I was always at a disadvantage as a child, because I never liked football. In the UK, football (or "soccer" as it's known in some parts of the world) is not merely a past-time or a recreation; it's a way of life.

Every lunch break was spent kicking around a ragged tennis ball. The cliché of jumpers-as-goalposts was a mundane reality. Saturday afternoons were marked by the interminable reading of scores on Grandstand (a show whose only redeeming feature was having the greatest theme tune of all time. The closing credits of The Raccoons was the second greatest.).

Sure, conversation would from time to time cover television or other artifacts of pop culture, but football was the consistent mainstay of discussion, with the performance of your team being of singular importance. Football being a winter sport in the UK, there would be a few months' reprieve for the football-hating minority each summer, but even this was ruined on a biannual basis, courtesy of the World Cup and European Championship.

Football was the dominant sport, but my disinterest was universal. The rest of the nation would froth with fervored excitement during the Ashes or even the Rugby World Cup. I wouldn't.

Even as this pattern continued into adult life, I never got it. At one level, I can get the appeal of playing these games. They weren't for me—I'm essentially devoid of any kind of athletic prowess—but even I can enjoy hoofing a ball at goal from time to time. The watching, however—the sport as a passive activity—never struck me as anything more than tremendously boring.

More perplexing to me was the emotional entanglement and sense of identity. I saw people weeping when "our team" lost in some competition or other. So much was tied up in the performance of these teams, teams whose performance was entirely independent of the millions of people drunkenly cheering in front of their TVs, and I just never understood. Why should there be an emotional pay-off just because your arbitrarily chosen team happened to beat someone else's? And yet, this bizarre, inexplicable-to-me phenomenon was perfectly normal. I was the one who was different.

I started playing Dota 2 earlier in the year. It's a kind of game called a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), ARTS (action real time strategy), or just plain "DotA-style" (after Dota 2's predecessor, a mod for Warcraft III called Defence of the Ancients). This wasn't a game genre that I was familiar with until I picked up Dota 2, and my review explains the basic concepts. The important thing to note: it's a five-on-five team game that's played competitively.

When I first started with Dota 2, I was vaguely aware of this competitive play, but never really paid attention to it. But then Valve did something rather clever.

Dota 2 is free-to-play, but Valve has a couple of ways of monetizing it: you can buy various cosmetic in-game items, and you can buy "tickets" to allow watching competitive, professional tournaments in-game. Even without buying anything, however, you can be given free cosmetic items. Playing the game awards "battle points," and every 1,000 battle points gives a guaranteed cosmetic drop. Because of these guaranteed cosmetics, battle points are important. There are even items you can buy that give a temporary boost of the rate they're accumulated.

Here's Valve's master stroke. Normal professional competitions sell tickets. For its big competition ("The International 3," held in Seattle last month), Valve sold a thing called the Compendium. The Compendium worked like a ticket, insofar as it gave access to both the qualifying matches and the main event, but it did so much more. Update: It turns out that The International was actually available for everyone to watch even without the Compendium. It included information about the teams and players with collectible player cards, it had a fantasy team competition, and most importantly of all, it had some special cosmetic items, and a huge battle points bonus for several months.

As such, buying the Compendium was attractive even to those without a great interest in the competitive scene: with a Compendium, you won cosmetics far, far faster. This gave it massive appeal.

But the Compendium's competitive tie-ins didn't go ignored.

One of the cosmetics that it awarded was a courier. Generally, each team buys a courier to ferry newly purchased items from the shop to the player on the map. The default model is a flying donkey, but a wide variety of custom couriers are also available (mine is the totally adorable Captain Bamboo, who's not just a panda—he's a captain! Yes, I paid money for him. Totally worth it).

The Compendium's courier is a curious little creature called a Smeevil. The Smeevil courier is upgradable in various ways, and one of the ways to upgrade it is to watch The International matches.

On top of this, a portion of its purchase price went directly into The International's prize pool. The more people bought the Compendium, the more money was at stake. Each time you started the game, you could see the prize pool progress that was being made.

In this way, the Compendium not only made me aware of the competitive side of Dota 2. It encouraged me to participate, both enlarging the prize pool, and more importantly, watching the matches. As a promotional item, I think it was extremely well designed, and I can't imagine that I'm the only one who started following Dota 2 as a sport as a result of the Compendium.

I did, and I became hooked.

I didn't go to The International 3—though I really wish I had—but I watched it from afar, both in-game and through twitch.tv. Even at home, the raucous atmosphere of the live event was contagious and tremendously exciting. Sure, the professional teams were playing the same game as I did, but the skill and precision they had transformed the game. Heroes that are a disaster in the hands of regular players became game-changers in the professional matches.

One of the many features of the Compendium was that it let you designate a team that you backed, and the team I picked, Na'Vi, fought hard, pulling off some tricky high-skill manoeuvres to avoid getting knocked out in an early stage, before finishing in second place after a nail-biting final.

As I tweeted about The International, I discovered that a few of my followers and followees, people who I didn't know followed Dota 2, were also watching. While our tweets didn't quite flood Twitter the way the (endlessly tedious, to those who don't care about it) American Football tweets do on game days, there was nonetheless that same sense of a shared experience, those "holy shit, did you see that?" moments, sitting on the edges of our seats, trying to will our teams on. OK, so I didn't weep when Na'Vi lost the fifth game of the final, but I did cheer their successes in the run up to the final. And I was utterly drained when it was over. I couldn't imagine living without watching International matches each day.

The world of e-sports is a curious thing. e-sports-heavy games such as Dota 2 or League of Legends have millions of players (Dota 2 is far and away the biggest game on Steam; League of Legends is bigger still) and yet to much of the gaming public, they don't even exist. Most gamers don't even know what the MOBA genre even is, or how it works. Better-known games such as various members of the Call of Duty franchise have competitive sides too, but to casual gamers they remain all but unknown.

Prior to picking up Dota 2, I knew that e-sports were a thing, but, like their non-electronic counterparts, I never thought I'd care about them. Now I do. I've dipped my feet in the waters, and I get it. I understand why people follow sport, why the performance of their team matters, why they have a team. The desire to watch football, talk about football, and read about football: it makes sense to me. I can comprehend how people get so emotionally invested in what they're watching, and I get why Bill Shankly said:

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

And it's amazing.