Esport Play

Anticipation, Attachment, and Addiction in Psycholudic Development

Veli-Matti Karhulahti

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501359330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Weaving the author's own lived experience with theoretical insights from the fields of game studies, psychology, and anthropology, Esport Play probes and advances current gaming topics such as addiction, skill development, and toxicity. With a focus on League of Legends – one of the flagship esports of our time – Karhulahti explicates what esport play is: documenting and identifying competitive play as a present-day means to satisfy basic human needs. Ultimately, the book presents a theory of psycholudic development that explains and organizes the development of player-play relationships that may last for years.

1

Noob

Noon, Christmas 2012, and I’m just about to hear about League of Legends for the first time. The family is getting fed at my grandparents’, as my cousin Mathias, 13, tells me of his new hobby. “I play League of Legends.” The silence that follows isn’t uncommon in Finland. “Every day,” adds his father a bit later. To play my part as a researcher, I ask a few questions. Topic closed. Lutefisk was good, as always.

*

A year later. Same time, same place, same lutefisk. I ask Mathias what he’s up to nowadays, and one of those déjà vu moments transpires. “I play League of Legends.” Silence. “Every day,” adds his father. I’m driven into a lengthy chat about this pastime that’s evidently more than a pastime. The same evening still, I add League to my endless to-be-played list. By 2013, the game has started to conquer substantial press space.

*

A year later. I’m teaching a media studies course in the University of Turku. The topic of the last class is esports, and League gets picked as playing material. For a week, every evening my students and I join the European Nordic and East server to learn what the fad is about. It all turns out to be simple: two five-player teams clash to eradicate the enemy base, Nexus, in a setting that reminds me of Warcraft and StarCraft. Players are distributed in four respective places on the map: toplane, midlane, botlane (two players), and jungle. In each match, we choose our gladiators from a pool of 121 champs that look like comic book heroes. It’s all quite complex, as each champ comes with lots of unique abilities and powers. Skirmish continues until one of two Nexuses is down. This can take up to an hour. I’m not often on the winning side.

*

A week later. The first evening after my introductory week to League. I open the client, log in, and stare at the large PLAY button in front of me. None of the students from last week are online. After twenty matches and a dozen play hours during the past seven days, my account has reached Level 9, whatever that means. I choose to play one more match, this time alone, and thus teamed up with four strangers. They tell me to take the midlane position. I pick Nunu as my champ. Nunu is a yeti rider from Freljord, specialized in biting and tossing snowballs. I’m bad, we lose, and my teammates call me noob. I decide not to play anymore.

1.1 A Whole World to Toy with

As of today, likely some years before you read this, several sources reference League of Legends as the most played videogame on the Earth. According to the developer, Riot Games, 27 million unique individuals played the game every day in 2014. Two years later the company announced that their monthly player base had exceeded 103 million. While self-published estimations like this should always be taken with caution, it seems fair to count the game among the most popular commercial playthings of all time: next to titles like Angry Birds with 2 billion downloads, Minecraft with 121 million sold copies, and Wii Sports with 82 million single-platform distributions.

Compared to its peers, the utmost mystery behind League of Legends is the pull that draws players in. Despite the game being a genuine freemium product (it monetizes via optional cosmetic purchases that do not affect performance), one can hardly call it casual by any standard. A single match takes around 30–40 minutes and provides no possibility to pause or quit without penalties, which already becomes a constraint too great for many busy lives. While reflexes and motoric accuracy are not necessary for sub-professional success, player performance is certainly tied to physiology. The game’s main recruit issue derives from information overload, nonetheless: it does not take long to learn how to the game works, but enjoyment lies behind a tall wall of comprehending relations between hundreds of items, champions, and other constantly changing entities. League of Legends is, for short, a laborious hobby. Yet millions and millions still keep on having it as part of their daily life.

From biology’s viewpoint, the fondness for play is already a matured research topic. Based on William Preyer’s physiological findings in the nineteenth century, Karl Groos (1898) outlined the satisfaction of play as the “joy of being a cause,” as the child feels “when he tears a paper into fragments” (88). Such feelings can derive from many things, and evidence has since snowballed for the now-apparent fact that numerous ludic behaviors from visual curiosity to spontaneous running hold central functions in organismic development (e.g., Vygotsky 1933; Gibson 1950; Piaget 1951; Kagan & Berkun 1954). Animals, including the human, are naturally motivated to play with their surroundings, physical abilities, and fellow beings because evolution has proved it useful (for reviews, see Smith 1981; Pellegrini 2009; see also Csikszentmihalyi 1982).

The primal pleasures of “being a cause” are unquestionably present in League of Legends too. Kinesthetic champion control, mechanical exploration, and the general execution of agency all stimulate the human ludic reward systems. The overall appeal for the game is a matter much more intricate, however, and perhaps the best concept for elaborating on this intricacy further derives from psychologist Robert White’s (1959) classic essay where he suggests “competence” as a basic motivation:

The behavior that leads to the building up of effective grasping, handling, and letting go of objects, to take one example, is not random behavior produced by a general overflow of energy. It is directed, selective, and persistent, and it is continued not because it serves primary drives, which indeed it cannot serve until it is almost perfected, but because it satisfies an intrinsic need to deal with the environment. (318)

The seminal contribution of White’s observation here is the bridging of two biological ludic lineages that scholars like Groos had already recognized, but not really told apart: play as vague explorative exertion and play as determined competence-driven behavior. While the pleasure of “being a cause” is something that children (and adults) can experience with things like tearing papers into pieces, such behaviors are also part of people’s directed, selective, and persistent need to become better at things. The reason for many adults to not tear papers into pieces is that they have already become good with their hands over the years. For adults, paper tearing is hardly a process of exploration or betterment anymore.

In the same way, everyday environments have a bad habit to stop surprising and challenging people at some point, which leads many to explore and seek further competence elsewhere. Along these lines, a vital charm factor in League of Legends is its capacity to satisfy its players’ needs for competence efficiently. Like the child who draws pleasure from refining their competence with the everyday environment (grasping stuff more skillfully), League of Legends players draw pleasure from refining their competence with the game environment (playing champions more skillfully). Competence acquirement remains a source of pleasure as individuals grow up, and the game is pretty good at providing that pleasure, for a long time.

As a competence-satisfying activity, League of Legends is of course but one instance in the vast market of commercialized play. In their book on the psychology of gaming, Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan (2011) cite a number of studies that display competence satisfaction as the most common pleasure among gamers in general and a “consistent predictor of game preferences” (37). This, the authors argue, is first and foremost a consequence of the videogame’s capacity to assure that its players reach their goals:

Satisfaction of competence needs is often an uncertain and drawn-out process. Not so with video games. Their simple but powerful psychological appeal lies in the efficient way they allow us to feel mastery. (19)

While the contemporary videogame is often designed to make its players fail now and then, these failures tend to happen in fun and safe ways; one may get stuck, but only for a short while. This generates a secured feeling of progress and success, which has nowadays become one of the key design components in the field (see Mendenhall et al. 2010). The player must feel competent, repeatedly, and that is what usually happens.

Alas, esports and League of Legends in particular work with a rather opposed logic. Where they surely offer plenty of potential things to become competent with, reaching that competence is hardly a secured process. The frequent failures that esport players experience tend to be genuinely unsatisfying, and the disappointments that follow are not followed by triumph. The players do not know if they will ever be able to get even close to what they strive for; nevertheless, it is this authentic uncertainty that significantly adds to the unique appeal of esports.

In a seminal reevaluation of competence theories, Susan Harter (1978) aptly points out how competence satisfaction does not derive from being competent alone, but also from the attempt to become competent. In other words, success is usually gratifying, but trying to succeed can be gratifying too. In this vein, the magnetism behind League of Legends lies not so much in the fleeting moments of realized competence, but rather in the uncertain longitudinal anticipation of future competence.

For ages, scholars of play and games have made frequent use of the Greek term “agon” (ἀγών, “fight” or “contest”) to distinguish competition-related struggles from other types of play. While agon catches some of the former’s essence (reflecting a Nietzschean desire to struggle for power that Groos conceived biologically as “striving for supremacy [that] is instinctive with all intelligent animals”) (1898: 290), it has also led many to disregard the parallel Greek term “arete” (ἀρετή), which held somewhat equal importance in the Hellenic discourse. Arete has less to do with fighting, contest, or supremacy, and signifies the individual’s personal “quest for perfection” (Miller 2004: xv) or “striving for excellence” (Gumbrecht 2006: 70). In order to fathom League of Legends as a game, it is necessary to perceive its play from the latter viewpoint too: not simply as recurring contest and conflict, but also as persistent pursuing toward betterment. Contest is only a momentary measure of competence.

A person’s performance satisfaction tends to cohere with the amount of work they put on their performance, as long as the efforts are not compared to others (Ames et al. 1977). People enjoy moving toward their esteemed goals whatever they are, and while the social recognition and valuation of such striving differ between cultures, the pleasure they generate has been found to follow a number of fixed principles (see Carver & Scheier 1990). Manifestly, many of your ancestors took laborious undertakings in which self-refinement and persistence played central roles.

In neuropsychological terms, the determined long-term efforts that people exert can be linked to a certain “conative” functioning, “the ability to focus and maintain persistent effort” (Reitan & Wolfson 2000: 444). In the current psychological field, related findings come from Angela Duckworth and her colleagues (2007) who distinguish between the general human drive for achievement and that of “grit”:

Whereas individuals high in need for achievement pursue goals that are neither too easy nor too hard, individuals high in grit deliberately set for themselves extremely long-term objectives and do not swerve from them—even in the absence of positive feedback. (1089)

Grit, as a trait involving perseverance and passion for long-term goals, lays a fine ground for the coming explorations. The emotional loot that League of Legends provides does not peak in play for quick reinforcement, but that of grit over prolonged personal progress. While achieving is part of League of Legends in many ways, the governing processes of its long-term play are fundamentally tied to betterment through persistent commitment. This typically involves systematic concentration on improving particular sectors of action over periods of time, for which speaking of it as “play” in the conventional sense evidently has its problems.

In his later seminal opus, Groos (1901) went on to probe the nature of play more explicitly as human behavior and, eventually, ended up asking, “What is it that converts play into sport?” (120). Groos’ neat conclusion (still the best philosophical conceptualization of “sport” by today) gives an adequate frame through which to perceive the specific form of “play” that the following chapters keep talking about:

We may then define sport as play pursued reflectively, scientifically. (121)

Ultimately, it is that very reflective and self-analytically scientific approach to individual betterment with a growing understanding of the game that has the capacity to turn League of Legends into a practice of sport like any other, while still constituting an activity of its own in many distinct ways.

*

November 2014. For reasons still to be figured out, I return to play League. This game is repetitive AF. All action seems to take place on one and the same battlefield (they call it Summoner’s Rift) and I’m always doing the same things: combating creatures that spawn from the opposing base, tearing down enemy structures, and buying strengthening items with gold granted by the previous two, which, again, makes those two things gradually easier. The positive cycle leads to an accelerating feeling of empowerment that builds up. At the beginning my champ is slow and has hardly any impact; at the end my champ runs like a wind and clears full creature waves with a single blow. The feeling doesn’t last long, however, as progress gets repeatedly reset: all my amassed power and riches vanish by the end of each match, and nothing gets carried to the next one. But the thrill of re-empowerment remains, from one match to another.

*

Like many other online games, League allows me to level up. In addition to the ephemeral champ elevations that reset after each match, my account levels up along with the experience points that are earned by winning (and losing) matches. The process isn’t related to any avatars or other anthropomorphic entities, but to my personal faceless profile with a made-up name as its label. The whole system seems to be an ornamental thing, more or less: new levels don’t change or add to performance in any meaningful way, and matches follow the same formula regardless of the account level.

*

Unlike the account level, a truly useful recompense seems to be in-game currency, “influence points” (IP), w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Noob
• 2 Uncarriable
• 3 Boosted Animal
• 4 Ludo-Narcotic Junkie
• 5 Today We Die a Little
• 6 Meaning of esport play
• 7 Theory of Psycholudic Development
• Interlude
• Notes
• References
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Imprint