DAY TWO: those summer days, like youth
By: Two If C.
Tags: Esports, League of Legends, Feelings

DAY TWO: those summer days, like youth

I posit that the calendar year of professional League of Legends most closely resembles the agricultural life cycle. The winter of offseason, when our cold hearts hibernate, sleepwalking through the blizzard of teams breaking apart, then rejoining in unpredictable forms under a thick blanket of snow. Spring split, where we begin to turn over the soil to uncover our new teams, carefully nurturing them, pulling at bad communication and synergy and shotcalling like errant weeds, hoping that the rainstorms will be kind, afraid of a late snap of frost. And fall, the only season that matters. The season of harvest and the season of worlds. Worlds, like a windfall, and worlds, like a drought.

But before all of that, the summer. Long days full of league, worrying about the standings and the meta, culminating in the finals and a gauntlet that sends you to worlds.

I’ve been to the NA LCS studio twice now, both times in the summer. I don’t know why I feel this way, but summer seems like the right season to see LCS. July and August in L.A. are when the sun is at its brightest, its cruelest, its hottest. The sky is so clear and blue it feels like it could break your teeth. During game day afternoons, the players emerge from their Ubers, blinking and squinting before retreating quickly into the air-conditioned embrace of the dark studio hallways and practice rooms. Around the arena, there are few places to hide: underneath awnings, maybe, or the occasional bubble tea or t-shirt stand.

This year, I went for Rift Rivals, which fittingly came at the tail end of July Fourth, America’s Independence Day. Europe (without a representative from the UK) won that weekend’s rematch. It was a weird event, half-full of the kind of joyful nonsense All Star 2016 used to sucker me into League of Legends and half-full of typical NA vs. EU salt. Romain Bigeard cracked a whip — literally, over the backs of fans competing to see who could do the most number of pushups. Team Liquid managed to win against Fnatic, which surprised me, but lost to Splyce, which didn’t. Olleh and Kasing smeared each other’s faces with whipped cream. The final game was FNC vs. Echo Fox, for whom Rift Rivals would be the only “international” experience.

It’s tempting to go back to these summer months and read deeply into everything, see signs of coming tragedy and wonder how I could have missed them. Doublelift and Olleh lost the 2v2 to G2’s Hjarnan and Wadid — a sign of how far G2 would go in Worlds and how TL would falter. 100 Thieves’ use of Brandini and Levi flabbergasted many fans — a sign of the drama that would follow them with Rikara and Cody Sun. Across the ocean, LPL would win against LCK — a sign of IG’s eventual victory at worlds. I’ve blamed this kind of thinking on so many things before: on the seduction of pattern recognition, on the human need to tell stories with a beginning and an end when there is neither, on simple megalomaniacal self-importance. Mostly, for me, it’s about memory. Mine is idiosyncratic and untrustworthy, better with feelings, little observations, a look on someone’s face or the slant of light through confetti, than with scorelines, or sequences of events, or statistics. Storytelling is how I organize memory.

I did manage to tell a story about Brandini from that weekend. It wasn’t a complete story, just a little slice, because success can be like that, fleeting and a momentary glance through the trees of the path ahead of you, all the way to the mountaintop. The story that I didn’t end up telling was Altec’s.

Altec is no ingenue of the professional scene. He survived the implosion of Winterfox, the trials and tribulations of NRG, getting dropped by Flyquest for Wildturtle, and Dignitas not making franchising. So maybe it was me who was naive. When I go back and look at my interview notes with him, all the questions seemed so positive, so happy. Was EFX the best team he’d been on? (Yes, definitely, in terms of player strength.) What did he think about his teammates? (He was grateful, to Huni especially, who could call him on his mistakes, they were even close outside of the game.) What were his goals for the year? (To make worlds, obviously, he thought they had a really good chance. Hell, he’d be disappointed if they didn’t make it to worlds this year.)

It hurts to go back and look at that interview transcript. I, too, had thought Altec was only going to go up, that EFX was going to go to worlds, that he would be with them. It felt okay to ask him about the past, how he would frame those failures, because I thought there would only be more success in his future.

I keep struggling with how to talk about failure (this, you will realize, will be a theme for all 12 days). I never want to say that failure is okay. I especially never want to say that failure is okay while writing about any progamer, because I don’t think it’s fair to project that kind of sentiment on them. I don’t think Altec would agree that failure is okay. I don’t think Altec thinks of himself as a failure. And most importantly, I don’t think of Altec as a failure. But I can’t pretend that 2018 ended the way Altec wanted it to. I can’t pretend that it doesn’t feel disappointing, to know that he isn’t yet signed onto any team for 2019.

Altec’s debut in LCS was on Evil Geniuses, with Pobelter. “We were both these two young kids that had so much potential,” Altec had told me. “People looked at us initially [like] we were both going to be superstars. And for Eugene, he ended up winning two titles. And for me, I didn’t win anything.” I think about this moment a lot when I think of Altec. There’s always been a funny parallel to Altec and Pobelter’s careers, and in 2018 there are moments you could crystallize that make Pobelter seem like he was on top of the world. Two LCS titles, a team that seemed to want him to succeed, and a trip to worlds. But you could freeze the moments that came after too, and make Pobelter look like he had failed, with TL’s middling results at MSI and worlds both. Would Pobelter say the same thing about his career as Altec? That he’s always been a little underrated? That he wants to be remembered as someone who comes in clutch, who can turn the tides of a bad game? That he wants to be a role model, to prove that to himself that he can be the best?

What does winning change?

Really, when can you say that you’ve been a success?

What I guess I’m trying to say is, failure is not an ending. Failure is a thing that happens to us. You know that old saying, that a happy ending is just a story that hasn’t finished yet? More than anything, this year in LCS has taught me to think that way about failure and success. That there’s no right place to end the story of someone’s career. That you can never tell when success or failure will happen. That our lives are constantly in flux. That failing and succeeding is a cycle we go through, like the seasons.

That it may be Altec’s winter now, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still another long summer, full of league, ahead for him.

(This post is part of 12 Days of Esports for 2018.)