NArrative
By: Harrison Liao
Tags: Esports, Gaming, League of Legends

But the narrative has shifted. eSports is beginning to take up broadcasting real estate on ESPN and other traditional sports media titans. There’s a sense that these digital arenas have significance now in the sport-culture historical timeline, along the ranks of Coliseums and football stadiums. These video games are evolving into athletics on new-age platforms, and TSM is Team USA in a lot of ways. And because they failed, they should be ashamed, not only for their fans but for their country. They deserve the hate. They’ll never be great. A lot of memes disguise real vitriol now, but this is not how League began. This narrative means more to us than we ever thought possible. The Season 1 League World Championships peaked out at 210,000 simultaneous viewers for its grand finals. Season 5 Worlds peaked at 14 million. Not too long ago, this was just a cartoonish, free-to-play MOBA (Massive Online Battle Arena game). Now? It’s an Olympic eSport.

League Narrative is supposed to be funny. It’s angry, vile, toxic, and occasionally hilarious. Remember this community is historically composed of mostly young teenage males that don’t gravitate toward the macho-aggressive doctrine of traditional sports. Although ‘sports’ is an integral part of eSports culture, the ‘e’ modifier preceding the term is a vital strand of its DNA. eSports are founded upon the backs of video gamers, not athletes. It’s no surprise, then, that the birth of eSports, particularly League, was synchronous with its twin, Meme culture, and I‘m not sure the two aren’t symbiotic. Memes are the essence of League, and the community has always made sure to maintain a spirit of brevity about their over-serious competitive computer simulation.

TSM lost. And Twitter/Reddit-spheres imploded like a shitstorm supernova. Some fans disowned the team, which was billed as possibly the most talented Western squad of all time. Many others launched into illogical ad hominem at anyone that dared celebrate the demise of the Great North American (NA) Hope. And those that celebrated went over every wound twice to make sure they didn’t miss a single opportunity to thoroughly massage in the salt.

But this is our year. This is our time. eSports has borrowed these types of narratives from traditional sports. They have also recently borrowed an unsavory gravitas for these narratives, as sports fanatics have become infamous for.

Team SoloMid, №1 North American seed at the 2016 League of Legends World Championships took the stage at the Bill Graham Civic Center around 9:00 PM on a Saturday to a deafening chorus of cheers. Their next match, versus the talented but inconsistent Royal Never Give Up, had win-or-go-home implications. Beat RNG and advance. Lose, and North America’s torch, excruciatingly lit over a half-decade of international failure, would die out once again, as it seems destined to do.

Passionate fans are good, right? This is a step in the right direction. Yes, and no. While League’s earliest player-base couldn’t have envisioned their game becoming a sport, that was precisely Riot Games’ vision. This is, more or less, the community Marc Merril and Brandon Beck imagined their game would foster when they created it. Merril and Beck designed the game with eSports godfather StarCraft in mind. They invited rabid fans, and toxicity was an unfortunate byproduct of that. This was the plan all along, we just didn’t know it.

Former TSM and Team Liquid coach Choi Yoon-sub (a.k.a. “Locodoco”) recently went on eSports talk show Summoning Insight. He lamented the fact that most of the top rosters are dotted with “imports.” For those unfamiliar with the game, every regional team is allowed two international players. For example, EDG, a Chinese LPL owned team, has two Korean players, Kim “Deft” Hyuk-kyu and Lee “Scout” Ye-chan. Locodoco’s reasoning for disliking the import system boiled down to spectator wish-fulfillment. As a fan of the game, Loco wanted every team to represent their nation purely. Tournaments would be more interesting, according to him, if Korean teams were composed of only Korean players, with the same logic applying to all other regions.

ANX, the most surprising of this year’s Quarterfinalists at Worlds, features two Russians and three Ukrainians.

Loco is right, to an extent. Albus Nox Luna, the Cinderella story of this year’s World Championships, has a certain mystique about them. Most of this is due to the fact that nobody watches Russian League. There’s also the shock factor of unfathomable victories over top international teams, and their flamboyant Cinderella aura (see: Likkrit) adds a layer of drama. But hidden in the midst of ANX there is a cartoonish fascination for what is essentially “Team Eastern Bloc.” Sure, they’re half-Ukrainian and half-Russian, but they seem to represent something homogeneous. I’m not saying ANX is interesting because they’re all white and have similar accents, but they are a pleasure to watch in an international sense, as if having worldwide parity somehow makes the scene that much grander. They are fascinating because they fit the age old narrative for global sporting competition. ANX hearkens back to the days when, in the face of Hitler and his evil posse, the Olympic performances of Allied nations circa 1936 felt important, and unified. This is not to say Korea is Nazi Germany, although it sometimes feels that way, with the LoL community all too willing to put heroic or villainous projections onto certain teams. It’s easy to think of perennial powerhouse SK Telecom T1 as the “Evil Empire of LoL,” but it’s also fictitious. Faker is not actually Darth Vader. He’s a 20 year old young man that is really good at his job. Whether he wanted to or not, however, he became our Darth Vader. We made sure of it. We require narratives for our sports — without them, we feel naked — and ANX’s Cinderella start was a very easily identifiable story, making them easy to root for. TSM, despite featuring two Danish players, also felt familiar. The Great NA Hope, we called them.

eSports has adopted the same binary culture of fanaticism that traditional sports was founded on. Cowboys and Indians. Cops and Robbers. Boston and Los Angeles. NA and EU. We crave the simplicity of rooting for the home team, and we reject the truth whenever it dares to peek its ugly head — the truth that our games and our relationships with them are far more complex than we care to imagine. Jay Caspian Kang, from his piece “How Do You Tell a Better Story in Sports?” published by The New York Times:

The modern N.B.A. era began in the 1980s with two made-to-order if only half-true narratives. The rivalry between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson was transmitted to the public through sportswriters who typecast Bird as the white country bumpkin who gritted his way to excellence and Johnson as the black, always-smiling savant who whipped up his God-given talents into the best show on hardwood. The cities of Boston (parochial and solemn) and Los Angeles (flashy and morally suspect) were featured in supporting roles that echoed the best and worst traits of the main characters. The reality behind “Bird versus Magic” was mostly irrelevant. What mattered was that the choice you were supposed to make between them was laid out as simple-mindedly as possible. In recent years, there has been a movement to replace these hoary old sports stories with an atomized landscape of numbers, stats and transactional analysis — and its adherents harbor a healthy amount of scorn for anyone who thinks differently. The move toward dispassionate stats is for the greater good; sportswriting and fandom are too often unctuous and absurd and lend themselves to blanket moralizing in which the athlete is reduced to some lesson about life itself. If he does not hustle to first base on a ground ball, he becomes a stand-in for the insufficient work ethic of h is entire generation. If he happens to be an immigrant or from a racial minority, he becomes a stand-in for his entire people. Despite the growing influence of the rationalists — the analysts and wonks who want to tear this all down — the mainstream sports industrial complex, especially in the loftier parts of the media, doesn’t share their vision. Narrative, with all its lies, still dominates.

Much apologies to our fetishes, but ANX, in reality, is not “Team Eastern Bloc.” Take the narrative out of the equation. ANX are a collection of unknown craftsmen that have brought an unorthodox and (so far) effective playing style to the 2016 World Championships through one round. That’s it. In a vacuum, they don’t signify some kind of picturesque Cinderella team standing up to the Korean overlords for all future underdogs to come. They are a League of Legends team. They are five professional video gamers.

But mankind has always needed icons. We’ve structured entire societies around them. The USA holds a popularity contest every four years to elect a symbol. England has a Royal Family that does not actively shape legislature to the degree that their congressional powers do. The mere idea of a certain Islamic prophet has molded numerous nations to his ancient visage. Whether it is a construct of our imagination or not, ANX absolutely signifies something greater than the sport they play. TSM did let us down. Even if they never had a real responsibility to us in the first place.