Close to 100 fans are packed into an Ottawa bar, sporting T-shirts decorated with team emblems and arguing over their favourite players. Clutching beers and snacking on nachos, they cheer, groan and applaud as the action unfolds on the bar's TVs.

But the flat-screens aren't broadcasting a hockey or soccer game; instead, they display digital tanks and aliens, computer-generated armies controlled by professional video gamers. The event is Ottawa's first "Barcraft," and it's part of a growing movement to put video games on the same level as other spectator sports.

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The Barcraft movement began earlier this summer, growing rapidly as Starcraft fans watch games and co-ordinate events online. Last weekend, Barcrafts were held in cities across Canada and the U.S., including New York, San Diego and Austin, Texas.

Internet e-sports like Starcraft2 have big-name pro players, announcers who broadcast matches, and millions of fans who'd rather watch the action online or in bars than play themselves. WSJ's Amir Efrati reports.

One Sunday afternoon last month, a hundred boisterous patrons crowded into Mad Dog in the Fog, a British sports bar here, to watch a live broadcast.

Half the flat-screen TVs were tuned to a blood-filled match between two Korean competitors, "MC" and "Puma." The crowd erupted in chants of "M-C! M-C!" when the favorite started a comeback.

The pub is known for showing European soccer and other sports, but Puma and MC aren't athletes. They are 20-year-old professional videogame players who were leading computerized armies of humans and aliens in a science-fiction war game called "Starcraft II" from a Los Angeles convention center. The Koreans were fighting over a tournament prize of $50,000.

This summer, "Starcraft II" has become the newest barroom spectator sport. Fans organize so-called Barcraft events, taking over pubs and bistros from Honolulu to Florida and switching big-screen TV sets to Internet broadcasts of professional game matches happening often thousands of miles away....