BCM 215 CONTEXTUAL BLOG POST

Throughout my DA, I spent countless League of Legends game constantly ponder why I play the game I have roughly spend 700 hours in game mostly in the classic mode of summoners rift and I started to realise why I have. See for most games I pick up, get bored and then leave them a few months later but games with a ranking system such as Gran Turismo sport, CS:GO and League of Legends I have spent hundreds and in some cases thousands of hours in game with them. This pattern I noticed lead to me to realise that I should explain it to others through the use of research and my own personal experiences.

I based a lot of my argument on journals that show evidence into why people like competition and why we play competitively but I also dove into the reasons why Riot as a company make the game so addictive despite the game being unchanged for so many years. I ended up coming to the conclusion that it was the empathy from the company in giving us as a player base what we want. The difference in League of Legends compared to a game such as Call of Duty is that Call of Duty is this money making machine, they know people will buy their games each year because if you don’t at least a few of your friends will leaving you no one to play with on the other instalments of the series. But if you look at League of Legends this single free to play game has developed over the past decade into a game that is very up to spec in graphics and hugely improved, Riot don’t want the game to die out they want to keep it alive and thriving and they do that by watching the play style of professional players and seeing what they are doing.

Which leads to me what I wish I had time to look into, my DA was very much constrained by time for a game I play so much of. There was a whole other chapter I had to cut out and that was on the player base watching other people play the game, arguing into the fact that lower ranked players tend to copy whatever strategy the higher ranked players are going with, this is why an off-meta strategy tends to become popular and part of the game, like the roaming support I mentioned in my video essay.

Overall I wish I could’ve spoken more on other topics within the game, I wanted to challenge myself through the use of a video essay due to my strong points in my work being elsewhere, while I feel like I may have missed the mark in some spots I tried to apply the feedback that Richard left me on my beta to explain the game a bit better and to shorten it down the amount of things I wanted to talk about. I feel like I have created at least a small understanding on the game for people who can’t wrap their heads around playing the same game for nearly a decade.