Part of my daily ritual over the past several months, after grabbing a bite for breakfast and sitting down with a cup of coffee, has been queuing up Twitch. Not to play or stream anything myself--I haven’t had the time or inclination--but to watch someone else. Specifically, I watch Rabia “Nightblue3” Yazbek play League of Legends. He’s a streamer that plays more or less daily, but I also watch the game’s professional esports coverage.
And I think you should too.
I’m not saying folks should watch League of Legends just because I like the game, though. For those that might not know, League of Legends is a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) video game by developer Riot Games. It’s been out for several years, and is one of the several to crop up in the wake of original Dota developers going commercial. It’s not super important to understand all the gritty details about the game’s past, just that the people responsible for it have been working in the field for what is, relatively, A Long Time™.
With that experience comes some knowledge of how to make a game appealing to watch. In my opinion, LoL and similar games are the easiest to explain to spectators. Unlike first-person shooters, there’s no janky, sickness-inducing camera movement to follow. For another thing, the game is played by several different professional teams across multiple regions. There’s the Chinese LPL, the Korean LCK, the EU LCS, the NA LCS, and more. All have teams battling within and without, with drama not unlike that of the NFL when it comes to trades, inappropriate behavior, and rivalries.
And the actual game’s design itself also lends itself to easy comparisons. There five total well-defined roles like Jungle, Top, Mid, ADC (Attack Damage Carry), and Support to any given team on the screen. Add to this several layers of complexity like picks and bans, item builds, skills, and runes, and suddenly it’s pretty clearly a game of strategy. How to juggle minions, where wards should be placed so you can see your enemies, and greater objective control. A game of carefully considered and weighed options that’s then placed in the hands of humans--who make mistakes--trying to figure out the best way to best their opponents.
This would all be well and good to watch as it is, but thankfully Riot employs professional casters that are (typically) hired either from the amateur casting scene or carefully groomed while they’re still players. This means that the talent pool is practically filled to bursting with folks that know the game inside and out as well as the players. They’ve been at this for years in one way or another, and it shows. The best ones convey this knowledge in a way that’s easy to understand while also emphasizing just how important one decision is versus another. (This is particularly amusing when a caster becomes known for specific tidbits, such as Krepo’s love of the krugs.)
Best of all, now’s the perfect time to get started. The 2015 World Championship is about to start in October with Group Stages--where teams duke it out to get the top spots--and ending on October 31st with the Finals in Berlin, Germany. All of that will be broadcast live, streaming over the Internet. And if you miss anything, or want to watch old streams? Everything’s available to watch via the game’s YouTube account, full games recorded directly from the stream, casting and everything.
And if any of that sounds too daunting, too official, there’s always dipping your toes into regular streamers like Razbek. There’s no real cost to it other than time, and there’s often a slew of different folks playing the game for your perusal. Some are more personable than others, of course, and there’s always a community surrounding these folks that can be…less-than welcoming, in some instances. It’s going to be a matter of preference, as I generally believe there are one or two streamers that folks will click with over others.
But that’s the beauty of it. There are dozens of ways to watch, and even if, after my extolling of its virtues, watching a game isn’t your thing… There’s always installing the game and playing yourself.
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