For those who take the game as a competition!

Electronic sports comprises the competitive play of video games. Other terms include competitive gaming, professional gaming, e-sport, and cybersport. Games that are played as electronic sports normally belong to the real-time strategy (RTS), fighting, first-person shooter (FPS), massively-multiplayer online (MMOG), and racing genres. They are played competitively at amateur, semi-professional and professional levels including in leagues and tournaments. Events such as MLG (Major League Gaming), GSL (Global StarCraft League), WCG (World Cyber Games), Dreamhack, and GSTL (Global StarCraft Team league) provide real-time casting of streamed games.

Over the Internet
The easiest way to play an electronic sports match is over the Internet. General online play is subject to the lessened ability to detect cheating and the more unpredictable network latency not being the ideal environment for high level competition; however, due to its convenience, even players who are used to LAN games use Internet games for fun and exhibition games.

Usually teams (or "clans" as they are sometimes called) contact each other prior to matches. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is very popular for doing this, due to the ability of each clan, league, or other gaming-related organisation to set up its own chat channel on the network, making them easy to find. (IRC has become so popular among gamers that the largest IRC network is QuakeNet, a network originally created for players of the first-person shooter Quake and now used by players of many different games.) The matches are then carried out on the server according to the rules of the leagues the teams are familiar with.

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