Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel has been called, at various times, the Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Tony Hawk of professional videogaming. Known for his stunning ability to “frag”—virtually kill—all comers in such first-person shooter games as Quake or Counter-Strike, he has placed first in nearly 70 percent of all the competitions he’s entered and is the only person to have won championships for five different games. A pro since 1999, the 26-year-old has won $500,000-plus in tournaments and has raked in even more in sponsorship deals.

In short, Wendel is the best-known gamer in the world. When a new professional videogame league—flush with cash from its backer, News Corp.-owned DirecTV—went looking for a spokesman and commentator, he was a natural choice.

With tens of millions of dollars in backing, the Championship Gaming Series is the splashiest and best-funded of the many professional videogame leagues that have emerged in recent years. These leagues have partnered with—or like C.G.S., have been developed by—media companies that are hoping to turn gaming into the next poker or even the next professional football. In fact, C.G.S. was modeled after traditional sports leagues; its teams are even affiliated with cities.

C.G.S. will fork out $5 million in salaries and prizes in its inaugural season, five times more than any of the three other gaming leagues that preceded C.G.S. The league staged the first gaming draft in history this week at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles (surprisingly, the top pick was a female gamer), it is the first videogame league to sign all of its cyberathletes to contracts, and its across-the-board $30,000 base salary is more than what 34 percent of the players in Major League Soccer made in 2006. There are currently fewer than 100 full-time pro gamers in the U.S., according to industry sources, so with 10 players to a team and 16 teams worldwide, the C.G.S. will singlehandedly more than double the number of game jockeys who don’t need day jobs.

But for all its resources and ambition, the C.G.S. faces the same problem as the rest of the leagues, including the World Series of Video Games, which recently renewed a deal with CBS to broadcast recaps of its world tour (in which contestants vied for a $750,000 purse), and Major League Gaming, whose 2006 season was aired on Vivendi Universal’s USA Network: Who actually wants to watch other people playing videogames?

The challenge is not a lack of interest in gaming itself—140 million Americans play videogames, and in 2006, sales of hardware, software, and accessories totaled $13.5 billion. Nor is it that gaming doesn’t require skill. Wendel is known to play one-handed, or solo, against multiple challengers or to play in exhibitions against hundreds of “regular” videogamers at a time, wiping the floor with their digital carcasses.

But racing through a virtual war zone, ducking bullets while simultaneously taking out three snipers, is one thing; sitting there while other people do it is another. A game may have as many as 10 players. The graphics that display such important information as how much damage a character has sustained are hard to read and are often tucked away at the side of the screen. And unless you’re well versed in a particular game, it’s far from obvious why even a top player like Fatal1ty is as good as he is.

“It’s like the popularity of pro football before John Madden and Monday Night Football came along,” says Michael Pachter, a research analyst with Wedbush Morgan, a Los Angeles investment bank. “We didn’t understand what was going on.” Innovations such as instant replay and top-notch analysis from Howard Cosell and Frank Gifford, not to mention the element of spectacle, drew fans to football.

At this stage, pro gaming doesn’t need its own John Elway. It needs a Henry Orenstein, the man who brought the blockbuster Transformers toys to the U.S. and who patented the hole-card camera that helped ignite the recent poker craze. These tiny cameras let spectators see the players’ facedown cards, turning dull fare into gripping drama.

The videogame leagues have introduced play-by-play announcers and colorful commentators, but they need to go further, says Angel Munoz, who left investment banking to create the Cyberathlete Professional League. in 1997. The leagues are playing games that were not meant to be played on a television broadcast, Munoz says. “They were never designed with that in mind.”

Now the C.P.L. is working with Dallas game developer Escalation Studios on a first-person shooter game titled Severity, expected to be ready in 2008. Severity’s designers are making it easier for spectators to see what type of armor a player’s character is wearing and to know when the character is wounded or tired. They are also working on a small but potentially powerful innovation to counter the “what the hell is going on?” effect that results from watching several players running—make that “running”—through the game at the same time: Spectators will see the part of the screen where the action is taking place in sharp focus; everything else will appear slightly blurry.

The C.P.L. is hoping to license these technologies to other game developers and leagues, says Munoz, who was a consultant for DirecTV while it was founding the Championship Gaming Series. None of the three other leagues says it has immediate plans to develop games that are broadcast-friendly.
 
The one place in the world where pro gaming has already gained wide popularity is South Korea, where gamers are treated as celebrities. But when Major League Gaming executives went to South Korea to find out why, they came back disappointed. South Koreans use only one game, called Starcraft, for their competitions, as opposed to the slew of games U.S. pro gaming uses, according to M.L.G. chief executive Matthew Bromberg. And gaming enjoys much broader acceptance in South Korea, where, unlike in the U.S., it isn’t often portrayed as an activity for layabouts and escapists.

But in the U.S., DirecTV is betting that more television programming will help broaden pro gaming’s acceptance and help the C.G.S. survive.

One of the reasons people have trouble following gaming is that television coverage has been spotty, says Steven Roberts, a vice president of DirecTV. “They may see an hour of it in June and then not another hour of it again until December. So it’s kind of difficult to build an understanding without any persistent gaming programming.”

DirecTV plans to target its first-season programming at the estimated 15 million hardcore gamers. The network will show 13 hours of videogame programming on channel 101 and 10 hours on the Web in July, Roberts says. The league is also bringing on 11-time Emmy winner Mike Burks to produce the shows. Burks, who has helmed more than 2,000 sports programs, will have control over special virtual cameras that will bring viewers inside the game. DirecTV also stresses that this will be the first time anyone has produced pro gaming live.

The drama of live TV is the reason that television networks around the world pay billions of dollars for sports programming, Roberts says. “It’s the ultimate reality TV, and that’s what we’re going to be able to provide gaming with for the first time.”