The Ongoing Product Lifecycle of a Games as Service Model: a League of Legends Case Study

Schoolyard Riot League of Legends and High School Esports

The Awakening of the Goddess in Competitive League of Legends

Paidia to Ludus, Non-Commodity to Commodity: Uncovering the Residue of Player Developed Custom Game Modes in ‘Zombies’ and ‘ARAMs’

Prank, Troll, Gross and Gore: Performance Issues in Esport Live-Streaming

This article examines the functions of prank performance and troll performance for the aesthetics of personal live-streaming, i.e. the practice of live-streaming one’s personal performance via platforms such as Twitch.tv. The study is based on a close analysis of personal esport live-streamer Ali Larsen, aka Gross Gore, via a 12-month observation period. With help of Goffmanian frame theory the notions of interview frame and play frame are introduced as the basic cognitive tools for organizing personal esport livestream experiences. The study concludes by proposing three factors that are vital for the aesthetics of personal live-streaming in general: (1) the feeling of affecting live-streams, (2) the suspense that derives from expecting something unexpected to happen in livestreams, and (3) the sharing of dramatic developments that occur in live-streams.

Conventions within eSports: Exploring Similarities in Design

Among the thousands of competitive games, only a few have emerged as the eSports sensations that they are. To understand the cause of this phenomenon, this paper applies the notion that successful eSports share design characteristics which ordinary competitive games do not possess. Drawing from the MDA framework (Hunicke et al. 2004), these similarities are explored by conducting a comparative interface study (Consalvo and Dutton 2006) on two leading eSports – League of Legends (Riot Games 2009) and Counter Strike: Global Offensive (Valve Corporation 2012) – in order to understand how they may be similar in design despite the contrast in genre. As a result, this paper identifies five design characteristics – Match Based Structure, Player Evaluation System, Explicit UI, Player Performance Feedback and Game Client – that are shared explicitly between these eSports and elaborates them in detail with discussions on the potential reasons behind their implementations. In doing so, this paper argues for the consideration of implementing these design characteristics in the construction of any competitive game that seeks success within eSports.

Critically Approaching the Playful and Participatory Genealogy of MOBAs

This paper gives close attention to the term ‘Multiplayer Online Battle Arena’ (MOBA), establishing what it implies in popular discourses as a term with specific generic connotations and more critically, what its short but eventful history represents alongside wider participatory trends across the Internet. Despite its far reaching influence and now commonplace usage, MOBA is not a neutral term and it signals a precise transitional moment towards a new normalisation of playful, cultural and economic control for the genre. Through adapting Foucault’s term of the ‘dispositif’ and applying a genealogical approach towards mapping the transition from the mod of Defense of the Ancients (DotA) to the genre of MOBA, this paper argues that MOBAs continue to be laced in significant bottom-up movements and characteristics. It is these lingering characteristics of playful and participatory residue that many of the genres most notable game design and paratextual aspects can be found. However, it is also here that critical questions surrounding the platformed state of these relations also make themselves evident.

The Well-Played MOBA: How DotA 2 and League of Legends use Dramatic Dynamics

This paper will analyse the two most popular games within the MOBA genre, DotA 2 and League of Legends, as performance-designed spaces. By analysing MOBAs as performance and using Marc LeBlanc’s (2006) Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics as an aesthetic framework the aim is to posit a greater understanding of the ways in which e-Sports and MOBAs specifically can be designed in order to create dramatic tension within the increasing variety of available viewing platforms. In this way, this paper helps present new ways to think about how games can be designed/structured in order to be satisfyingly performed and consumed through increasingly diverse viewing methods.

From Generative to Conventional Play: MOBA and League of Legends

Despite its vast enthusiast community and influence on contemporary game designers, the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) remains under-explored by academics. This paper considers many meanings of “well played” reflected in the design, community, and aesthetics of the genre's most popular member, League of Legends. Originating as modifications of commercial RTS (real-time strategy) games, MOBAs present a rare study of the “rhetoric of the imaginary” in play theory applied to popular game design. The genre's reification in commercial forms such as League show how the attitudes of distributed design projects manifest themselves as values of play. A close reading of the phases in a match of League of Legends exposes one possible aesthetic framework for the consideration of eSports. Greg Costikyan's theory of uncertainty in play serves here as a backbone for the study of conventions, tension, strategy, and tactics in a team-based competitive videogame.