Remember that time you scolded your child because he had spent the previous 16 hours eschewing hygiene in favour of playing video games?Turns out that might not have been one of your better choices. E-sports, essentially competitive video gaming, is fast becoming one of the biggest entertainment industries in the world and is predicted to eclipse the movie industry by 2020."E-sports is huge. You're talking 1.7 billion gamers on the planet. I can't think of a group of anything that's 1.7 billion strong," said e-sports ambassador Gareth Woods.Competitive gaming may not be something most of us would have ever considered a viable career option but the prize pools for some of the competitions are staggering. Earlier this year the winners (teams generally comprise five members) of the International DOTA 2 (Defence of the Ancients) Championships walked away with $9-million (about R127-million).Locally, the industry is growing healthily as well. The total prize pool for this year's Telkom Digital Gaming League Tournament was just shy of R2-million."Gaming in South Africa has grown 13.6%, 12.1%, 16.6%, 10.7% year on year from 2011 to 2014 according to a report by auditors PwC. Compare this to film, growing at about 5.9% and music declining 3.3%," said Woods.This growth has led to a growing number of professional gamers competing for increasingly lucrative prizes."Registrations for the Telkom Digital Gaming League in 2008 were about 500. There are now approximately 12000 teams entered," said Woods."I wish I was born a bit later. E-sports is growing at a rapid rate here now. Give it two to three years and things will be looking good for us," said pro gamer Darren Meyer, AKA MeyRRo_0, whose team Destruction Gaming competed in the Telkom Digital Gaming League.The most striking thing about Meyer is that he looks nothing like the pimply, socially awkward stereotype we usually associate with gamers. If anything he looked more like the scrumhalf at your local university being chased down the hall by lusty fans. He certainly practises like a scrumhalf."Close to competitions we try to practise as much as we can. Usually it's about three to four times a week. When it gets closer to competitions we practise six times a week," said Meyer.The practice sessions typically last about two hours but can go longer.MOBAs (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas) like League of Legends and DOTA 2 as well as First Person Shooters like Counterstrike Global Offensive, Call of Duty and Overwatch are currently the games du jour but other titles like FIFA have strong followings as well. In fact, such is the cult following of FIFA that football clubs like Manchester City, Barcelona and Wolfsburg have all signed professional e-sports players in recent years to compete for them in major tournaments and against fans.It's not just playing games that's huge. E-sports have become wildly popular among spectators. It's not unusual to see crowds of 100000 squeezed into a stadium to watch two teams battle it out for DOTA 2 honours.According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Twitch (a website that allows users to watch other users play) attracts the fourth-highest amount of traffic in the US. Only Netflix, Google and Apple have more people going to their sites. Another way of looking at it is that a greater number of Americans are more interested in watching others play games than they are in porn or social media.At the moment South Africa lacks the scale to compare favourably with the global gaming market which, according to Deloitte, is a $500-million a year industry that is growing at an annual rate of around 25% but if it keeps growing the way it does, it may not be long before we see our very own millionaire gaming celebrities. In other words, let Simphiwe play a little longer...