Photos by Alex Copeland

More than 1,400 gamers competed in Major League Gaming's Fall Championship at the Dallas Convention Center over the weekend, with thousands of international viewers tuning in via livestream. Hell, even ESPN covered it.

ESports and videogame fandom at large can no longer be pigeon-holed as truly esoteric. Now, that's fine and good, but it also means that our dearest stereotypes about the basement-dwelling, pocket protecting nerd are due for a bit of an update. Here are a few new (to me, anyway) stereotypes I observed at last weekend's event.

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via MLG

There will be a lot of head phones and overgrown bangs at the convention center this weekend.

If you've ever been on the receiving end of a profanity-spewing 14-year-old's headset-enabled tirade, you probably know that some people take video games quite seriously. Seriously enough to start calling video game competitions eSports, and to jump from one continent to the next to face off in person and compete for big cash prizes.

This weekend, these serious eSportsmen gather at the Dallas Convention Center for Major League Gaming's 2012 Fall Championship, where they'll compete for $150,000 in prizes in Halo 4, StarCraft II, Mortal Kombat and Tekken Tag Tournament 2. Here's what gamers and spectators can keep an eye out for between death matches and zerg swarms.

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Halo 4 comes out November 6, but you can play it the weekend before at the convention center.

There are types of people in this world: those who game, those who don't, and those who used to game, until they got jobs and wives and kids and life started crushing down on them, although sometimes they think they should just say screw it and leave it all behind for a bar-tending job, a shitty one-bedroom, a giant flat screen and a headset for trash-talking.

All three people have their place in this world. But in competition, those who game are always going to win -- and sometimes they're going to win big. What does it take to win big? We're about to find out.

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In 1997, Dave & Buster's seemed like a good idea. It did to 12-year-olds, anyway, and adults played along for a while, enough for the chain of arcade/crappy restaurants first went public. Things soon soured, however, and the Dallas-based company was taken off the stock exchange after being was purchased on the cheap by a private equity firm in 2006.

On the face of it, Dave & Buster's isn't doing much better, having lost money for each of the past three years. But that's not stopping it from preparing to go public for a second time, per a filing Monday with the SEC
.

The company is scaling back its store format in an effort to become more profitable, but to woo the lucrative adult-arcade patron, the chain will have to make more substantial changes to the way it does business, such as the following:

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Evan Clinton

This guy fell asleep at 2010's QuakeCon. He still hasn't lived it down.

See also: The Epic Gamers of QuakeCon 2010.

Let's go over a quick checklist for this weekend: Fully optimized alienware desktop? Check. A full case of Bawls? Check. Soap? For the love of god please say check. This weekend, QuakeCon 2012, celebrating its sweet sixteen in Dallas, will bring gamers from across the globe into Dallas for a weekend of boss fights, booth babes and Bawls. Here's what to look for if you happen to be at the Hilton Anatole this weekend:

Tournaments to Prove the Virility of Your Thumbs
The tournaments of Quakecon are serious business. Seriously. Over the weekend, $30,000 will be awarded to the owners of thumbs that can stand the intensity. The name of the game for QuakeCon 2012 is Quake Live. Tournaments will be held for capture the flag and duels where two gamers enter and only one leaves. While the professional tournaments are by invitation only, the amateur tournaments and random-draw tournaments are open to all -- but first come, first serve.

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Welcome to another edition of Geek-Offs, where you'll find the perfect distractions to help you muddle your way through hump day each week.

It's a rare day when you see an app in the iTunes store that has a 5 star rating (for the current rating at least, and 4 ½ stars for all versions, but who's counting) and over 130,000 reviews, so when I happened upon Temple Run, I knew I had to check it out. And several hours later - along with a fresh battery recharge - we offer up the iPhone running game from Imangi Studios as this week's welcome to the new year Geek-Off.

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Welcome to another edition of Geek-Offs, where you'll find the perfect distractions to help you muddle your way through hump day each week.

I have a confession to make. One of the main reasons I wouldn't update/upgrade/sync my old iPhone 3G was because of my fear of losing one game: Edge. The awesomeness that is Edge was one of the first games I bought, but due to the on-again off-again legal battles between a douche who thought he owned the rights to the word "edge" and French game studio Mobigame, the game has been repeatedly pulled from the iTunes store over the past couple of years. I was worried I would lose it forever.

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Welcome to another edition of Geek-Offs, where you'll find the perfect distractions to help you muddle your way through hump day each week.

If you're anything like us (and we know you are), you spent hours upon hours playing Portal. Whether you were drawn in by the puzzle aspect of the game or you just wanted to hear what GLaDOS would say next, it quickly made The Orange Box a top seller and Portal 2 was one of the most anticipated releases of this past year. Well, since your console is at home and you're probably not allowed to access your Steam account from work, we bring you Invertion, a fun Portal-influenced game by HighUp Studio.

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Welcome to another edition of Geek-Offs, where you'll find the perfect distractions to help you muddle your way through hump day each week.

Forget about square pegs in round holes and all that mumbo jumbo. Instead, you're going to have to abracadabra your way through disappearing shapes in this week's Geek Off The Wizard of Blox 2, a fun physics puzzler by Ttursas Ltd, the guys who brought us the fun iDrop Dead app.

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​Welcome to another edition of Geek-Offs, where you'll find the perfect distractions to help you muddle your way through hump day each week.

Sometimes falling can be good and sometimes it can be bad, but either way, as the rhyme goes, we all fall down. For this week's Geek-Off we offer up Fall Damage, a fun little game by Armor Games designer Tony Lavelle, where we will free fall 'til we crack.

In Fall Damage, you're a newly hatched egg high up in a nest and you have to, well, fall your way to safety. A Doodle Jump in reverse, the only way to go is down, but if you fall too far at once, you're going to suffer varying degrees of fall damage until you crack.

You'll encounter obstacles along the way, for which there are handy tricks and features (wall sliding, parachuting and pogo-ing) to keep you from falling too far too fast, but beware -- the longer you survive, the faster the game progresses. If you can keep from doing too much damage to yourself along the way, you can achieve a rank of 5 and solve the hot mystery of just who you're supposed to be. Is it rewarding? You'll have to see (for) yourself.