I don’t play Dota 2, but I finally understand why people love it

This evening, I attended the first The International (TI) pubstomp of my life. I am not a Dota 2 fan, and my account is level two, and honestly, I don’t care who wins the ten million dollars at stake in TI4. But I went out of editorial obligation and while I still don’t care who wins TI, I now understand why other people do.

This particular pubstomp is the first one to start in Singapore this TI season. I got there early enough to watch the organizing committee run around chasing the final public customers out of the venue and prepare it for the incoming crowd. Even though it was a good three hours till the first game, the sense of electricity in the air was palpable.

(See: Singapore may be a host city for 2015’s World eSports Championship Games)

The venue—Colosseum—is a cyber cafe situated in a mall. But as the crowd in the mall thinned thanks to the late hour, the queue outside Colosseum grew. The demographic was mostly male and mostly young, and they were of all races and walks of life. Some came in groups, and not everyone knew each other. But they were all united in one thing: their love for Dota 2.

As I watched the pubstomp participants hand their tickets over in exchange for bracelets, and then head to their assigned computers, I understood what had brought them out of their cozy homes and into the pubstomp.

(See: These cartoon drawings of Team DK and Invictus Gaming make me wish I had fans)

Do you know why football is a beautiful game? It’s not just the fancy footwork; it’s also the bond that grows within a team, when you train, when you bleed, when you fight for something together. The organizers of this pubstomp understood this. Colosseum has two outlets with two pubstomps running concurrently, and while everyone waited for TI to start, Colosseum pit one outlet’s players against the other’s.

An emcee blind-picked five random players from the crowd and dubbed them the representing team. Each of these five people did not know each other, but now they were united in a cause: if they won the upcoming friendly match for the outlet they represented, everyone else would win a freebie. And so, united, they went to battle. Win or lose, they would become friends, and they would enjoy TI4 together. Perhaps they would even go home with a prize.

(See: Singapore: Steelseries Dota 2 Rival mouse available this weekend, before TI4 ends!)

Near the close of the recent World Cup, the Pope said that he hoped sport would always promote the culture of encounter. We may not all be football fans able to fly to a foreign land to watch the World Cup live, but we have gathered in our respective countries to cheer on teams that will never know us. And this, my fellow gamers, is a bond as strong as that which makes people travel for days to cheer their teams on in the World Cup.

This is what makes eSports an equally beautiful game.