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So I wrote my Bachelor Thesis about the connection of League Lore with the Game itself...

SaltyToplaneGoat··13 votes·1,756 views

... just wanted to tell you that I got the work back today, and they told me I passed. (I major in media studies at a german university if anyone wants to know).

The topic in general was "Narrative Structures in competitive online games", and the question how to analysze such structures, mostly because classical narratology, as the methods of Gerad Genette don't exactly work outside of literature or similiar linear media. Sure, Britta Neitzel tried to make Gennete's methods usable for gaming, but she also only looked at classical single player games, making her entire work absolutely useless for the area I was trying to get a look at.

So instead I had to result to taking theories of Jesper Juul (games as a hybrid constructs of real rules and diegatic aesthetic), Henry Jenkins (4 categories of tansmedial narrative structure), and Wolfgang Iser (receptionist aesthetic of a narrative while using his own "Void-Theory"(no clue how to properly translate this, but it has nothing to do with pruple monsters)) and build my own theoretical Frankenstein's Monster from it.

And the result was pretty much: as this mostly falls into Jenkin's category of an Embedded Narrative, we need more ingame quests, and more Bilgewater-like events, mostly because this was one of the only times where the change of a character was part of the game. First you had Gangplank, then he was deactivaed because he was dead in the lore (I personally would have gone so far to totally delete him from the game temporarely), and then he came back a different man.

Also I found out that League is mostly vasting A LOT of potential they have in transmedial storytelling - especially whgen you compare this to Blizzards Overwatch that has already a astounding amount of comics and lore-relevant video-material out, despit ethe game only being a few months old. And now they announced a visual novel to hit the comic stores 2017 that will go in-depth on the past of the old Overwatch-team. You look at this, and then look back at LoL and just wonder... with a massive playerbase and a widely accepeted diegetic realm, why is there no other content coming from Riot? They already have an audience and they know what the audience wants, they only need to deliver. But they barely do.

And what is delivered is kind of tricky to find, but I hope the new client helps with that.

And that is not only speaking about animated shorts or comics, but also about other games. Starcraft 2 for example (which I also wrote about in this thesis) solves this by pretty much being two games in one: Singlerplayer-Modus and Multiplayer Mode that are detached from each other to some degree. Now, "how the fuck do you make a Moba Singleplayer?" one might ask now. Then I ask you if you remember the old days of Warcraft 3, when for some time they just turned an RTS into an RPG in the same engine.

But it doesn't even have to be in the same engine. Seriously, you could just deliver a 2D RPG a la RPG Maker or whatever. As for one example: Imagine a Zelda-like game set in ancient Shurima. It doesn't even need to have anything to do with the Azir/Xerath storyline and can take place way before that, but just imagine moving through an actually living Shurima, meeting Nasus and Renekton before they kinda got scarred by the events that happened on lore, exploring the world in general by venturing into the neighboring regions such as Mt. Targon... and all that while going through dungeons, solving puzzles, etc etc. My personal recommendation would be that the protagonist has Ezreal's gauntlet as a tool they find and upgrade through the game, as the abilities are needed for puzzle solving. The game ends with the gauntlet being put on a statue to honor the hero, then it turns dark, and then you just see Ezreal re-opening the ruins and taking it.

And that was just one of the many many possibilites that the League uinverse has for games. Heck, a Zaun-Style beat-them-up sidescroller featuring Ekko wouldn't be too much of a hassle to produce either, but also a way to deliver lore to the people.

And my last idea, if you want to really drop the content-bomb on your audience: imagine being a private detective in Piltover/Zaun. Your job is to uncover a corruption affair and reconstruct the events that led to a brutal massacre in the slums. All you have is photo- and video-material as well as written reports in the Piltover-Police database that you have access on. It would pretty much be a mystery-text-adventure. Considering whatever you think has happened you can go and investigate areas or ask people, but all in the text-adventure setting that is accompanied by some nice images. This interaction with the world alone could offer so much information, but you'd probably need to give your writers coffeine infusions so they come up with all the content.

But we are getting kinda off-topic now.

All I wanted to say is that I passed and that I'm kinda thankfull that with league I had something to write about, mostly because finding a fitting topic for one's thesis is absolute hell, especially when you have to write 40+ pages while at the same time having some academic level of content in there. And I thought, that hey, since it passed, what I wrote couldn't have been that wrong, so I thought of sharing it here ^^

[slayer-jinx-catface]

6 Comments

Doommonkey817 votes

First of all, I find it pretty cool that you were able to draw some sort of academic inspiration from League, much less 40+ pages. I do agree with your point about a simple off engine game, Blitzcrank's Poro Roundup is a great example of what could be done. Although I'd prefer a narrative driven game text based or otherwise. Anyway congrats on your thesis making it! (I'd want to talk more about the thesis paper but I wouldn't know where to begin.)

SaltyToplaneGoat3 votes

To be honest I am not sure if what I am doing is truly "academic". I mean, the last project work I have turn in until the end of september is a video project featuring the first 10 minutes of gampley from Dark Souls 3 <_<' (It's not a let's play tho, got 2 voice actors, one "narrator" and one "hero", they hate each other). But apparently that falls under "analysis of artistic possibilities of the medium).

I still have Poro-Roundup installed, although i have not played it in ages. Think less of the scope of a joke-casual game, and more of an old SNES-title, but more refined. Good games don't have to be long after all. For example I got through Ghost 1.0 in 10 hours, and that was on the hard survival mode. Classic would probably have taken less. Yet it was one of the best damn games I've played recently. Best 3 bucks I have ever invested during a steam sale. Or take the old Metroid Fusion: if you are quick and know where to go, you finish in less than 3 hours, speedrunners even manage to make 90 minutes out of that. Yet that game is a pure gem in terms of design.

Some people create games of that scope FOR FUN. Seriously, check out what people can do with a simple tool like the RPG Maker. Now imagine what a company like Riot could pull off!

Feel free to ask whatever you want about my work, now that I have actually passed talking about it is so much easier anyways xD

Doommonkey812 votes

Well, I meant that Riot could do the side scrolling Ekko game and I was using that as an example. Also I'm not very well versed when it comes to SNES titles and the like. What was your thesis about? You mention that your topic was Narrative Structures in competitive online games, but from what I read you didn't really say what it was. Maybe I'm just not reading well enough into it, but I would definitely like to learn what it is.

Also on a side note, what you're doing can be classified as academic. I mean it is in the pursuit of knowledge and the like. Some studies are based around a person's digestive habits(as in bathroom in case I failed to convey it)(Probably a study, too lazy to check). So by saying this Isn't academic It's like saying what you are doing is less academic than... Well you get the idea, so don't devalue your work just yet! [slayer-pantheon-thumbs]

SaltyToplaneGoat2 votes

I was trying to figure out what stratagies online competitive games use to deliver story, as you cannot do that in a repetitive system like you can in a linear game with clear start and end. Every time you start the game the rift is reset, so what story can you tell there?

But for analyzing something you need a) a method, and b.) you need to define what you are trying to look at.

As for my categoriazation model I chose the model of Henry Jenkins (Evokative, Enacting, Embedded, and Emergent), but that guy is too vague with his definition of what a "story" and what a "game" is. The best definition of a game in my eyes is the definition of Jesper Juul, who claims that a game is a hybrid of "real existing rules", that define how you move, what actions you can take, etc etc and "story, or theme". However, he does never define what a "story" is. In his book he explains how time and storytelling works and all, but never defines the core element.

So I had to dig deeper to find the very definition of what a story is, so I wound up looking in a 40 year old book by Wolfgang Iser who's created his "gap"-theory. It is not important what is written down, but the gaps in between what is written down. Kinda complicated... I wrote down an explanation for that some time ago, let me look for it... it's something of a longer thing I wrote for my blog some time ago where I talked about this very same thing.

All those are stories you’ve heard already. You know that they are stories, yet you have no idea what makes them what they are.

Maybe this was the wrong approach. Maybe it’s not important what the story is about, but how it is told – because after all this seems to be a rather important part: If a story is never told, does it even exist? Some would say no, others would argue that the story has always existed and we can only see it when it is told, when words become a portal to another world or time.

But we still don’t have the answer we are looking for. Just what is a story now?

We could try to find out if we ignore all the unneeded parts – remove everything from what we think is a story until we find its core, the very thing that makes it what it is. Or maybe we could just try to create the simplest story that can possibly exist. Well, let’s get to work then.

Let’s just start with one sentence then: “The king is dead.”

Is that a story? It has a protagonist, something must have happened as kings are usually not dead, but does this qualify as a story? No, these four words are just an information, nothing we could weave a narrative around – sure we could start creating our own story around this, but the sentence itself is not a story.

Let’s add a sentence to that, shall we?

“The king is dead. The baron is happy.”

The second sentence is just like the first in its structure as it describes an actor in some kind of status. By itself it is also just information, but when combined with the first something truly interesting happens. Of course it could be just correlation that the baron is happy just as the king is dead, but doesn’t this make one suspect that the baron is happy because the king has died - or if he has caused the death of the king somehow? Or that he benefits from it? No one knows, yet these two sentences suddenly let us look into a world where a baron is happy about the death of his superior. Also we now don’t only see the baron as a blank slate as if we would if the sentence was standing there alone:

Now that there is the possibility that these two are connected, it gives us the image of a person that is happy over the death of another – a quite negative image, don’t you think? We could make it even worse with one more “information”:

“The king is dead. The baron is happy. He is next in line to become king.”

Now the negativity is even stronger and we all suspect that the baron has murdered the king to take the throne for himself, although this is absolutely nowhere written. Of course it could also go a completely different way:

Let’s add one more sentence – or maybe just half a sentence to this: “The king is dead. The baron is happy. The tyranny is over.”

Now the negative image has shifted from the happy baron to the king who doesn’t seem to have been a good emperor. A single information has been replaced, yet the entire situation has changed.

But is this a story now? It’s not a good story of course, for that it is horribly written, but it still qualifies as one. One might think now that a story is a accumulation of information, but that is not entirely correct. The information themselves are irrelevant for the definition of a story, what is important is the fine connection between them.

By that definition a story is the void between information – nothingness, yet existent. Of course the information is also important for the story, especially when there are no contradictions – unless the contradiction is only caused by a temporary lack of information that is solved later in the story – and when the different fragments of information fit together well, preventing the void between the absolute fragments to become too big.

So we conclude that a story is emptiness kept small. Let’s use this on our “story” of the baron and the king: “The baron is happy because the king is dead and the tyranny is over now”. The same information fragments, only stronger combined, decreasing the room of speculation between the absolutes.

The more fragments you bind together and the better you bind them, the better your story will get – but do not tie them together too strong or the emptiness in between will be too small, leaving no room for imagination and reducing the story into a profane mass of absolutes.

That was pretty much what my thesis was based on. So and on the basis of that I looked at Starcraft 2, League of Legends, and Left for Dead 2. I was looking for 1.) how and where these "gaps-of-information" appear, and 2.) how they are interfering or being enforced by the rules(mechanics) of the game. And with that I could put them in Jenkin's categories.

About half of the thesis was purely theoretical and had absolutely nothing to do with analyzing a video game at all...

Anyways, during that I found out that Riot is wasting really a LOT of potential here. They are sitting on a gold mine, yet are too lazy to dig it, despite already having a extramly large audience that has very clear wants and needs. All they need to do is deliver, yet they don't. I blame the upper management that has gone dizzy with all the Esports attention. Esport is usually the SIDE EFFECT of a game being good. Yes, you can kinda support it, but it was never supposed to be the main thing. But with all ressources being located to that during the last few years, other areas had to cut short. The "worst-ever-executed"-retcon is the perfect example of that and falls into this time period.

The thing is, I am not asking for much. I do not necessarely want ingame events, new modes, or cinematic. Just give me a constant stream of content, like imagine a story of a Zaun Detective for example. Every week you get a chapter as he gets closer and closer to finding the culprit of a murder or something. Maybe he meets some champions along the way or hears of them, but in the end they are irrelevant as this is HIS story. You would have to produce zero game content, yet you could deliver so much lore. And that's just one example.

Seriously, there are webcomic artists that manage 3 pages a week full color. And you are telling me that a team of hired professionals couldn't easily take on that workload when the story has been already fleshed out by the writers? What a joke...

Anyways, I hope that this was informative enough...

Doommonkey811 votes

Wow, quite a bit to delve into but I think I understand what you're saying. Empty spaces need to be balanced. Too much emptiness and there's not really a story but when there's not enough left to the imagination it becomes dull. Any lore would be great but I'd really like some Demacian lore, such as life of the average soldier on the battlefield or even a guard in the city. Something to show what life is like for those who support the ideals but not without question. They could show how great Demacia's ethics are to the point that it's too great. I imagine how it must be for the impoverished of the city and how stealing something like bread could be a death sentence.

On the flip side they could show some good things about Noxus, like how they value strength in all forms. Someone who is crippled could be hailed as a hero because of their intelligence and how they use it to help Noxus. I don't know, just something to balance both factions out and make the war more of a grey area. Anyway it was pretty informative thanks! If I have any more questions, I'll definitely be sure to ask.

SaltyToplaneGoat1 votes

Right now we have in most aspects TOO much empty space, and the information we have lacks variation.

The problem with core-lore (as Demacia vs Noxus was supposed the core of this game), was that this game started out to be an amateur project by some Dota-enthusiasts. Amateurs with neither the skills nor the aspiration to make a great story. Just look at the original 40 champs for example. They are not characters, they are mostly cliches and archetypes, both in gameplay and story, and the same thing applies to their origins, where Demacia was the "good guys in golden armor" and Noxus was "evil", following the typical black/white stereotype of generic fantasy.

To be honest that is also the reason why we got mostly Bilgewater, Shadow isles, and Shurima lore recently: those areas were pretty much blank slates. There were barely any screw ups from the old days of lol that they had to clean up.

The fact that Demacia is pretty much an absolutistic tyranny liek Saudi-Arabia or rather North Korea, considering their love for claiming that they are superior to everyome never really bothered them, or the fact that Noxus might be a lot "fairer" in some aspects than other states of the world. You want to achieve something? Well, try it. If you can't, become stronger and try again! But since these were both national actors established by total amateurs, we are not going to see any of this any time soon...

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