t's a common worry among parents - the amount of time children spend playing computer games. But those endless hours in front of a screen have paid off for some who have become celebrity gamers competing for huge prizes.
You know a sport has arrived big time when 120,000 people gather to watch a competition. Or when TV channels are devoted only to televising games in professional leagues. Or when the top prizes run into the millions of dollars. Or perhaps when match-fixing scandals erupt around big events.
Welcome to e-sports, which may now be the Korean national game. In South Korea, there was once a moral panic as adults feared a generation was about to waste its time in front of screens but that seems to be fading. Instead, all the signs are of growth and increasing professionalisation.
The recent launch of the latest iteration of StarCraft took place in Gangnam in Seoul with all the trappings of a big, minutely choreographed Hollywood event, complete with red carpet for TV interviews with celebrities and a staged wedding of one of the game's stars to celebrate his recent marriage.
There have always been killjoys who've got themselves into tizzies over games. In 1942, Mayor LaGuardia of New York personally took a sledgehammer to pinball machines. The games were banned in the city until 1976.
Even chess has had its critics. In the Scientific American of 2 July 1859, under the headline "Chess-playing excitement", an article bemoaned that "a pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country". This was deplorable because "chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while at the same time it affords no benefit whatever to the body".
The outraged author continues in full indignant flow: "Persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require outdoor exercises for recreation - not [this] sort of mental gladiatorship."
Change the word "chess" to "video games" and you might get the same outraged sense of moral panic. That feeling is no longer associated with chess - it is a byword for virtue.
Will the same be true of e-sports?