Those TV and computer games your dad/girlfriend thought you were wasting your life on could earn you millions of dollars. That was the word from speakers at rAge at Johannesburg's Coca-Cola Dome at the weekend. The yearly expo celebrates all things gaming, and this year's focus was e-sports.In case you are unfamiliar, e-sports is competitive gaming in which teams of five gamers battle each other to the death, often for multimillion-dollar prize pools in front of tens of thousands of fans.Hundreds of people visited this year's expo, some dressed as miniature versions of the suicide squad, while others opted to dress like Kylo Ren or a favourite Power Ranger.On the competition floor, crowds of people from across the age spectrum bit their knuckles and oohed and aahed as teams played out a digital royal rumble in a variety of games, including Dota 2 and Counter Strike."E-sports is huge," said e-sports ambassador Gareth Woods. "You're talking about 1.7billion gamers on the planet. I can't think of a group of anything that strong.""I wish I was born a bit later," said gamer Darren Meyer, aka MeyRRo_0, whose team Digital Destruction Gaming competed for part of the R1-million prize."E-sports is growing a lot here now. Give it two, three years and things will be looking good for us."The local prize pales in comparison to those of some international competitions where they can reach $20-million.Woods said: "The winners of the International Dota 2 championships in August walked away with something like $9-million to split among the five of them."Dota 2 is a free online multiplayer battle arena game. Football clubs including Manchester City, Barcelona and Wolfsburg have all signed professional eSports players in recent years to compete for them in major tournaments and against fans."Imagine e-sports is the Olympics and each game is its own sport. Counter-Strike is like rugby, where maybe Dota is like soccer," said Woods.Like the Olympics, e-sports draws huge viewership numbers. Twitch, an online streaming service in which spectators watch other gamers in action, draws the fourth most traffic on the internet, with only Google, Netflix and Apple TV attracting more eyeballs.E-sports competitions also pull massive online crowds, sometimes up to 100000.The e-sports industry is already bigger than the music industry or the movie industry. Its growth is changing the stereotypical conception of a gamer. It is estimated that by 2020 the e-sports industry will be bigger than the music and movie industries combined."If I can destroy anything it's the idea that gamers are the geeky dude in his basement. Everyone has games, whether that's on their phone or other platforms."..