What makes an athlete? Webster’s demands “physical skill and strength,” while the O.E.D. cites the Greek: an athlete must “contend for a prize,” like an olive wreath, or a big silver cup from which to chug Labatt Blue. The Department of Homeland Security has its own definition—“skill and recognition substantially above that ordinarily encountered”—for doling out its “athlete visa,” known bureaucratically as the P-1A. Such visas have been reserved, traditionally, for Finnish goalies and Argentine point guards, but this summer the government performed enough semantic gymnastics to begin offering P-1As to professional video gamers.

Given the recent struggles of New York’s professional sports teams—as of last week, all had losing records, and the D.H.S. might do well to reconsider whether Andrea Bargnani, of the Knicks, has demonstrated the requisite level of skill—it’s possible that the most successful athletes to pass through town lately were the eight professional video gamers competing in a two-day tournament, sponsored by Red Bull, at the Hammerstein Ballroom. The game: StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. The prize: fifty thousand dollars, plus a trophy shaped like the Empire State Building, with a computer motherboard inside. The field: six Koreans, one Norwegian, and a Canadian; no one over the age of twenty-five; only one girl—the Canuck. At the Hammerstein, players sat inside a soundproof booth onstage, beneath a giant screen that broadcast the games. Several announcers, led by Sean Plott, the Dick Vitale of StarCraft, offered live commentary meant to explain what was happening onscreen—which it did, if you can keep up with the following:

“Talk me through the decision to go Tempest here.”

“The Tempest can pick away at the Hatchery in the north.”

“He did get Pulse-Crystals, did he not?”

“Yep. Right now, there’s not a single Spore Crawler on the map.”

Most of the Hammerstein’s twenty-five hundred seats were filled with diehard fans—“The community is almost exclusively people who have never had a job,” Plott said—who knew each of the competitors by name: Bomber, Scarlett, Golden, Snute, PartinG, HyuN, sOs, and MC. “It’s like being an athlete,” Snute, the Norwegian, who is twenty-three with shaggy blond hair, said at a pre-tournament photo shoot. He was drinking a Pepsi, and wearing Adidas pants and Nike shoes, even though his team’s primary sponsor is an app developer. “Typical office pains are the ones we need to watch out for,” he said, of his regular trips to the gym. “Stiff shoulders, back pains. You’ve got to be really careful with your hands as well.” Scarlett, twenty, the Canadian, had recently been sidelined with a wrist injury: the tendons in her hands had grown so weak that she had been forced to use two fingers for each mouse click.

The first day’s competition had trimmed the field to four: three Koreans plus Scarlett, whose presence was a surprise not because of her gender—last year, she announced that she is a transgender woman—but because of her nationality. South Koreans dominate professional video games, much as the Soviets once ruled ice hockey. Top Korean gamers live in team houses, where they review game film, talk strategy, and practice for up to fourteen hours a day. “The advantage of being in a gaming house is that usually there’s someone to cook food for you,” Snute, who recently spent a month in a Korean gaming house, said. “Many people around this age don’t necessarily cook very healthy food.” Min-Sik Ko, an agent who represents multiple gamers, including HyuN and MC, said that he had found it difficult, culturally, to start a house anywhere else. “In Korea, they have six people sleeping in one room, and they don’t mind, because their focus is on the game,” he said. “In Europe, they say, ‘Yeah, we need our own room.’ ”

After her upset win, Scarlett draped herself in a Canadian flag handed to her from the crowd, but she lost in the semifinals, in a match interrupted by a software malfunction, pro gaming’s version of a rain delay. That set up an all-Korean final between sOs and PartinG, the most recent world champions. Standing onstage before the match, sOs rejected a handshake from PartinG, as if following Don King’s instructions to give the proceedings a veneer of animosity.

“I am your daddy,” PartinG typed, as the players sat down at their computers.

“I have no daddy,” sOs wrote.

“I am new your daddy,” PartinG wrote.

“Dancing a thin line—talking trash in a language that is not their first,” Plott said, as the back-and-forth devolved into emoticons. “They’re either in the finals or they’re two lovers texting each other.”

PartinG took the championship with ease; dinner in Koreatown was on him. Scarlett left to play a tournament in Singapore, while Snute, humbled by his first-round loss, went back to Norway to recuperate. He did not see a long-term future in gaming (few players survive into their thirties) but felt confident in the sport’s legitimacy. “It’s really—what’s the word?—it’s very taxing on the mind,” he said. “The mind is a thing, too.” ♦