Part 2: League of Legends at play

League of Legends from the industry perspective

For the full story, please first read part one.

The first online games started to emerge in the prehistoric era of the internet network with bulletin board system (BBS) through which a computer server was connected to users by phone lines. Soon multiuser BBSs started to allow user interaction inside games and gradually the simple-text design-based environments incorporated more complex graphics. With cheaper technologies for PCs in the late 90s, the online feature started to be offered among different game genres via broadband internet connection. With the possibility of sophisticated 3D visuals and servers allowing simultaneous connections of thousands of users, multiplayer online games became one of the most popular categories. In this essay we will continue the analysis of the video game League of Legends already explored on the previous post, but this time our main focus will be the industry perspective. We will explore some characteristics that made League of Legends a successful franchise and, comparing with other sectors in media like the TV and recording industries, understand that League of Legends also became a transnational enterprise. As we will see, the growth of these industries meant an important change in the audience that shifted from the homely amateur to the competitive professional.

Released in 2009, League of Legends was conceived as a multiplayer online game, following the momentum created by online multiplayer role-playing games like the WarCraft franchise. It began with an innovative business model:  free to play but using the micro transaction concept inside the game. These purchases are made while using Riot Points, an in-game currency concept to monetize the sale of champions, champion skins, icons and multi-game boosts. Their fan community is huge and very active  in YouTube where guided videos instruct players to face their enemies (read more about the LoL community in part 1). It is noteworthy that the sense of community allied to the inherent competitiveness inside the game and in-game currencies created a new profile of players that actually make a living as gaming professionals. In this sense it is worth  mentioning Twitch, a social video platform and community for gamers where individuals stay connected for hours in real-time (this creates a spect-actor, a concept we explored here). Some of them are expert professionals that charge $4.99 for their channel’s subscription and receive donations that can vary from $5 to $500. We also  reviewed  a channel called “Arams con vosotros” owned by a Spanish player who before the start of a match commented that he was invited by an American firm to go to USA to test a new game. In his channel he shows his complete profile including partnerships with game resellers, fans’ comments, and a list of top donators.

In Tasha Oren’s article On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition as Television Values, she explores the changes of food TV programs that evolved from the early domestic kitchen to a restaurant-set highlighting the competitive professional performance. As we see, the same happened in the gaming environment where the amateur profile of players shifted to professionalized experts (as we will discuss later, the competitive character was also inserted in the gaming culture under the eSports category). Oren underlines the bridge of the cooking environment with games and, more related to what we are exploring, with video games. As  discussed by David Marshall, the game culture is stimulating a reconfiguration of other industries towards interactivity and intertextual associations across media products (Oren, 2013:32). Actually, marketing researchers are recognizing the video game industry as the fastest growing and exciting category of mass media for the coming decade, characterized by a high degree of innovation. They also stress the bridge to other entertainment industries such as those products that offer hybrid experiences – for example, Lord of the Rings as a game, movie, and other merchandise (Marchand and Hennig-Thurau, 2013:141). We will show next that League of Legends is already in this track and behind the game there is a structure working to engage more players by offering them the same kind of competitive experiences that Oren discusses in her article.

The structure behind League of Legends is Riot Games, an American developer with headquarters at 17 cities around the world. Although they state on their website “We create competitive, PvP, online games for gamers”, League of Legends is actually their only title. With a monthly audience of 67 million players, the firm strives to find a huge workforce to fill open jobs around the world, ranging from events management to finance, narrative, player support, art, game design, production, e-commerce, among several others (Riot Games figure at #13 position on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list). Actually, besides the funding from micro transactions, Riot has a full range of merchandise materials for fans available on Riot Games Merch with products ranging from t-shirts to posters, statues and accessories. Additional to generating revenue, the merchandise also serves as a way for the fans of the game to create their own “imagined community” (Anderson, 2006 [1983]), a complex and dynamic process we explore here. Beyond that, Championships promotion also plays an important role in making League of Legends one of the most played video games of the world .

The first League of Legends competition was a tournament held during the 2010 World Cyber Games at which teams from China, Europe, and the Americas competed with a $ 7.000 prize. Since then, Riot Games started to promote annual Championships offering $1.550.00 in prizes each year. Events like these help to reinforce the importance of  the whole category of eSports but, more important than that, highlight League of Legends as one important player in the video game industry. On top of that, it serves as a platform for fans of the game. Nowadays eSports championships are comparable to usual sports, taking thousands of spectators to indoor arenas and stadiums, being transmitted in several languages via online live broadcast. As we discovered, this year one League of Legends British team was being sold for an amount surpassing  $500.000.

Unlike other competitors that develop games serially, Riot Games has put all its energy in transforming League of Legends into a successful global franchise format. Besides the international headquarters, the merchandises, the licensing and distributing partnerships, Riot Games is focused on the power of these championships as strong promoters of League of Legends. Because of this, although the events and teams are managed by third parties, Riot Games stays involved to assure the best results. The process follows the same tracks that Katherine L. Meizel describes in Idolized about the global franchises and geopolitics of Idol TV show. She justifies the successful reach of Idols franchise with the twin processes of globalisation and consolidation in the media industry plus the wave of democratization (Meizel, 2010:206). In our study case, concerning to the democratic feature, the voting process of Idols is substituted by the free-to-play business model, the growing accessibility of the game (via technology and internet access) and game features ensuring that a competitor will face an opponent with equivalent capabilities. As Meizel points out, “these values of democratic competition are also central to the competitive individualism that stars in the early-twenty-first-century American Dream” (Meizel, 2010:212). In this sense, similarly to Idols, eSports championships are leveraging players to global stardom and becoming a replicable format very similar to those found in the TV industry. Furthermore, just like the Idols franchise, League of Legends owns its success to globalisation.

In The making of an entertainment revolution: How the TV format trade became a global industry, Jean K. Chalaby describes TV formats as transnational operations. The two key aspects that Chalaby underlines in TV formats are present in the broadcast of League of Legends. First, formats offer a distinctive narrative dimension “with all the highs and lows, tensions and conflicts, twists and conventions of drama” (Chalaby, 2011:294). As we see in championship videos on YouTube, a set of elements work consistently to insert drama and trigger moments: a stage with neon and spotlights, the central futuristic scenario with two opposite teams sitting in ergonomic chairs; the surrounding audience; and an additional team of commentators and moving cameras injecting thrilling speculations about what is about to come. Secondly, the way the championships are broadcast shows an inherent transnational character. As we saw, similarly to TV format, Riot Games inputs rules for event and team managers because the franchise success depends on showing economic benefits for future licensees.

Ever since the early days of the internet until today, the game industry made a leap pushed by a constantly evolving technology inside game devices, computers and the internet. A new globalised environment contributed to a shift in the industry as a whole and players were given the choice of having an amateur profile or living a routine of improvement based in training and succeeding as gaming professionals. Although game industry companies are not so well known by the general public as the TV / recording corporations are, it is clear that it influences other media industries. Moreover, the game industry is also driving transnational processes, transforming cultures across geographic, economic and political boundaries.

Discussion: Since eSports are taking the shape of a transnational enterprise, what is missing to make this new sport category reach the general audience?

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

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Bibliography

Oren, Tasha. "On the Line: Format, Cooking and Competition as Television Values." Critical Studies in Television: An International Journal of Television Studies 8.2 (2013): 20-35.

Meizel, K. (2011). Idolized: music, media, and identity in American idol. Indiana University Press.

Chalaby, J. K. (2011). The making of an entertainment revolution: How the TV format trade became a global industry. European Journal of Communication, 26(4), 293-309.

Marchand, André, and Thorsten Hennig-Thurau. "Value creation in the video game industry: Industry economics, consumer benefits, and research opportunities." Journal of Interactive Marketing 27.3 (2013): 141-157.

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/