of Duty: Black Ops championship in April was held in Los Angeles, with teams vying for $US1 million ($1.09 million). As in Korea, the best players rake in the cash. Current Call of Duty champion Matthew "NaDeSHoT" Haag is sponsored by Red Bull and is worth $US400,000, while former champion Johnathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel retired aged 32, after earning $US500,000 in prize money and launching his own branded motherboards. And yet the most popular games are, arguably, the least spectator friendly. Known as Mobas, or Massive Online Battle Arenas, they're the modern incarnation of a Dungeons and Dragons-style statistic-based fighting game – complex and baffling. The biggest of them all, League of Legends, has more than 70 million players (and recently opened an Australian office). That huge inbuilt fan base contributed to making last October's final the most watched e-sports event ever – with more than 8 million viewers following in 13 languages. The inevitable consequence is increasing numbers of professional gamers. Take, for example, Britain's Michael O'Dell. Having left school aged 16, he started playing first-person shooters such as Quake and Battlefield 1942 after injuring his knee playing football. Now 41, he quit his "normal job" as a sales and marketing manager in 2006 to become CEO of the largest pro-gaming collective in Europe: the slightly morbidly named Team Dignitas. Its roster includes 67 players of 14 nationalities.

O'Dell spends his time flitting between the team's head office (his converted Surrey garage) and Team Dignitas' gaming house: a $US1 million Los Angeles mansion full of players practising League of Legends 24 hours a day. Money comes in from cash prizes, corporate sponsorship and the ad revenue from online matches. "Streaming has revolutionised how people watch e-sports," he says. "Even away from the tournaments, top players can make $US60-70,000 a year just screening tutorials to people online." One World of Warcraft pro-gamer has 600,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel AtheneWins. His 600-plus videos have been viewed 323 million times. Nevertheless, O'Dell warns, most of his young players aren't paid; Team Dignitas only covers flights and board so they can attend tournaments. But his premier league players – those excelling at League of Legends, for example – can expect a £40,000 salary. "They're genuinely famous," he says. "After a tournament in Texas this year, the team were signing autographs for an hour and a half. There are groupies I have to fend off so they can train properly. I'm no different to any other sport manager."

Which brings us to the other multimillion-dollar question: will competitive gaming ever be recognised as a sport in its own right? This may seem laughable for an activity based around staring at a monitor. But, T. L. Taylor argues, pro-gamers require a level of dedication akin to athletics. "The key components are all there," she says. "Measurable and differential skills, advanced tactical and strategic thinking, physical and material components and formal and informal structures of competition to name just a few." O'Dell says his players practise for eight to 10 hours a day; South Korean teams train for 17 hours a day. Starcraft, for example, is played by issuing commands – selecting a military unit, then ordering it to attack a specific enemy. However, to beat everyone else requires doing this hundreds of times a minute – which means practising combinations of keystrokes and mouse movements over and over again. Pro-gamers measure this in actions per minute (APM). Most casual Starcraft players manage an APM of between 50 and 70. The celebrated BoxeR regularly hits 400 APM. That's 6.66 unique sequences of keystrokes and mouse movements per second. Perhaps it's no wonder that some countries have moved to put joypad mastery on a par with football or athletics. The South Korean government actively supports the Korean Pro-Gamers Association, while in Denmark, gaming teams can apply for tax breaks and social housing.

In the end, though, it will be the burgeoning popularity that drives recognition. Not just at the top levels of government, but also in the minds of concerned parents. "It's not quite a solid career option yet," admits O'Dell. "While the infrastructure is there, it needs time to develop. The gaming world also needs to get more female-friendly. Gaming is the ultimate level playing field – there's no reason why girls can't beat guys. "And when the right guy comes along, who's good-looking and charismatic enough, I'm convinced he'll achieve the status and wealth of David Beckham. "Honestly," he smiles, "it makes you want to be 18 again." Telegraph, London