On playing the big bad spider: Elise

League of Legends features a champion known as Elise, the spider queen. Yes, that’s her actual in-game title. I have a lot of happy memories associated with Elise, even though she has fallen out of favor lately and I’ve been playing her less. I began playing League on the patch in which Elise was released, and picked her up as my second champion (after Mundo, who is bae). I’ve always had a soft spot for her as a champion, and have recently been trying to build her in a relatively unorthodox way (if you’re a LoL person we can talk more about this).

Elise’s schtick is that she can transform between human and spider forms, and therefore has access to a greater variety of spells than most other champions. Elise is not unique in this; I can think of Nidalee and Jayce who also transform between ranged and melee forms.

Elise has three skins which allow her to appear slightly differently. In the image below, the picture on the top left is Elise’s default appearance, and the other three are the alternates. The picture on the top right represents a skin that was given as a reward for achieving a high level in ranked play (Championship Elise).
Elise is also described as an archetypal femme fatale/black widow, and her basic character design supports this. From her lore:

Elise’s entrancing beauty and grace conceal the pitiless, black heart of a deadly predator. With ruthless cunning, she lures the unsuspecting with promises of favor from the spider god. Having exchanged her humanity to become something far more sinister, Elise sacrifices the innocent to maintain her power and seemingly eternal youth. No one can fathom how many have been caught in her web, slain to feed her insatiable hunger.

Biggest Pet Peeve: Despite the fact that she correctly has eight legs and that some of her skills depict this, one image for one skill depicts a spiderling with six legs. 😦

Image Courtesy Riot Games

Elise is an example of a spidery champion designed to be vaguely terrifying. If we look at an interview with some of the designers, we can see that they intended to tap into a widespread cultural arachnophobia. In fact, some of the designers suffered from this same arachnophobia:

When our animation director RiotBamDragon goes over animations for review, he looks at everything for little fixes. I found it weird that he only had suggestions for the female-form, when he’s usually more comprehensive with feedback. I quickly realized that he never looked at the spider form because he’s terrified of spiders. “The spider’s fine. Spider’s fine. Just ship it.” I asked him, “Did you even look at the spider?” “Yeah, I’m sure it’s fine,” he hastily replied.

– “Inside Design: Weaving the Spider Queen’s Web,” Post to Riot Forums, 19 October 2012 (Retrieved 10 June 2015)

In fact, the designers mention having to put effort into editing Elise’s design in order to make her less scary to view and play. Mike “ohmikegoodness” Laygo, –Senior Animator, says in that same interview, “I had to de-creepify her a bunch … reduce a lot of the twitchiness because it was just too frightening and unnerving.” Similarly, Mark “Riot G Mang” Sassenrath,– Game Analyst, remembers, “She actually became too scary, so we had to tone it down.” Despite comments like these, it is clear that being terrifying is part of Elise’s character design; perhaps the real challenge was making her scary without being unplayable.

As a side note, one thing that emerged from that interview was a meditation on the challenges of cross-cultural design. Sassenrath mentions in an aside that “something that I didn’t know was that arachnophobia is pretty much a uniquely western phenomenon. In China, for instance, there isn’t the widespread association between spiders and scary that we have here.” Designing a game for a worldwide audience makes some of these culturally-specific fears apparent, waggling an eyebrow at socialization as a means of intensifying a small fright.

Those are pearls that were his eyes

Part of the reason why I’d been thinking about names and identity and the power of pseudonyms has been because for the past few months I’ve been debating registering a domain (morbidflight.com although I’ve briefly been transfixed by the idea of morbidflig.ht). I finally went ahead and did it today, which means that non-lazy people now have another way of finding my real name (despite the fact that it’s on this blog in at least one instance).

It’ll take a couple days to hammer out the kinks and figure out what I want to do with this, exactly, but I’m glad I did it instead of waffling for another few months/years/decades. There’s a pair of boots I’ve been meaning to buy for the past five years and at this point I don’t even think it’s worth it. That’s the kind of waffling I wanted to avoid. Sometimes, spending money on myself is a good thing.

This is just a quick post to mention that and to suggest, however indirectly, that there might be a sea-change in my online presence. I’ve made a home, now, instead of camping out in the guest rooms of friends. It remains to be seen whether this is as momentous as I made it out to be. (I’m betting not.)

What’s in a name?

I suppose you’ll have noticed by now the quote in the header. I confess this quote was a conveniently apropos quote that I found through a google books search when launching this blog, but has no relation to the process of creating the name by which I identify myself on the internet.

No, that’s a different tale altogether, and I am not simply indulging in narcissistic nostalgia by telling (some of) it. Names have power, especially when they’re names we choose ourselves. Listen, dear reader, and you shall hear.

It should be no surprise (I mean, really, “morbid” is half of this name) that I’m a bit of a baby goth. The colorful clothes throw it off for some people, but when it comes down to it I’m definitely sullen and I’d say emo except emo developed when I was just older than its inhabitants. Back in 2003, when I was barely a teenager and starting a blog, I wrote a poem about myself that included the line “morbid flying in warped dreams.” (Protip: don’t try to google it, it won’t really work.) When I had to think of a username that wasn’t an obvious one, I took the first two words and smashed them together to get morbidflight. It worked, and I’m eternally grateful to my creativity.

So that name, “morbidflight,” comes out of a fairly dark period of my life and more embarrassingly than that, a fairly juvenile one. I don’t claim to have matured significantly in the intervening eleven years (although I hope I have). I’m still morbid(ly) flying through warped dreams. I’m still very much morbidflight. The old blog might not exist where it used to, but it definitely exists on the web. I need a record of my past as much as I need a record of my present.

But the story is never that simple. I’ve believed for a long time that the only reason we believe in consistency of character, of personality, is that we keep the same name. And as a member of the generation that grew up with relatively easy internet access, I understand the value of pseudonymous identities. Yes, plural, identities. I have a name that I use in meatspace with few misgivings, and I’m rather attached to it. I have morbidflight for the internet, and I’m rather attached to that as well. But I’m also someone in a position of developing a professional identity in meatspace that is tightly intertwined with what I do on the interwebs. And therein lies the rub.

What is my name? What does it matter that this group of people defined only by their real-world location calls me by one moniker, while this group of people defined only by their lack of real-world location calls me by another. Why do I care so much about keeping these names, and these identities, separate? These thoughts have been going through my head for several years now, but I think the decision to write these down is in part spurred by a friend’s recent name change (yay, friend). To throw out a spate of offhand metaphors, names are records, names are identifiers, names are choices that we make and choices made for us.

I prefer to make the choice myself, controlling the relationship between my meatspace name and my cyberspace name as best I can. This is why you might see me request to delete something that has my name in it, or fail to see me claim ownership of a thing that has my name in it. I definitely don’t do this as well as I should, or as well as others would expect, but I do it in a way that works for me. It’s not an easy distinction between professional and personal identities; in my case it really feels more like a distinction between meatspace and cyberspace. But I’m professional and personal in both of those spaces—ask anyone who’s ever been at a conference with me, or anyone who I visited after getting to know online. And to complicate this further, I go by different pronunciations of my name depending on the country in which I am located and the language I am speaking. In the past year or two, I’ve even started responding to a name used only by a small group of people.

I guess it’s safe to say that I go by many names, all of which correspond to me. Even if it feels a little weird to let people call me “morbid” and leave off the “flight,” that’s a nickname. People say “morbidflight” out loud when they want my attention. Maybe it started out as a name I chose for myself, but now it’s a name that others use for me. I am accountable because I use this name consistently, and accountable because this name corresponds to a story, a telling of my life.

And that’s about what it means to be a name.