My Issues with #eSports & Professional Gaming

This is an area I don’t know a lot about, but am interested in knowing more. What caught my eye is the growing prizes and interested in professional gaming, or eSports as it seems to be known.  For example:

Blizzard‘s RTS behemoth is the show’s main event, hosting 64 of the game’s top players in a group format. They’ll eventually be whittled down to 16 and placed into a single elimination tournament for a 200 000 SEK (~$30 000/£20 000) grand prize. Sounds better is Krona doesn’t it? Still, that’s a tidy sum.

Yes, that’s am impressive amount of money.  I’m not a huge player of Starcraft, but I’m intrigued to watch some competitive games, so I googled a bit and found some stuff such as this – but I do feel a bit lost in all the commentary.  It’s not very welcoming IMHO.   It’s a bewildering area, with lots going on – for example the measure of the speed of a player’s hands as they control a game:

I’m also not that enthused by the mish-mash of extreme sports and normal sports styling they give to the coverage.  Again, it feels a bit ‘in-crowd’ and not welcoming to newly interested people.  I might be wrong, and would be happy to be pointed to links that are more open, but at the moment, if eSports wants to break the mainstream, I think they need to stop seeing themselves as either a branch of Football or Skateboarding and define a new style of coverage.