League of Legends

Choosing a game for this topic was so difficult, it wasn’t til now I realised how much of a massive gamer nerd I am. But alas, I was able to figure out which game I would most like to discuss on my blog, the most popular eSport game in history, League of Legends.

Source - Google Images

League of Legends is a massive online battle arena (MOBA), where teams of up to 5 players, select characters or “champions” and fight on the fields of justice to destroy the opposing enemy nexus. I highlighted League of Legends as an eSport since, unlike most other games, there is a lack of narrative in the game and the pure point of playing is competition. There are no quests to take, no story to progress through, simply fighting for the sake of competition. Competitions in LoL have gone to a point where professional players are rewarded with enormous sums of cash for victory, the last world championship saw the winning team, Taipei Assassins, awarded $1 million US dollars. But the game does have a small form of narrative, the champions they choose come with their own backgrounds and stories, creating lore within the League of Legends universe.

The League of Legends universe revolves around the magical world of Runeterra. Once a land ravaged and torn apart by war, powerful summoners created a competition for rivalling parties to settle disputes and end the pointless bloodshed between countries. In the lore, this competition was known as the League of Legends. The conflict between cities was very much political with countries fighting due to a clash of beliefs.

A dominant reading one could take from the game is that, disputes can be solved without violence, or war. Countries can differ and disputes could be settled in more “peaceful” terms (the League had become more of a spectacle and entertainment in the LoL world). A negotiated meaning could come from players believing that violence is never the answer but the League, which can be interpreted as their form of sports, is not a real indicator of a country’s power (just look at the results from the last Olympics :P). The oppositional reading could see players disagree with the League’s idea of peace, and that the game still shows that violence is the only way to resolute conflict.

Hall, S 1980, ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’, Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, England, pp. 55-58, accessed 12 Sept 2013