As the Nebraskans and I exit the train and begin walking through downtown, I'm suddenly rocked by the realization that I have no idea what to expect when we arrive at TI4. I've never played DotA before—I haven't even picked up a video game controller in two years. And Michael's explanation of the game, though exceedingly patient, had made an intricate ruin of my notes.

Hoping to start small, I asked them what sort of people I'll likely be running into at this event.

Michael smirks. "Males between the ages of 15 and 30," he says. "And then some above."

"I've seen some women," Nathan shoots back defensively. "Maybe seven to eight percent."

He glances back at me with a kindergarten teacher's patience. "If they look like a character from the game, they're doing that on purpose."

···

It is one thing to discuss DotA 2, with its kaleidoscopic strategies and variables, in a controlled setting with four patient Nebraskans. It is something else entirely to behold it projected onto an eighty-foot screen—its teams enclosed in matching soundproof cases onstage, its audio effects amplified to the point of near cruelty, its fans shrieking and spilling their jumbo tubs of popcorn down the back of your shirt. When I'd been warned that DotA was an immensely complex game for a beginner to understand, I should have appreciated the sheer profundity of that understatement. Everyone around me seems to gasp, boo and erupt with delighted applause as if obeying a series of familiar cues. My experience, meanwhile, is a queasy hallucination of roars, fireballs, spells, graphs and technical gibberish.

This is why, early on the tournament's second day, I find myself in the Key Arena's basement-level pressroom, sourly dejected and inhaling complimentary mini-Snickers bars. For much of the morning, I'd been glued to the "Noob Stream"—a Twitch TV webcast of TI4, overlaid with commentary geared toward newbies, or "noobs." Despite its hosts' frequent tangents—"What a sneaky guy this guy is! I wouldn't let him date my sister, that's for sure!"—the Noob Stream has turned out to be a major lifeline. It supplies just the sort of dumbed-down synopses I need to begin understanding the game's teams, heroes, and strategies.

The purest expertise, though, emanates from the industry journalists nearby. Since arriving, I'd seen them ducking in and out of the pressroom, cracking Mountain Dews and firing off the same buzzwords the Nebraskans had recited on the train. They all seem to know each other, and their interactions feel at once jocular and world-weary. As far as e-sports go, most are veterans of the big events: Sweden's "DreamHack," Frankfurt's "ESL One," all the U.S.-based "Major League Gaming" stuff. Yet among them, there's a sense that TI4 feels distinct.

"I've seen some pretty big venues, but this is on a different level," says Andrew Campbell, an L.A.-based DotA 2 commentator with a booming voice and a squid-like flop of brown dreadlocks. He wears a well-tailored button-up shirt, brown dress shoes and a pair of skintight DotA leggings. "It's this intangible electricity. It doesn't translate to camera—you can see the shot, and it's like, 'That's cool, people are going wild.' But feeling the rumble of everyone cheering for their favorite team—to me, it really legitimizes what I've been doing for the last three years."

Three years may feel like a long time to devote to video games, but it's really just a small sliver of e-sports' history. Indeed, competitive gaming has been part of the U.S.'s public conversation since at least 1982, when _Starcade, an arcade-themed game show, first debuted on WTBS. _Briefly hosted by Alex Trebek, it ran two seasons and pitted competitors against each other on the era's bulky kiosks. Later, after console purveyors like Nintendo and Sega replaced traditional arcades, gamers would photograph their high scores and mail them back to the companies as proof. Sega and Nintendo, in turn, would submit these scores for publication to industry magazines, which fans would collect and analyze.