Tag: league of legends

Feature

From Maverick to League of Legends Team Leader

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. As Ming “Clearlove” Kai evolves from an aggressive risk-taker to an eSports team captain, his trusty gaming PC remains a portal to becoming a consistent leader. Kai’s competitive League of Legends (2009) career has kept the eSports community on their toes. Notorious for his unpredictable boldness, the daredevil now seeks to find stability as Edward Gaming’s (EDG) gifted captain. After being named ESPN’s top jungler at this year’s World Championship, empowered by both the support of his teammates and powerful practice rig, hope runs high that Clearlove will lead EDG to…
Feature

What Survivor can teach us about emergent game design

If you were inclined to pare down the reality TV show Survivor (2000-present) to three key terms, they would likely be “tribal council,” “immunity,” and “alliances.” The first two are part of the core Survivor game template. Every three days, there will be a challenge—early on between two tribes and later, after merging, as individuals. The winner is safe at tribal council, where a person must be voted out of the game. “Alliance,” meanwhile, did not come from Survivor’s creators, but the revolutionary machinations of its first winner, Richard Hatch. “Richard Hatch was so far ahead of us in the first…
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How scientists are using MMOs to study sexism in videogames

For the past few years, one of the more common debates to be found on social media has been over whether women are discriminated against within videogames. This can relate to a number of factors, including skill, female presence in the community, and how women are represented within games, but conversations in these topics are often noticeably hostile and difficult to conduct. However, recent scientific studies on the topic have provided new insight into if and how discrimination presents a problem for women in and around videogames, as well as what difficulties sexism in games poses for women in tech in…
Feature

The loneliness of the professional gamer

If you haven’t heard of Jonathan Sutak, producer and director of The Foreigner, a new documentary about professional StarCraft II (2010), you can take solace in knowing that you’ve probably seen some of his work. Not, mind you, the two independent dramas—Up The River (2015), a romance, and Don’t Worry Baby (2015), a comedy—he’s produced; you haven’t seen those. What you have seen are the many trailers and TV spots he’s edited, for films as far afield as Everest (2015) and Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015). If not exactly a Hollywood insider, Sutak nevertheless approaches filmmaking from the perspective of…
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What happens to the young, retired stars of esports?

When Dennis “Thresh” Fong was growing up, there was no such thing as a ‘professional gamer’. He was sixteen when he started playing DOOM (1993), but wasn’t competing for anything other than the thrill of victory. Aside from hustling chumps at the local arcade, nobody was making money by playing games. “A professional gamer is anyone who makes money, even winning 10 bucks on a Street Fighter game at Seven-Eleven,” joked Nick Allen, the panel moderator of “The Professional Gamer” at GDC 2016. That notion should seem quaint; at the Capcom Cup in 2015, the final prize pool for Ultra Street…
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Tinder matchmaking is more like Warcraft than you might think

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” says the pick-up artist. “I’ve just got more game than you,” says your roommate who wears too much cologne. Comparisons between dating and gaming are commonplace in our web-obsessed culture, and thanks to a recent profile on Tinder from Fast Company, it turns out this connection is less superficial than you might think. We’ve all been there. You spend hours in matchmaking waiting to get picked for a quick game of Halo, but see no results. You’re swiping right all day on Tinder, but nobody swipes back. In this context, browsing for dates…
Article

The push to make Halo 5 the next big eSport

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. For an entire generation of players, there is nothing sweeter than scoring the winning kill in a Halo death-match and leading your team to victory. With the first-ever Halo World Championship, Microsoft is making a concentrated effort to get these good vibes out of the living room and into a giant eSports arena. But does Halo 5: Guardians, the franchise’s latest installment, have what it takes to make it as the next major eSport? Halo 5’s executive producer Josh Holmes certainly thinks so. Holmes recently told the gaming site Polygon that…
Article

Muay Thai by day, League of Legends by night: A conversation with Tanet “Jacky” Puangngoen

When he comes onstage in the second-to-last panel in Tribeca Games’ “The Craft and Creative of League of Legends,” Tanet “Jacky” Puangngoen is not an immediately imposing figure. He’s on the shorter side, with a kind face and polite demeanor. Nevertheless, when he throws a mock punch in demonstration at James Patterson, the esports host flinches pretty hard. It could have something to do with the clip we all just watched of Jacky kicking a training pad over sixty times in a minute. Or it could just be the general knowledge that Puangngoen spends most days training in Muay Thai,…
Article

League of Legends and the problem of online communities

If you liked what you read, why not back us on Kickstarter? Early last Friday, just before the opening remarks of “Tribeca Games Presents: The Craft and Creative of League of Legends,” I sat next to a young man named Will, who told me he had come all the way from Daytona Beach, Florida. I asked him if it was a business trip; this was the first time Riot and Tribeca Games had ever put on an event like this. There were a few hundred people present; it’s not the sort of thing I would expect fans to pilgrimage over. “No,”…