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

... 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]