Post-school

After pass/fail was enacted, school slowed down considerably for me. I’m fortunate to not be severely affected by the quarantine, so school didn’t demand much of my time in the past couple months.

After I concluded my final exams, I turned to playing lots of League of Legends. The initial days of playing went decently well, which fed into my desire of wanting to play more––it was the first time in a while where playing League felt gratifying.

More generally, taking a break after finals is justified in my opinion––I don’t feel guilty over spending so much time playing video games. The thing that does bother me is that now I have responsibilities that I must complete, but my habit of playing video games instead of being productive is preventing me from completing my responsibilities. Hopefully writing this blog post will help trigger a flow, and I will get back into things in the coming days.

League of Legends

For people who’ve never played league/don’t play video games in general, this section might not make much sense to you, but I’ll try my best to explain.

Essentially, at its core, League is a highly complex team game that involves 10 people at once over a 25-45 minute time period (on average). There’s a high degree of both what’s called “micro,” which essentially means how good you are at reflexes and small things (imagine your breathing/fingerings if you were playing an instrument or your knife cutting skills when cooking) versus “macro,” which is essentially your overall strategy (continuing with the analogy, this would be like how you’d compose an orchestral piece of music or trying to create a recipe). This contrasts with games like Chess, which is purely “macro” (only strategy) or a game like Flappy Bird/Temple Run/Fruit Ninja which is only “micro” (since you only are focused on tapping at the right time). These games are complex in their own respects, but having both “macro” and “micro” ensures that League is one of the most complex mainstream games on the market. This matters because the extremely high complexity of the game means that there’s always room to improve (even pro players continually get better) and the game itself never gets stale, ensuring maximal potential for addiction.

For those who personally know me, League is a big part of my life and is one of my primary passions. Deciding to quit league is not an easy decision, but, as I care a lot about the game, I’ll explain my thoughts on League in general.

State of the game

A lot of streamers/players have been using their platforms to comment on the state of the game, with the most severe being that many of the biggest names straight up quitting due to how toxic the playerbase has becoming and over lack of hope of improvement.

There are many memes about how toxic the League of Legends community is, and it has exponentially gotten worse over time. The game is almost unplayable at this point.

For the past couple of days, in nearly every game I play in, there’s always somebody who is actively trying to make the other players in their games upset and frustrated by intentionally trying to lose. It may seem stupid to care, but I’ve devoted a lot of time to League and my rank in the game honestly does matter to me. Furthermore, as someone who values their time a lot/working on things that I care about, spending an hour of my life on a match only for it to be ruined because someone thinks it’s funny to wholly ruin someone’s day is extremely frustrating. Repeated across an entire day, and you’re stuck craving for the dopamine associated with a normal game but are only left with extreme frustration. It’s not hard to see how this leads to addiction.

My best analogy is this. Imagine you’re working on a group project with 4 other people, and as usual, there is a slacker in your group. You try your absolute hardest because if you do well on this project, you get an A in the class and all your work over the past year on other assignments/tests finally comes to fruition. After weeks of being the only person who works on the project, somebody in the group thinks it’d be funny to smash your project and turn in an offensive assignment to the teacher. Worst of all, the teacher thinks it’s your fault, you get failed while the person who ruined everything on purpose receives no real punishment, since they didn’t care about their grade anyways in the first place.

It sounds very dramatic, but with how addicting the game is, it honestly feels that bad playing League of Legends. Those close to me are able to see a bit of the mental toll this kind of abuse takes on me.

Take on trash-talking

My final straw for quitting league was when I got punished for getting mad at an individual for doing precisely what I mentioned above and then convincing everyone on the opposing team to report me. Anyone who knows me well knows that false accusations are my biggest pet peeve––I lost my cool for three lines of messages, and it was enough to get me chat restricted and for all my in-game privileges associated with being an honorable player (I’ve never had any offenses before) to be stripped.

There’s so much wrong with this. My take is that, short of hate-speech, genuinely offensive language, or violent threats, trash-talking in a video game should not be bannable in general, much less in a game where muting is extremely easy. Second of all, anyone who’s played the game can attest that actively trying to ruin the game is far more damaging than calling someone a “piece of sh*t” in my case.

Small indie company

Most League players hate on the company that runs League, Riot Games, for extremely good reason. There are a lot of memes that League players are not having fun while they play League, which sounds counterintuitive and is a meme for a reason, but it’s grounded in a lot of truth. Riot Games’ primary objective is not the happiness/fun of their players––their sole concern is keeping their playerbase addicted and spending money. This is clearly evidenced by their lack of support for pro players/streamers, their focus on creating content rather than improving the gaming experience (balance changes/quality of life bug fixes within the game), and general lack of action to address players’ mental health suffering as a result of their game.

This, sadly, is the reason for their success. In 2016, League had over 100 million active users. In 2019, it is reported that at any given moment, 8 million people are playing League of Legends. Looking at the statistics of streaming, more people watch the League of Legends championships than the Super Bowl, which is the most televised event in the US. Other games that employ other strategies focused on player happiness over player addiction are far less financially successful. Even Fortnite, one of the biggest games in recent memory, faded from relevance very quickly simply because their game isn’t complex enough/designed for pure addiction.

Parallels

Honestly, Riot Games remind me a lot of Facebook. Both are companies with massive user populations, but their primary concerns, as with any company (capitalism amirite), are with profits rather than the happiness of their users. Social media has a lot of short term benefits, just like playing League, but both cause many of their users to ultimately feel unhappier.

Solutions

I have no real proposed solutions. At an individual level, all I can do is recommend quitting if you find that social media, video games are controlling your life rather than the other way around. If the things that are supposed to make you happy are making you sad/frustrated instead, it’s a clear sign to stop and take a break. For me personally, I’m going to take a long long break from League. It’s extremely frustrating for me to play, and I know many of my friends who play the game feel similarly about the game. I can point to many friends who genuinely hate playing the game, but cannot stop because it’s optimally designed for pure addiction.

Dammit Riot, why are you so good at your job.

At a larger sense, I do think that the League community push for less toxicity is beneficial for fixing some of these problems. If socially it becomes unacceptable to be toxic in League, the general playerbase will become more toxic. If more and more people like me voice their concerns/quit, then Riot itself will have to start implementing changes, or else they will become unprofitable.

This same logic can be applied to social media. Movements prioritizing mental health can lead to cultural changes that make social media more realistic/less toxic to consume, while public outcry against social media companies focusing on addiction rather than user happiness will force these companies to change their ways lest they lose profit.

I’ve learned a lot from my experiences playing League. Funnily enough, this post was initially supposed to be about all the lessons I’ve learned from league that can be extended to general life/society, but clearly this post has taken a different tilt. Perhaps I’ll write about that in a future post.

TLDR

If you don’t really understand/didn’t feel like reading the whole thing, this clip of tyler1 very eloquently summarizes the jist/emotion of this post.