It started as a joke, a laugh, a what-if scenario.

Last school year, some teachers and teens at G.W. Graham had tossed out the idea of hosting an eSports league—an extracurricular for gamers who wanted to play video games during school hours, and challenge each other in-game.

“We kind of joked about it,” Logan Sapielak, a Grade 12 student in the school’s production and broadcasting program, said. “It was a thing between a couple of teachers and the production crew … and it just kind of became its own thing.”

Jenny Cho, G.W. Graham’s computer teacher, made it happen.

“I thought, ‘This eSports thing we were joking about, is it possible?’” she said. It turned out that it was. Teachers in the theatre and livestream programs came on board. Game-loving staff agreed to open up their rooms for lunch hour sessions. The school PAC gave Cho a grant to buy televisions and gaming consoles.

G.W. Graham’s eSports club was born. Teens challenged each other to gaming competitions during lunch, and soon took over the school’s theatre stage for a school-wide intramural. Within months, Graham’s club had brought two other Chilliwack schools on board, and the idea expanded to a district-wide league that held its first multi-school tournament in Graham’s theatre at the end of February. Two-dozen gamers competed. Sapielak was one of the commentators on stage spelling out the stakes for the audience.

“People are learning about it, and now you guys come talk about it,” Sapielak said. “I think it’s pretty cool that we’re getting the publicity.”

“It was a joke, and now it’s not.”

ESports is certainly no joke.

The first official eSports competition was held in 1972 at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. There, five competitors battled each other in a game of Spacewar! to be the last spaceship in the air. Rolling Stone journalist Stewart Brand sponsored the tournament and wrote a 9,000-word story detailing the thrill of the game, the skill of the players, and the potential of computers at a time when few people knew video games even existed.

Since the 1970s, eSports gaming has grown into a lucrative cultural phenomenon, with streaming platforms like Twitch allowing video game fans to watch competitions across the world. In 2019, Forbes wrote that eSports revenues exceeded $1 billion in that year.

That number has not gone down, and professional gamers are reaping the financial rewards. Last year, the eSports World Cup offered a $5 million prize pool for competitors in its DOTA 2 championship. The Gaimin Gladiators, a Toronto-based professional eSports organization, took home the top prize, worth $1.5 million. Other professional Canadian teams, including the Canucks-owned Vancouver Surge, Overactive Media’s Toronto Ultra, and Toronto’s Luminosity Gaming, also took home thousands of dollars for their performance in Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, and Call of Duty competitions.

If those teams—and their million dollar prizes—are in the NHL of the eSports world, Melissa Burns is responsible for the video game equivalent of Hockey Canada.

Burns is the chair and CEO of eSports Canada, a country-wide organization focused on supporting competitive gaming from the elementary school- to the national-level.

Although she considers herself a lifelong gamer, Burns has never competed herself. But as a teacher in Manitoba, she saw her students engaging in video games in their downtime, and wanted to facilitate better experiences for them.

“I knew that my students were all playing games passively all the time, and that’s part of why we see it have the reputation that it does for being a very toxic space,” she said, referencing the often malicious and harmful online interactions video games can facilitate.

“I wanted to bring into schools on purpose, so that we could transition it from being a passive, unregulated space to something that was an intentional conversation, something that would allow them to have a safe place to fail.”

Because video games don’t need a physical space, Burns was able to connect with other Manitoba teachers to form a provincial organization for competitive gaming. They soon expanded nationwide, starting eSports Canada in January 2020.

It was fortuitous timing.

“It was one of the few activities that schools could participate in during the pandemic, and so we saw a lot of growth and success throughout that period of time,” Burns said. Professional and college-level teams reached out to the organization, asking them to create a K-12 pipeline for future athletes.

Today, the organization supports player development from the youngest players (the Timbit teams, to use Hockey Canada terms) to the national athletes. Burns and her colleagues look at ESRB ratings to find games that are appropriate for youth, while also seeking out those that are playable on multiple platforms. The organization doesn’t play with micro-transactions—in-game elements that encourage players to spend real-world money on items, characters and other bonuses.

“If you’re going to win, you’re going to win based on merit and skill, not based on a purchase that you made,” Burns said.

Skill—and intention—is what separates an eSports athlete and a run-of-the-mill gamer. While many people play the games for pleasure, professional gamers take a more strategic approach to their play, often for high rewards. Professional eSports players hone their movements so their actions can be translated at lightning speed through a digital interface.

“They’re looking at strategically developing their technical and tactical skills,” Burns said. “They’re looking at how to assess the opponents, how to counter different plays.”

She mentioned one Canadian gamer who described how he made split-second decisions on which move he would use to counter his opponent based on how many frames-per-second each would take.

“The stereotype of someone who plays a lot of video games doesn’t actually match what the demographic looks like for our high-level players,” Burns said.

While some may picture a serious gamer with a two-litre bottle of pop and an open bag of chips, professional eSports athletes tend to take their physical conditioning more seriously. They undergo training. They work with nutritionists, mental health professionals, and other coaches to help them achieve peak performance.