Probably the best class paper I've ever wrote, and I wrote it about League

Over the past few weeks, my father and I have been comparing life to about 5 different video games. Our best example was the total of life in the discovery of the Americas was a WoW and Skyrim hybrid. But when you look at League of Legends, you’ll see a parallel in today’s America. I’m here to prove this.

League of Legends starts with a tutorial of course (as many games do), describing the rules, terms and conditions, a few tips and tricks, teaching you the lingo, and being a good sport. We can equate this to being around the age of around three to five. Your life has just started and your parents have laid down some ground rules. Bedtime at 8, eat your greens, say please and thank you for good manners, and correcting any bad pronunciations you make. 

Eventually, you hit the age where you begin going to preschool, we can equate this to beginning AI or bot matches. You learn basic mechanics of League (or life), movement speed, familiarizing yourself with the shop, lanes and minions. Just as in Kindergarten you learn things like how to read, write, spell and basic math. 

A few years later, you’ll find yourself with the ability to take peewee sports (or not). You guessed it, the same thing happens in League. People can either stay in bot matches or play PvP style. The same drawbacks happen to the people who decide to not take peewee sport and stay in bot matches, they’re never faced against real people trying to win so they learn the mechanics of the bot they play. Just like how you practice ball with mother or father, everything they do is predictable. 

Around level 20, you are introduced into draft matches, the same way high school students are introduced into high school sports and competitive academics. The understanding of the games are almost the same also. League players have their keystones and and almost a full rune page. High school baseball players have a basic “everything” glove, with their own bat and a few baseballs to practice with. They both have the same basic understanding of the game at this point, score points through doing proficiently in your position. They have a basic understanding of each position, but haven’t really specialized into a certain one.

Level 30. Graduation. The moment that every student/player waits for. Ranked become available along with moving out and living on your own or with a roommate, going to college and studying or going straight into the workforce. Both people that have been through that stage in their lives give you the same advice. Go to college/don’t start ranked immediately, because it will spell bad things for you later in life. People that don’t start ranked are better prepared for how things work in the grand scheme of things. They know ward placement, how to CS correctly, your wombo combos, and a great deal of your matches with certain lane partners. 

Then you proceed into your work life or ranked. Naturally, unless you took a great deal of education and/or analyzed until you found your game to be spotless, you’re going to find yourself at the bottom of the ladder. You’re pretty poor, paying off your student loans, making enough to live off of ramen and the occasional McDonalds visit. Just as you start around either bronze or silver in League. You aren’t really doing much in the community you’re in, but you still exist as the average person/player.

Here’s where the lines get scarily blurred. Have you ever noticed how the lowest class is always the one that complains the most? We always hear about people living out of trailer parks and farms complaining about how the economy is total garbage and they need to fix it. It’s the same exact thing in Bronze and Silver leagues. Angry players flame Riot games for not fixing certain characters and/or not making certain items good enough for the game. All while never improving their own situation but complaining about their own. While things in the real world tend to revolve around not going to school, being in debt and not paying, wasting money on trivial things, and skipping work. Things that League players refuse to do is practicing how to last hit, watch their replays and analyze where they went wrong, or even ban bad counters. People refuse to fix themselves and blame others for mistakes that they made instead of fixing your own.

However, another scary parallel is with pros/people with a good foothold in the economy. These people complain very rarely, they adapt and move on instead of trying to yell at someone in power to fix things to where they feel comfortable in the certain META/economy. Not only do they not complain, but they very rarely state their opinion unless asked by someone. These people aren’t pros and rich by luck (even though some of these millionaires seem to make bad decisions), they’ve seen things from the bird’s eyes view and capitalized on it by carving their own strategies and forcing the people to face them on their own turf. 

In conclusion, I’d like to end on a quote from my step-mother. “Poverty is a mindset. If you give a person in poverty one million dollars, they will spend it on the most worthless thing. However if you give it to a person with a basic understanding of the economy, they will spend it wisely. Investing on things that will help them now or later.” I can relate the same thing to League of Legends. If you realize a certain character is near game-breakingly strong, you need to ban or pick them instead of flaming anyone who plays them. If the Bottom Lane tower is weaker than normal, focus that lane and put pressure on it more than other lanes. Life is a strategy-MMORPG hybrid, play your pieces wisely.