I'm standing on the edge of a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd—the kind of crowd where you have to apologize to seven people just to move a few feet—frantically snapping pictures, because I've got the distinct feeling that what I'm looking at is one of the stories of the year in video gaming.

It's a video game tournament, but it looks more like a rock concert, complete with a huge stage up front, tons of lighting equipment overhead, and a large merchandise booth off to the side. As the tournament reaches the finals, the crowd continues to flow in until every seat, aisle and empty corner of the two linked ballrooms of the Seattle Convention Center is filled with a throng comprising thousands and thousands of people. Even when the room seems completely full, the people don't stop coming, and the hallways outside of the ballroom begin to clog as fans continue streaming up from the lower floors of the Penny Arcade Expo.

They're all here to watch professional gaming teams battle it out in the North American regional finals in League of Legends, a PC action-strategy game that has exploded in the competitive video gaming scene over the past year. The tournament's winning team will take home $40,000 and a trip to the World Championship in October, where the victor will net $2 million and international fame.

A tipping point

Starcraft II competitions are popular enough to be considered the national pastime in South Korea, but for most of the last two decades the idea of gaming as a popular spectator competition in the West has been little more than the butt of jokes. In the last year or so, though, eSports has undergone a sudden exponential growth. The Major League Gaming Spring Championship in June (which featured tournaments in four high-profile games like Starcraft II and Mortal Kombat) attracted 4.7 million online viewers over three days in June, peaking at 437,000 concurrent viewers. That's substantially more than all of their 2011 events combined. Over 2.2 million viewers tuned in to Ustream internet broadcast of the 2011 EVO fighting game championships from a packed ballroom in Las Vegas.

These competitions aren't just popular with loners sitting and watching at their computers, but also with crowds of people that gather to watch the events live. After the packed crowds at the PAX Regionals in Seattle, last week League of Legends officially sold out its second annual World Championship in Los Angeles' USC Basketball Arena (which has a seating capacity of 10,000, though it's unclear if all those seats are being used for the tournament). A three-day playoff series at a smaller venue is also sold out about a month in advance.

After decades of struggle, eSports are finally starting to attract significant attention in North America. The raw numbers might not compare well with well-established spectators sports like football and basketball, but that might be the wrong comparison to make. After all, you don't need to be Lebron James to get a start in the NBA, you just need to be better than the low-ranking players. And eSports certainly show more fan excitement and growth potential than the least popular sports that currently get television coverage, such as late night poker or lacrosse. In many cases spectator gaming even rivals other up-and-coming sports leagues like Major League Soccer in terms of viewership.

Plus, these new digital spectator sports don't really need to compete head-to-head with other established sports, because they've completely bypassed television distribution. Online streams let these eSports hunt down the key gamer demographic in their natural habitats—forums, social media, and video game websites— without the need for television exposure. The ability to offer free eSports programming to any curious gamer with a broadband connection has helped the concept spread virally, and paid HD subscriptions have become a much-needed revenue source as well.

A generational shift

Up until about 2011, eSports showed persistent but slow growth that bore the markings of a snail-like generational shift. Before eSports could become the force that it is evolving into today, it first needed a generation of potential viewers that grew up comfortable with the idea of watching digital competition in basements and rec rooms from a young age. Those lifelong gamers then needed to grow up, get jobs, and acquire disposable income for advertisers to chase after, a phenomenon that is finally starting to happen on a large enough scale to support a spectator sport.

In 2012, that slow-growing community support has finally gotten large enough to translate into significant advertising support from major brands. Dr. Pepper, Doritos, Red Bull, Bic razors, and all manner of gaming companies are turning out for the chance to advertise to a flock of eSports watchers in the key 18-30 year old male demographic.

The current limiting factor for the eSports movement is not the fact that it hasn't been fully accepted by mainstream culture, but that it hasn't even been fully accepted by the entire video game industry. The scene still excludes almost all of console gaming (save for the relatively niche fighting game genre), and scant few publishers have committed appreciable funding toward developing their competitive communities.

But this is starting to change. Activision, for instance, recently unveiled a spectator toolset for one of the biggest games in the world, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which will allow shoutcasters access to advanced camera and streaming tools to bring matches to viewers much more comprehensively (Shooters in particular have struggled to gain spectator appeal outside a hardcore niche because of the complexity of relaying action that takes place from so many perspective). The upcoming MMO/shooter Firefall and Valve's League of Legends competitor Dota 2 are adding similar eSports-friendly tools. Halo 4 will also be playable to the public at a November Major League Gaming event just prior to its launch, showing how important Microsoft considers the audience of live eSports spectators.

If Microsoft and Sony include integrated support for eSports streaming services like Twitch.tv in their upcoming consoles then we could very well be on the verge of an even larger eSports boom.

The crowd

As I'm standing in the crowd at the PAX League of Legends finals, a player on Team SoloMid (the eventual champions) pulls off a surprise kill and the crowd goes wild in raucous applause and whoops. It's at that moment that I realize the full appeal of eSports, just like traditional sports, comes through best with a live crowd. It doesn't really matter whether the game that's being played is soccer or Starcraft, there's a human element of camaraderie that comes from sharing a moment of excitement with thousands of other individuals.

And that's the true hope for the future of competitive video games. Traditional sports have reigned in North America for a hundred years, but as I stand watching this crowd cheer their hearts out, I wonder what the sporting world will look like in the future. Right now, eSports' most populous demographic is an incredibly young 18-24 year old male. Meanwhile, new people are being born into a world where watching eSports is increasingly normal. What might the sporting world look like in 25 years when that a significant percent of the population has grown up with the idea of popular competitive gaming? In 100 years? What if game designers can create entirely new games that are built from the ground up to be thrilling for spectators?

We don't yet know the answers to these questions, but it's going to be incredibly exciting to watch them unfold. It seems possible now that the video game revolution that dawned in the '70s could continue to shape our spectator-sports-crazy culture for decades to come.