Month: February 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

The sudden popularity of a certain new video game has a lot of people asking a lot of questions: (1) What is this new video game contraption that all the young folks are doing? (2) How does one play this game? (3) Why does my chest hurt after drinking a bunch of lemonade? (4) Will I ever truly be happy?

Let me try and answer some of those fascinating queries:

1. League of Legends.
2. Read the rest of the article
3. You might have acid reflux
4. Probably not but hey might as well try

Not that all of those questions aren’t worth discussing, but I’ll be focusing on #2 for the remainder of this article.

There are a lot of reasons you might be reading this. Maybe you want to be the next Faker (Korean pro player, some call him the Lionel Messi of League, others just call him… Faker-sempai) and be a professional League of Legends player. Or perhaps you’re just wondering what it is your roommate is doing that has him clicking so loudly that it sounds like a woodpecker lives in your ear! Whatever the reason, read on, and find out just what the hell your roommate is doing awake at four in the damn morning on a Wednesday night. (Seriously, Jeremy. I’m trying to sleep. I have a math test tomorrow, I’m late with this article– I do not need this right now.)

Basics of the game

We’ll start out simple. Two teams of five players each face off in a large square arena, with one team’s base in the top right corner, the other in the bottom left. Three paths (lanes) connect the two bases. The object of the game is to get into the other team’s base and destroy their nexus. Getting to this point and finishing the game will typically take around 30-45 minutes. With me so far? Good, because we’re just getting started. In each lane is a series of turrets. These turrets do a LOT of damage, so the game helpfully provides mindless minions to die for you! Small, weak, computer-controlled minions (or creeps) regularly spawn in each lane, and will slowly walk down the lane towards their enemy. Walk into the turret without a healthy supply of minions to back you up, and you might as well drop your weapon, pick up a shovel, and start digging yourself a grave. The players in each lane try to kill enemy minions so that their team’s minions will push towards the enemy’s tower. As long as your minions are in range of the tower it will prioritize the minions instead of you. This will allow you to hit the tower without fear of being pounded into the dirt. Be warned though, the towers do not take kindly to you attacking the champions of their team and will turn on you as soon as you damage a champion, minions or no.

Through landing killing blows on minions, blows on enemy players, and blows on towers, and through just sheer persistence (you generate a small amount of gold every second just for participating) you will acquire gold that can be spent back at your home base to buy items. Each champ can carry six items, and it takes quite a lot of time and gold to get all six. But with close to 200 items in the game, there are tons of possible item combinations (typically called item builds) that a player can have. Each item’s primary function is to give stat bonuses, and every champ requires different stats to do well. Every character has certain things they are good at and things they aren’t so good at. So pick a champion that fits a play-style you like and build items that fit that play-style! You wouldn’t buy a hockey stick for a football player, right? So don’t buy Archangel’s Staff for Garen. Just don’t. Please don’t. You’ll understand when you’ve played a few games.

Phew. Well there you have the basic objective of the game. Let’s make that a list so it’s a bit easier to understand.

1. Go to a lane and start killing minions.
2. Your minions will help you destroy enemy towers.
3. Use gold gained from killing minions to buy items to make yourself stronger.
4. Keep taking towers until you reach the enemy base.
5. Destroy the enemy nexus.

Of course, your opponents will be trying to do the same to you the entire time, so you can’t just walk into lane and mindlessly hack away at minions. You have to deal with a human opponent, controlling a character of similar strength to yours. This is where the “meta game” comes in.

At this point, it would be the acme of foolishness not to mention that the game is free to download and has a tutorial built in. If what I’ve just described sounds like a game to which you might enjoy devoting a bit of time (or your entire life) and spending no money (or over a hundred dollars) then download it and give it a shot (I’m so lonely). There are a lot of small details that I won’t be going over (damage types, resistances, scaling, turret agro, ip and rp, possible item builds, how to last-hit, runes, masteries, summoner spells, how to play while eating a sandwich, wards, dragon and baron, blue and red buff), which are all kind of boring, require lengthy explanation and are best learned by simply playing the game a bit. Those are the mechanics of the game, but what really makes League of Legends (or LOL, for short) so much fun is the massive number of characters that you can play. You thought Super Smash Bros. had a lot of characters? Man Smash Bros. ain’t got NOTHING on League.

Garen: The League’s favorite Beyblade

Champions

There are currently 123 champions to choose from, and a team must have five UNIQUE champs. There are millions of potential team compositions, which by itself should suggest the complexity of the game. Champions are divided into a few categories based on how they play. Assassins are champs that do a lot of close range damage extremely quickly but are very easy to kill. Most mages function similarly to assassins, but their damage is usually long range. Tanks (my favorite role) are beefy damage sponges that like to wade into a fight and soak up damage, but they aren’t too good at dishing out hurt themselves. Marksman (usually called Attack Damage Carries or ADCs) are long range champs that prefer to stay in the back of the fight while pumping out a steady stream of damage per second. Obviously these are just generalizations and there is a lot of diversity within each category. You’ve got bruisers, bursty marksman, melee damage-per-second champs, champs with high mobility, low mobility, split-pushers, champs with no crowd control, champs with lots of crowd control, fat champs, skinny champs, champs who climb on rocks. (If you got that reference give yourself a pat on the back).

Though each champ differs greatly, there are a few aspects that every champ shares:

Stats – Every champ has stats that all do different things. (This, by the way, is the kind of in-depth analysis that makes my article a must-read). The most important stats are health, mana (some champs use other resources or no resource, but that doesn’t matter right now), attack damage, ability power, armor, magic resistance, movement speed, and critical chance. Most of those are pretty self-explanatory if you’ve played an RPG before, but the main thing you need to know is that every item gives stats, and certain stats are good on certain champions.

Basic Attacks – All champions get basic attacks, some ranged and some melee. Basically all the dudes with axes and swords have melee basic attacks, and everyone who uses a gun or magic staff has ranged basic attacks. The higher the attack damage stat, the higher the damage on basic attacks. Easy enough.

Abilities – Every champ has a passive ability (no key binding), three basic abilities (Q,W, and E), and an ultimate (R). The maximum level in the game is level 18 and each level gives you one point to spend on your abilities. Each basic ability can be skilled five times, and your ultimate three times. All your basic abilities are available from the outset but you’ll have to wait until level 6 for the extremely sexy ultimate ability. Most abilities increase their damage the more ability power you have (wow, what a coincidence!) but some will cause more damage more as your attack damage increases. Every ability costs mana, so keep an eye on that pretty blue bar under your health.

So before we end this thing, quick wrap-up on how champions work:

1. You control one character, and you use basic attacks and abilities to do the big damages
2. As you disregard real life and acquire currency, spend that currency on items that fit your champion. Ex. Attack damage on Ashe, Health Armor and Magic Resist on Garen, and Ability power on Annie.
3. Proclaim your victory, dance on the desecrated corpses of your fallen foes.

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and give League a try! I’ll see you on the Summoner’s Rift or at Gaming Club in Tome 115 on Satudays at 8pm where we play lots of League and other games. Be there or be square!

I like video games. Some say I like them too much, but only those who’ve seen me write “Mrs. Jeremy Games” on the inside of my school notebooks. Recently, my interest in them has started to become academic in addition to recreational; I’ve started to think and write about video games from a scholarly perspective, as you might do with a classic film or piece of literature. To many, writing academically about video games might sound completely ludicrous, like if someone wanted to exhibit paintings of Nicolas Cage at the Louvre or if someone said that spray cheese actually tasted like real cheese. Why is it that most people fully accept paintings, novels, or films as works of art with the potential for analysis, but video games are merely toys for children, not worthy of any scholarly merit?

While it is true that video games are becoming more popular among scholars, they certainly don’t have the widespread acceptance that other forms have; it would be rare to find a professor of video games or someone majoring in Sonic the Hedgehog for his or her college degree. While it is true that video games are a relatively young art form, I think a bigger problem is how the public perceives games, and even how video game fans perceive games. Games are often seen by more traditional and conservative media outlets as purveyors of violence and sex, objects that seek to corrupt our children and turn them into gun-toting sex fiends. Not only can detractors harm the public perception of video games, but sometimes supporters can as well. Both people working within the industry and self-proclaimed video game fans and supporters often infantilize video games and create another juvenile image of the medium as a whole.

While it is often true that new forms of entertainment and media are met with disdain and scorn from members of the old-guard way of doing things, it seems like video games have gotten an especially bad reputation within traditional media. As far back as the Columbine shooting, video games were blamed for heinous acts of violence; Doom was partially blamed for influencing the two teens that then went on to shoot up their school and harm their fellow classmates. The 1992 game Night Trap was also put on trial by Senator Joe Lieberman for encouraging rape fantasies and violence against women.

Even today video games are still being demonized. For example, take the release of Mass Effect in 2007. Fox News aired a segment that put Mass Effect on trial for its depiction of “graphic sex” and questioned the game’s general merit. Most of the conversation focused on its potential impact on children, and how depictions of sex and violence such as those they thought depicted in Mass Effect could inhibit or damage the development of a child. In fact, all of those on the panel that attacked the game had never actually played it; they had only seen trailers and pictures, and actually scoffed at the idea of actually playing the game. All of these controversies begin with the assumption that video games are inherently for children and that children will find some way to get their hands on them. Even today when many modern games explore very adult themes and involve extremely mature content, why is it that many still assume that video games are children’s toys? I believe that one of the biggest factors keeping this myth alive are members of video game fandom whose intentions come from a place of enjoyment and admiration, but whose actions ultimately betray their intentions.

A number of events and films that appear to be on the side of video game success, for instance, can actually do more harm than good. Events and features that are meant to celebrate games and those who play them, such as the Spike TV Video Game Awards (VGAs) and the documentary Video Games: The Movie (2014), treat their audiences (and their source material) like children. The VGA’s are meant, in theory, to celebrate the best titles of the year; however, their actual purpose and existence is something far less noble and worthwhile. The awards are actually something of an extended commercial, with various trailers shown and revealed for the next year’s upcoming releases. When they’re not trying to sell you something, the VGAs fill the rest of their air time with skits that would make Dumb and Dumber look like a dark satire on the duality of mankind. Nothing impresses twelve-year-olds more and says ‘class and elegance’ like Neil Patrick Harris’ entrance to the 2010 VGA’s where he shoots up an entire troop of dancers. At the 2007 awards, the nominees for ‘Game of the Year’ had their likenesses painted onto scantily clad women who then presented themselves on stage. All jokes aside, the VGAs aren’t bad because of the trailers or the lack of awards, but because the awards assume that their audiences can’t be entertained without a copious amount of blood and boobs.

The recently released Video Games: The Movie aims to justify a love for video game and seeks to briefly chronicle their history, but comes off as more of a love letter or a puff piece. Stated more harshly: it doesn’t do anything but lick the metaphorical boot of the video game industry. Director Jeremy Snead, along with an ensemble of movie stars and video game industry figures, guide viewers through a very condensed history of video games. Although informative for the uninitiated, the history that the film outlines feels like an encyclopedia article with little to no insight or analysis put forth. The film itself is a sort of pre-pubescent love poem to the video games industry: video games occupy the place of a middle school girl who’s just bought her first bra while the generic video game fans are like boys trying to get a gander at them yams.

The whole film is filled with larger-than-life claims about video games and their potential, but not a lot is said with actual substance. Various celebrities who have nothing to do with video games, such as Zach Braff and Donald Faison, have their voices heard in this film not because of any expertise that they hold, but just because they like video games. While there are prominent figures from within the industry in this film that do offer their insight–for example Cliff Blesinski and Reggie Fils-Aime–they too offer little more than their childhood experiences with Space Invaders or their first time playing the Legend of Zelda. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with sharing these experiences, when put into a film that places itself as an ambassador for video games as a whole, it makes the industry and the medium look extremely childish and unsubstantial. Moreover, the formal elements of the film are often lazily done and riddled with errors; at one point, one of the graphics has a typo and instead of displaying ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’ the text reads ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocatina of Time.’ If a film can’t even be bothered to check its spelling, how can the viewer trust that the film’s message and content isn’t any less erroneous?

If VGAs and Video Games: The Movie are the wrong ways of talking about video games, then what are the right ways? I think that some form of justification of the medium is probably necessary, but not to the point of worship. One example of a representation done well is Indie Game: The Movie. It manages to tell the story of three groups of game developers without turning them into jokes, or worse, Big Bang Theory characters. These developers appear to be real people with a passion for video games, but not to the point of worship. I think the best part of Indie Game is that it doesn’t treat its audience with contempt; it assumes that the viewer can do his or her own thinking without having his or her hand held.

But seriously, liking video games doesn’t make someone a nerdy caricature because there is nothing wrong with video games in the first place. Video games can be taken seriously, but not if the only reasons given for the validity of the medium involve childhood memories and exorbitant flattery. If the general public is ever going to take games seriously, those who enjoy or play them need to take them seriously first. Not everyone needs to be the next great video game scholar, but simplifying games down to boobs and guns doesn’t do justice to the potential that video games offer as an art form or as a mode of storytelling. Hopefully the problems within the medium are caused by some kind of formal puberty, because I know that the medium of video games should and will one day become an art form that will be respected in its own right.