All they want to do is watch each other play video games

Esports venues opening across America

Video games are beginning their takeover of the real world.

Across North America this year, companies are turning malls, movie theaters, storefronts and parking garages into neighborhood esports arenas.

At the same time, content farms are spinning up in Los Angeles, where managers now see gamers as some peculiar new form of famous person to cultivate — half athlete, half influencer.

And much of it is powered by the obsession with one game: “Fortnite.” During the last month, people have spent more than 128 million hours on Twitch just watching other people play “Fortnite,” the game that took all the best elements of building, shooting and survival games and merged them into one.

It was inevitable. Movie theater attendance hit a 25-year low in 2017, while 638,000 tuned in to watch Drake play “Fortnite” recently. The Paris Olympics in 2024 are now in talks to include gaming as a demonstration sport.

Besides, gamers already have been playing together, chatting live on headsets and messaging apps as they march through their increasingly beautiful digital worlds.

Oakland’s new esports arena gave a pre-opening party recently. A line stretched down the block. Nearly 4,000 people jammed into the former parking structure and onto the street around it, right in the touristy heart of Jack London Square. The sponsor was Cup of Noodles.