How do we talk about character in eSports, Part 2

Continuing after a sick couple days…

So one of the difficulties of discussing character in League of Legends lies in the narrative complexity at work in the game. It’s a narrative complexity that is almost invisible to the players, but Riot has clearly taken great pains to establish the consistency of every part of gameplay. In the first part of this post, I was talking about the summoner/champion distinction that allows for 111 different playable characters yet a persistent identity. Now I’d like to talk about multiplayer interactions and how they are supported (or not) by the lore.

League of Legends is a game with no built-in singleplayer. You can create a bot game and be the only human player, but that sort of play takes the main gameplay mode, multiplayer, and substitutes bots for human players. Part of the point of League of Legends is that it’s a game that happens when people get together and play it. This also makes it incredibly hard to pin down and write about (if you should want to), because you probably want to write about the metagame and about particular games, and it’s hard to do that when the thing is slippery.

But this is something that game critics should be used to, no? This is the bread-and-butter of NGJ, the whole point of describing a subjective experience of play.

Anyway. Moving on past that minor quibble (hah, minor), let’s talk about team composition. For many players, the champion they select must help the team. At a basic level, there are certain prescribed roles that each team ought to have. To what extent the players fulfill these roles is up to them, but the cultural expectations do exist. In terms of the basic game mode, the 5v5 “Classic” game type played on “Summoner’s Rift”, there are 5 positions: top-lane, jungle, mid-lane, and carry and support teaming up in the bottom-lane. There are expectations for the kinds of champions you play in each of the lanes or the jungle, and this set of positions creates a well-balanced team that is hard to shut down based on champion selection alone. If, on the other hand, your entire team were to go support, or any other type, it might cause unbalanced gameplay from the outset. The point is to pick a team that will do well, but also one that you will enjoy playing.

when picking a champion to play out of my diverse champion pool, this is how i decide: 1. Where am I playing? (ie, what position am i playing, out of the standard, top, jungle, mid, ad carry, or support) 2. Who am I up against? (in draft pick, if the person I will be laning against has picked their champion, that gives me an opportunity to pick a champion who will have an easy time laning against them, mechanically, or pick someone who will counter their playstyle late game.) 3. What does my team need? (depending on what everyone else picked, do we have enough crowd control and peel? Do we have enough tanky people or do I need to pick someone who works with a tanky build?) 4. What do I feel like? (this is the intangible ‘fun’ quality. I feel like all of the champions can be fun in the right situation even if some of them are more fun than others. But what sounds fun right now?)

– LordCOTA

Now, there could be a lot to say about the construction of these roles. I’m thinking about other 5v5 competitions, most particularly the team kendo tournament, or futsal. But the thing that I want to emphasize is that League of Legends is a team game, first and foremost. Sure, it doesn’t always get played like that, especially in solo queue or duo queue, and in non-tournament/non-competitive play. But the game is structured to work well and to be fun if you play as a team.

And here, I’m going to drop a reference to a publication by Valve that addresses how to design for cooperative play, because it’s good and you should all read it:

• Michael Booth. March 2009. “Replayable Cooperative Game Design: Left 4 Dead.” Game Developers Conference. Slides

I think next time I’ll talk about how teams/community/individualism come up in the few times League of Legends gets discussed in mainstream games crit.

How do we talk about character in eSports, Part 1

To continue from where I left off in the first post in this series, I am going to look at how people within what I consider “mainstream games criticism” (aka, the major blogs and sites) talk about League of Legends. I mentioned the two camps of posts referenced in Critical Distance: two about the player community, and one about the character. Similarly, out of eight posts on Borderhouse Blog tagged “League of Legends”, six reference character design and two discuss the player community.

In this post, I’d like to talk about character:

Defining “character” in League of Legends can be surprisingly tricky. On one hand, champions are probably the most commonly identified “characters” in the game, with names, appearances, and particular playstyles. The champions are the face(s) of the game and they are the player’s interaction with the game world.  Like in Diablo or Warcraft, you control the character’s movement and action to an extent, with paths and autoattacks handled by the game itself.

On the other hand, champions do not persist as player avatars past the duration of a single match. This strange feature is also supported by the lore. One of Riot’s guides to gameplay identifies the summoner as the player’s persistent character, a force of political balance who fights by summoning champions.

A player in League of Legends takes on the role of a Summoner – a gifted spell caster who has the power to bring forth a champion to fight as their avatar in Valoran’s Fields of Justice. With all major political decisions on Valoran now decided by the outcome of the contests that take place in the battle arenas, a Summoner is the key force of change on the continent.

– “Summoner Information“, League of Legends Learning Center, July 6 2010

This convoluted relationship of summoner to champion allows Riot to sidestep the issues raised by quasi-persistent champions: the champion serves as the in-match “avatar” of the summoner, in the same way that the summoner serves as the invisible in-game avatar of the player. There are a few characteristics of summoners and champions that complicate the idea of character in League of Legends.

Summoners, for example, can heal their champion, damage opposing minions directly, teleport their champion anywhere in the Field of Justice they are in, fortify their team’s turret defenses, and a slew of other game-impacting results.

– “Summoner Information“, League of Legends Learning Center, July 6 2010

So we can see that summoners and champions both impact the game during a match, and summoners, though they do not have a manifestation on the field, have a direct connection with the game world.

I’m going to try to replicate a quick table here that captures the messiness of these two categories:

How character is spread over Summoner and Champion (Google Doc version here)

I need to flesh out the terminology, but I hope you get the idea.

Rebuttal: How Players Talk About eSports

This is a guest post by LordCOTA (my non-resident expert on LoL) in response to some claims I made in How do players talk about eSports? about “game” and “metagame” as it relates to (e)sports. I think the issue starts somewhere around when I said “So here we have sports, where the “metagame” (LoL version) is practically what we think of when we think of the game.”

Without further ado, the rebuttal:

Children begin playing in soccer leagues as early as 4 years old. If you’ve ever been to a game of soccer at this level, you probably understand why it’s been referred to as herdball or magnetball. But the fact remains these kids are playing soccer. Fast forward to 7-10ish and the kids are actually playing their positions which means the forwards are doing everything and the defenders are basically standing still until the ball is in scoring position. That contrasts pretty heavily with how technical and advanced professional soccer is, but it is all soccer.

A very similar learning curve exists in League of Legends. After the tutorial you know that enemy champions are bad and killing them and their turrets gives you gold. Those are the rules, the “game”. But you don’t know much else and people just do whatever. You notice that there are two people in the top lane and two in the bottom and one in the middle, so you split your team up that way. Eventually you learn it’s best to put certain types of champions into certain lanes and to have balanced team compositions with some key roles being filled. Fast forward a few levels and people begin sending one person top and having someone in the jungle, and a lot of entirely new dynamics of play emerge. At some point the game because a very close emulation of the professional scene, but can you at any point deny we are playing League of Legends?

League of Legends, as a new sport on a medium that is very new to sports, requires that dual terminology to differentiate the experience you get being dropped into the game with just the rules, versus the game that is being played competitively.

LordCOTA is an avid player of League of Legends and can be found on twitter @lordcota, in LoL as LordCOTA, or emailed at: cota (at) abzde (dot) com.

How do players talk about eSports?

In exploring the world of League of Legends, I find myself stymied by some of the basic terminology. The application of “game” and “metagame” is counterintuitive for me, and it took a fairly lengthy discussion with my boyfriend (LordCOTA) who has been playing League of Legends (for three “seasons”; more later) to understand how they’re used in this context. So I’d like to replicate both some of what I learned, and some of how I feel about it. I am trying very hard to avoid some of my prescriptivist impulses, and instead, want very much to focus on how these terms are constructed by players and developers and random forum posters. Because despite not showing up in mainstream (as much as there can be a mainstream) games criticism, this vernacular theory is very important to me. (And I hope I can give it its due.)

I’m going to quote a comment on the first post in this quasi-series, to illustrate this point:

But lastly (and maybe most importantly) I think that the kind of engagement with map layouts, skills, balance, and even lore is often sequestered away in sites that are about becoming really really *good* at the game, and so there’s a feeling of just creating the same knowledge as is already out there.

– Ben Abraham, comment here

With that flourishing player discourse in mind, let’s look at “metagame” and “game”, and how these two terms work together to make League of Legends what it is, halfway between classic video and computer games, and sports. In this way, League of Legends offers an example of how eSports are constructed by viewers and gamers alike.

Game refers to the mechanics of the game within the client, what you’re allowed to do by the game rules itself, the original product of the designers. The game includes stats, and is balanced based on the state of competitive play (both professional and high league). Riot Games tunes League of Legends biweekly during the “season” when competitive play is happening, and makes bigger adjustments between “seasons”.

The metagame is set of rules and expectations for how the game should be played, built on top of the restrictions of the game mechanics.

“that’s what the community considers the appropriate way to play, and it follows the current state of the competitive scene of the game”

– LordCOTA

It is similar to emergent play in a way, except if emergent play describes the moment of surprise and unpredictability, metagame refers to when that previously-surprising action becomes standard.

High-level players try out certain modes of play, which eventually settle into what gets known as the “metagame”, which affects what Riot rolls out in their biweekly balance patches. As a newcomer to League of Legends, I get somewhat confused by how people use “metagame” (and “meta”) to refer to things that I would consider part of the game, but in discussing it with my interviewee (lol) I think I have a better handle on why those terms are used in that way, and it’s actually fucking fascinating to me.

So here we have sports, where the “metagame” (LoL version) is practically what we think of when we think of the game. Soccer isn’t a game about kicking a ball, it’s about movement and getting your defense to push up just enough to apply pressure but not enough to leave a hole, and of having a goalie, and people designated to go score goals and people designated to stop goals from happening. Football has a whole system of plays and roles; there’s a person on every football team whose entire purpose in the game is to be good at kicking. Nothing else, just kicking the ball between the goalposts. And, what happens in sports is that over time these cultural expectations of how the game ought to be played start to shift, because really good people start doing really strange things, and the best part is, they work.

And apparently, that same thing happens in League of Legends, except this is called the “metagame”.

Next time: Stay tuned for a rebuttal of my points about game/metagame!