Generally, I think of trash talk as "speech that is aggressive, demeaning, and/or self-aggrandising during competition." With that (rather provisional and open to adjustment) definition, can someone explain the purpose of trash talk to me? I don't understand its function.
Your definition is well enough; sometimes a tiny bit of banter back and forth between teams or players can make a game feel more competitive or put a little bit of drama out there with some bad blood. There has always been some smack talk in gaming and in most cases it's not that bad; then you get games like League here where people take it too far and it just becomes someone personally attacking someone for the sheer sake of just being an asshat.
In general, trash talking really isn't needed (nor wanted) in most cases outside of entertainment purposes (drama = views), but it's one of those things where you unfortunately can't really escape it. People are gonna talk smack in gaming, just some people like to go the distance to try to be as rude as they possibly can.
to tilt the other team so that they play worst
It's there to manipulate another individual. Doesn't matter what the subject is, but the competitiveness to try to down-talk someone or try to feel superior or simply just to put someone off. Trash-talked is frowned upon here, depending on the manner of it. A simple banter that fixated on flexing your skills or to throw someone off, isn't all that bad, however, up until it actually gets to them. It can really frustrate people in this game because this game alone takes a lot of self-control for what we do and say, otherwise, if we slip and we get used to doing it, we may face some consequences with Riot. What I mean by that, is getting used to lashing out and being negative or toxic or retaliate and doing it consistently.
So people here don't really like it and really looks down on it. Also, another problem with trash-talking, majority of the times, they're not even trash talking to our opponents as do to their own teams. So there's a lot of flaws with trash-talking when it comes to League. Mostly due to how it can create toxicity from nothing with people that have little to no self-control.
Where does the trash talk come from?
it comes from Garbage Pail Kids
[sg-ezreal]
There are people like Ali, they intelligently use trash talk for an advantage. (There are people who attempt to be like Ali but are not nearly as skilled.)
There are angry people. They mostly speak out of instinct. Tends to use non-creative trash talk.
There are not nice people.
So, a wide range of people use trash talk. I think the commonality between them is "frustration". Trash talk is either used when frustrated or attempting to frustrate.
