A Chinese team specialized in Riot Games is paving its way to triumph of a world level contest in Tallahassee, capital of U.S. State of Florida, from Thursday to Sunday.
The five-member team from China has defeated a number of rivals so far, gaining hope to victory for Sunday's final.
Meanwhile, the five Chinese youth in their 20s have brought an exciting atmosphere of the popular PC/Mac video game "League of Legends" (LOL) to the city in the form of the five-day tournament dubbed the Mid-Season Invitational.
Besides the Chinese team, the competition includes another five of the world's best professional video game teams from across the globe. It's effectively a six-team regional battle with champions from North America, South Korea, China and Europe meeting up to wage war in a fantasy realm.
Video gaming is intensely popular in Asia and beyond, and amateur gaming tournaments have been around for a while. But the last decade has seen a rise in popularity and the creation of professional gaming. ESPN has even televised the competitions in a segment of the entertainment industry dubbed "e-sports."
Last year's LOL World Championship in Seoul, South Korea, had 32 million viewers worldwide watching online. This year's World Championship will have group phases in Paris, bracket stages in London, and then conclude in the finals in Berlin.
And Tallahassee was the recipient of the first-ever Mid-Season Invitational of LOL, which would be like the champions of various soccer leagues: English Premier League, Spanish La Liga, Colombian Liga, getting together to determine bragging rights.
According to Bowman, the weekend tickets were sold out at a capacity of 4,000, and attendance for the first days was over 2, 000.
Much of the crowd has come from outside Tallahassee in anticipation of seeing the showdown talked about for months on fan message boards.
"It's great to have the teams coming, for the first time, to the East Coast of the country. They are excellent," said Jason Dorrison, a LOL fan coming from Orlando.
For local officials and residents in Tallahassee, an expectation is being laid on the contest that will help push the city to the international stage.
"They (previous LOL competitions) have been in Paris, Milan, Seoul. For a little sleepy town to wake up and be a part of the world stage really brings us into a new era on how we do business here," said Terel Bowman, Director of Event Services for the Civic Center, where the competition was being held.
Three broadcast channels are being adopted to allow LOL fanbase to watch the events in Tallahassee globally: one for the U.S. which was sent to a studio in Los Angeles, another to South Korea and a third directed to China.
The prize pool for the LOL Mid-Season Invitational is 200,000 U. S. dollars, with the champion team winning a reward of 100,000 dollars. The prize money for the 2014 World Championship was 2.1 million dollars.
Gaming now has not only becomes a booming and formal business, but also respectable and rich. In general, a professional gamer earns approximately 70,000 dollars a year on sponsorship deals and another 70,000 dollars in prize money.
It may not have its professionals stick out as visibly in public as the NBA, but LOL has definitely attracted more and more young people across the world, injecting vigor into the sector for a prosperous future.
