Part 1: The Spect-Actors of the New Interactive Era

Analysis of the video game League of Legends’ fan community 

 

    In July 2012, the multiplayer online battle arena and real-time strategy video game League of Legends, also abbreviated LoL, becomes the most played PC game with nearly 1.3 billion hours of gameplay in America and Europe, ahead of World of Warcraft and Minecraft. Developed by Riot Games, the game is initially inspired by the new content Defense of the Ancients created by its own players for Warcraft III. It appears that the pupil has finally surpassed the master. Indeed, the free-to-play game, accessible to anyone with a screen and an Internet connection, has become an enormous phenomenon with over 67 million people playing the game every month (we talk about the business model of the game here). An audience from all over the world has been found, and a huge community of fans with different practices has been formed. Because of the expanding interactivity that is made possible through digitization and globalization the audience appears as a new audience neither passive nor simply active. How does the more and more complex audience change its media consumption? Can they still be considered as an audience? Through the works of Shayla Thiel-Stern Beyond the Active Audience and Jack Z. Bratich From Audiences to Media Subjectivities we will focus on the changing role of the digital audience through the different practices of fan communities created by the video game LoL and the way they create their own digital universe. We will argue that the fans can be considered as “spect-actor” in their double digital role of consumer/producer, observer/actor.

   

The adjacent practices of the daily users of the video game around the fictional world of League of Legends created a gigantic and transnational digital “imagined community” (Anderson, 2006 [1983]. How does this community manifest itself and what does it mean for the fan audience? The interactive community of the video game has its own website devoted to the fans where they can share comments, impressions, advice and organized events (tournaments, leagues, viewing parties, meet-ups). Consequently, the social digital life is one of the aspects of these fan communities where you are able to meet new gamers and share your "gamer life" (difficulties, characters, news) with them but also more. In fact, LoL is present on the Web in various other aspects than just through the game itself, directly on social networks as Facebook, Twitter and also the video platform Youtube. As explained by Bratich and Thiel-Stern the new digital audience is more than active and changes the usual acceptation of the term "audience" by blurring/merging the traditional roles between producer and consumer. Not simply being observers and admirers of a cultural, social, political phenomenon they contribute to it. The fans, as “prosumers” (producer-consumer) transcend the simple boundaries of the game by creating an entire digital universe around the fictional world of LoL. Originally coined by Toffler back in the 80’s, the term prosumer refers to that ‘businesses would bring about the increasing integration of consumers into the process of production in order to achieve customisation and individualisation’ (Hesmondalgh, 2013: 316).

Furthermore, more than just sharing impressions and meeting people, the fans of LoL create real cultural products such as drawings or videos as well. For Thiel-Stern, they are consumers of a cultural product, the video game, but they are also, by their appropriation of it, producers of their own cultural product (Thiel-Stern, 2013: 3). In the same statement Bratich affirms that the fans by producing their own culture, through the "creation of artifacts" create collective activities functioning by display and circulation (Bratich, 2013:18). The fans gather together in order to create a community and in the same way their own fictional world. Besides, being a multiplayer game, Lol emphasizes all the more the sharing and gathering by the fans. The importance of this community and its products to Riot Games is exemplified by two sections on the website of the fan community that are devoted to the "Fan Art Gallery" and the "Fan Videos". Most of the time, these products are a re-creation or re-interpretation of the fictional world of LoL, in particular the different characters. By  doing so, the fans bring LoL in their own personal creative world, through numerous fan fiction like (soft porn) artworks or the famous phenomenon of cosplay which involves the creation of costumes directly inspired by the video game. Thereby, as in the idea of drillability conceptualized by Smith, the fans are encouraged by the developer to immerse themselves in the core of the LoL mythology (Smith, 2011: 2). Moreover, according to Bratich the fan community is what he calls an "identificatory pole" which permits them to express their identity (Bratich, 2013: 19). In consequence, if the LoL community appears as an unity, the fans can easily revendicate their own identity in various sub-groups of leagues created by the community itself as for example ‘The League of Lesbians’, ‘The University of Toronto X’ or ‘Wine Country Gaming’. Consequently, the fan community of League of Legends is full of complexity and symptomatic of a changing role in the digital audience. Thus, the fans, consumers of the video game, are also producers of a transnational and personal universe beyond the fictional world of LoL.

    With the development of the video game communities, a new kind of interactive media also appeared, namely Twitch.tv. Twitch is a live streaming video platform, created in 2011 and owned by the giant merchant on the Internet, Amazon. The first use of the platform was focused on video gaming, allowing users to watch gamers play LoL live or as video on demand. In this case, the fans themselves are watched by other fans and this is what Thiel-Stern calls the Audience 2.0: an audience with an audience. The particularity of this "built-in audience" comes from the fact that they are aware of being watched by the media environment because they are an important part of this digital environment (Thiel-Stern, 2013: 7). This happened through social media networks, but also through the example of Twitch, which consciously organized the interactivity between gamers: experienced gamers would play for an audience of gamers who would improve their level by watching and asking live questions. More than spectators alone, they are actors of the game, watched by an audience of  fellow gamers.

Likewise, through Twitch fans can watch players of LoL at another scale of gaming through the broadcasts of eSports competitions. The eSports (electronic sports) competitions are an upper stage of the fan culture and lead to a professionalisation of this amateur phenomenon (read more about this in part 2). eSports are organized championships between professional team players in the form of tournaments. The phenomenon started in the South-East asian countries of Japan and South Korea and has extended in a transnational scale to America and Europe. Thereby, each year since 2011, in different locations in the world, the League of Legends World Championship is organized and teams of numerous countries compete against each other in order to win the Final cup and a cash prize of 1 million dollars. The fan community, thanks to digitization, exceeded the national boundaries and became a global and transnational phenomenon where on the common base of the game, the people from, at least, Japan, South Korea and Europe and North-America, can share culture and identity. Besides, eSports and Twitch reflect the tendencies of the Web audience and the idea of a spect-actor, coined by theatre producer August Boal, with a double role of observation and action. It also shows  the contemporary drift through the professionalisation of the amateur practices. The digital audience, in which the video game fan community is a part, is not a simple consumer of Internet anymore but rather a fully-fledged powerful producer of the media content.

    To conclude, the fan community of League of Legends is characteristic of the new era of Internet where the digital audience is not simply a spectator of a cultural phenomenon. They participate actively in it and create different "artifacts" around the fictional world of their much-loved video game. Other interactive media and events extend the digital world of the game in an enormous fan universe. With Twitch and eSports, "the audience is an audience with an audience" and the amateur becomes more and more a part of a huge professional business. And so, our analysis of League of Legends shows the empowerment and influence of the digital audience, who can no longer be classified as mere spectators, but as spect-actors and prosumers of the media. 

B.L., E.K., L.C., N.R., R.H.

Discussion:

The notion of the “spect-actor” is an example of the democratizing power of the Internet.

Bibliography

-Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. (2006 [1983])

-Bratich, J. Z.  “From Audience to Media Subjectivities, Mutants in the Interregnum.” The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, First Edition. Volume VI: Media Studies Futures, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (2013): 18-20

-Hesmondhalgh, David. The Cultural Industries, 3rd ed. London: Sage, (2013)

-Thiel-Stern, S. “Beyond the Active Audience, Exploring New Media Audiences and the Limits of Cultural Production” The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, First Edition. Volume VI: Media Studies Futures, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (2013)

-Smith A. Beyond the Brick: Narrativizing LEGO in the Digital Age. Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.(2011)

-Gaudiosi, J. “Riot Games' League Of Legends Officially Becomes Most Played PC Game In The World” in Forbes (2011) url: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/07/11/riot-games-league-of-legends-officially-becomes-most-played-pc-game-in-the-world/