League Of Legends Is Actually Just A Bait And Switch

Longer title: League of Legends sells you bowling, gives you neoliberal alienation.

So I have given a truly honest attempt to get back into League of Legends recently. I did this for a couple reasons, namely that I have finished college and I am trying to explore options on what brings me joy and is good for my down time. I have not really played League of Legends since I was in 8th grade, so it has definitely been an interesting experience. I know many people would not understand why I would go back at all, so let us start there.

I do not want to speak for most League of Legends players, nor do I think I really am in the target demographic for League of Legends, but I do want to speak to what I call the "core fantasy" of League of Legends. The "core fantasy" is not necessarily why most players play, but I do think it is a significant part of how Riot Games (the company that built and maintains League of Legends) thinks about marketing the game. But, it is critical to note the "core fantasy" is not how new players are drawn in, it is how they are *retained*. I suspect new players are mostly introduced by existing players or in social groups who are just "trying the game out", but I don't have numbers on this, and it is not important for my argument.

Okay, with that being said, the "core fantasy" of League of Legends is that you are playing the same game as the pros. It is that you are in a recreational sport league, and the pros are in a professional sport league. The "core fantasy" is that you are bowling in the 60s. What do I mean by that? To understand League of Legends, we first have to understand bowling in the 60s.

The first mass-market automated pinsetter - the AMF 82-30 - released in 1946, marking a tremendous change in the viability of bowling businesses. Human pinsetters were no longer needed, which meant more lanes, faster resets, cheaper operations, and cheaper bowling. This caused a bowling boom, propelling bowling to the most played participation sport in America throughout the 60s and 70s. But the *way* bowling was played was also exceptional.

So bowling was not just competitive, but also social. It was team-based, it was frequent, you could practice on off days by yourself, and it was public, exposing you to a wide range of people. The "core fantasy" is believing all of these things are also true for League of Legends. But there is one glaring difference: League of Legends does not force you to play with a consistent team, or force you to play against the same teams. In fact, it does not even incentivize it.

It is important to understand how exceptional live online team games are. Less and less people are playing traditional sports in their weekly lives, which has caused sports to become increasingly viewer focused rather than participatory. For the first time, video games could compete with sports - not in terms of viewership, in terms of participation. And online team games - which were released during the decline of participatory sports (but did not start it) - *exploded* in the 21st century. And from the beginning Riot Games wanted League of Legends to be an esport (electronic sport)[6]. But there was one glaring problem: they wanted to be an esport on their own, flawed, terms.

Riot has consistently omitted building out both physical and virtual infrastructure for League of Legends tournaments. This might be because it is a capital investment they don't want to make (public companies are quite averse to making capital investments). Or it could simply be that they don't care. Why would a LA-based company, owned by a Shenzhen-based company, care about communities in the Midwest, in the global south, in rural California, or anywhere else? It's 2024, money is extracted from our communities to LA, San Francisco, New York City, and yes, even Shenzhen. Riot Games does not care about us, they do not care about our communities, but they have no problem with taking our money. No industry is immune to globalization - wealth concentrates in a few people in a few cities, while the rest of us are sucked dry for all we are worth.

There used to be a local Microsoft store in the Easton Town Center mall in Columbus Ohio, a few miles from where I lived. They had biweekly League of Legends tournaments, filling up enough spots for a tournament every time, in a mall far away from the urban core. But, at the end of the day, Riot did not give them a single penny. The computers, headphones, and mice were provided by ASUS, the store itself paid for drinks, and the analyst/commentator on the stream. Moreover, the store used start.gg - formermly smash.gg, a website founded to help tournament organizers for Super Smash Bros. And this is important - because Super Smash Bros, a fighting game, has its roots in an arcade subculture.

The first fighting games were arcade games, and by necessity arcades were local, and very physical. Similar to bowling leagues, arcade fighting game communities involved weekly, biweekly, or monthly tournaments, with frequently the same players, who all lived nearby. They were also very economically accessible, as an anonymous author wrote for Team Liquid:

There is another cultural element we have to highlight: fighting game communities have black roots. Arcades were cheap, and they were in urban areas in post-white flight America, making them one of the few accessible entertainment options to an underserved black population in the US. And this audience is reflected in their designs. Sure, a game like League of Legends is ideal for white suburbanite kids who can't leave their house without being flattened by an SUV, but can afford personal computers. But arcades catered to a different audience, an audience that might not be able to afford a computer, but could scrap together some quarters and bus to an arcade.

And this reflects in fighting games designed for home consoles: you don't need 4 consoles to play a game of Smash, you need four controllers and one console. Friend groups in urban centers could all split the cost for a Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Wii, Dreamcast, etc. And, because of their proximity to each other, could go to each other's homes on their own. (This was also a symptom of families pushed to poverty, where both parents are overworked. I do not believe streets during urban decay were ideal sites for children's safety.) And, in cities, proximity and community led to flourishing used markets, making games even more economically accessible.

This is entirely untrue for League of Legends, it is so untrue that it is almost comical to suggest buying enough machines to play the game locally. Even a very scrappy buyer purchasing machines at $200 a pop would have to spend $2000 to get a full League of Legends game in a room. This is not accounting for mice, keyboards, monitors, power consumption, and the sheer amount of physical tablespace needed to host 10 PCs. The game is simply not designed to be played in physical closeness with others. Except, in the one case where Riot got the perfect video game infrastructure without having to spend a dime: Internet Cafes.

An internet cafe is a cafe that provides a computer with high-speed connectivity for its users. Internet cafes were more common in America in the 90s, but declined steeply in the 21st century. In eastern Asia internet cafes remain popular, and, importantly, very cheap. For example, in South Korea, most internet cafes charge 1,000 South Korean won (0.72 USD) per hour of use. I am far from an expert on South Korean economics - so take this analysis with a pinch of salt. But the minimum wage in South Korea is ₩9,870 per hour, meaning for one hour of minimum wage work you can get 9 hours of computer time. This makes South Korean internet cafes possibly more affordable than US arcades in the 70s - which would cost you a few quarters when the minimum wage was under $3 per hour. This cheap community access (paid for by the cafes, freeing Riot from capital investment), combined with League of Legends being free-to-play, explains why League is so popular in South Korea and China, its two biggest regions.

This also means you can get the community benefits that the bowling leagues and arcades offer. But, again - Riot did not do the work for this. Riot profits off of work done by the Smash community (which was built off black arcade communities and black labor), or east Asian internet cafe workers, without spending a single dime. And they make no effort to build similar infrastructure or community in the US. But what can we expect from a company founded by white suburb kids who had to compensate - and I shit you not - ***1548*** former and current women employees for gender discrimination [5]. As you might expect from such a startling number, the company had no pay equity practices (which means men got paid more for doing the same job as women) and its leadership was all men.

*This* is why League of Legends will never deliver on its core fantasy to its players. It is a team game designed to cater to exclusively anti-social white male suburbanites, by white male suburbanite creeps and harrassers. When they stumble into great success, it is through the work of people of color, either in east Asia or right here in urban America. And through it all they keep you hooked, how? By investing just enough into Arcane to hook you into the world and characters, and investing just enough in the esports scene to show you how good the game can be at its best.

But when you log in to play, they make no effort to bring you that experience. The solo queue game mode, the one that prioritizes your ability to win with 4 other people you don't know, is considered the measure of how "good" you are. The "flex" queue, where you can play with your friends, is not tied to a specific team, and so your rank serves as a poor measure of how good your team is. Clash, originally promising and a step in the right direction, was poorly executed and sparse. It only covers 7 weekends this year. That is a far cry from even the shortest bowling leagues, which lasted 30 weeks. And a refusal to support local community building for tournaments means there is no outlet for truly balanced and competitive team-based League of Legends...a competitive team game [8]. This is the central deceit - the way the fantasy gives way to reality, and why I think people hate the game. You and the pros are not playing the same game, they are bowling, while you are playing League of Legends.

Epilogue

If through all that you are left wondering how my experience getting back into the game went, I will tell you. When I logged back in, I said "okay, I want to get better, and I want to do more teamwork-related gameplay. I will play support and hit some ranked games." But the easiest way to win at low ranks is to play supports that assume your carry (the person you are supporting) is useless. This directly went against why I decided to play the game again - the easiest way to climb ranks is to not support your team...as the support. This is not a problem that would exist in a game that incentivized actual teamwork.

More than anything else, despite it all, this is a piece about business strategy. There are multiple gaps in the market outlined here, most blatantly the lack of a community-focused game with a studio willing to make investments in local communities. But there are others, too, including a lack of networked competitive team gaming emphasizing the "team", especially outside of shooters. It is surprising to me competitors like Omega Strikers did not try to gun for any of these gaps, lack of imagination is killer, I guess. They had gameplay that would have worked with local co-op and tournament structure, instead they tried to invest in the game itself, but it's hard to beat Riot at their own game. But they were former Riot employees, so they stuck to their guns, and they got shot first.

In "A Different, Messier World", P.E. Moskowitz tells us about the queer city, and the importance of both parts - the queer, and the city. Queer subcultures have gone mainstream, expanding and democratizing the queer, but without the city. They write,

So, queers, maybe I will see you AT THE INTERNET CAFE for SPLATOON DAY, I do need to find my switch and buy a copy of Splatoon 3, though. (Do not expect to see me at the most recent one, on the 29th. I am busy with a Palestinian art show.) Sadly the GAME ARENA doesn't have enough Switches (I am guessing) and the game does not have split screen, which is why I have to bring my own. A ways away from queer utopia we remain, but a step forward is in my future. And, I will start working on a little local co-op game myself, I did the business analysis, so who knows, maybe I'll give the, uh, business a shot. Expect a post about that at some point in the future, once Inam's Peasant Revolt (the game I am currently working on) is done. Thanks for reading everyone, I hope to see you at a tournament, regardless of what game we are playing. As always, my email is open for your thoughts and comments. I will put a few up if I find them compelling.

Notes

1. Conveniently, it is also a primary example used in "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community" by Robert Putnam, a book I will refer to frequently in this essay.
2. "What's happening to bowling?" by White Hutchinson Leisure and Learning Group (https://www.whitehutchinson.com/leisure/articles/whats-happening-to-bowling.shtml)
3. "Building the Future of Sport at Riot Games" by John Needham (https://www.riotgames.com/en/news/building-the-future-of-sport-at-riot-games)
4. "The Black Roots Of The Fighting Game Community" (https://teamliquid.com/news/2023/02/10/the-black-roots-of-the-fighting-game-community)
5. "Riot Games Will Compensate 1,548 Women For Gender Discrimination" by Anthony Wood https://www.ign.com/articles/riot-games-will-compensate-1548-women-for-gender-discrimination

6. During the development of League of Legends, Riot’s founders admired the Intel Extreme Masters Series and games with esports like Starcraft and Counter Strike. One day they hoped League of Legends (“LoL” or “League”) would be worthy of an esport. [3]

7. Also, it is important to note how many important skills are not learned. When playing with a team in a community you are forced to take accountability. If you get mad, yell at your teammates, etc, there are actual, real, social consequences. That is an important lesson the kids on this game are not going to learn.