By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 6, 2013
League of Legends has been on the scene for a while. I first remember it popping up in the fall of 2011, but I didn’t start playing until last year and didn’t really get into it until this year. Last week, I came to a frightening realization: this video game is basically an allegory for my life.
Let me back up a bit and explain the game. League is, in short, a team battle. It has a defined goal—to take out the other team’s base—which means that games can only last so long. Unlike its predecessor World of Warcraft (which League evolved from over several generations), there’s less chance of becoming enthralled in the world for 18 hours at a time.
League runs on similar principles to many video games: the better you are at killing the members of the other team, the better you are at it. In this case, it allows your team to push towards the enemy base and eventually raze it to the ground.
This is League in a nutshell, but back to my startling revelation: how is a video game a representation of my life as a whole? It’s honestly pretty simple, and I’m sure any psychiatrist could have picked it out in an instant.
I act exactly the same way in the game as I do in real life.
As in many games, dying is bad. The more your character dies, the more points the other team gets and the longer it takes you to come back to life. It’s good to have a healthy helping of caution – for instance, to not run too far into the enemy base, to not try to hide in a bush without first checking to make sure there isn’t already an enemy doing the same, and above all never abandoning the rules of self-preservation in search of valour.
This is the reason I will never be fantastic at League: I play with adrenaline instead of caution. My gamer tag is FOKJA, all caps, the closest you can get to swearing without the profanity filter catching it. The character I play is designed for defence, but that doesn’t stop me from rushing into battle at the slightest scent of a kill. FOKJA! If there’s an enemy at, say, quarter-health, I get the idea into my head that I can kill him. FOKJA! I don’t ask for help, I don’t ask for permission, and there are times when I distinctly ignore the pleas of my teammates to stay the hell back. I run right in, ice attack blazing. FOKJA!
Needless to say, this gets me killed a fair amount of the time.
And the more I die, the more foolhardy I get. I want to make it up to my team by slaying the next guy; I want to prove dying was a fluke, and in normal circumstances I am a merciless killer. This doesn’t generally work out for me; I usually just keep dying.
Then I put two and two together and found myself with the realization that this is how I act in real life. I’m used to charging in, locking onto a target, and destroying it. I can’t be the only student who piles way too much on their plate – I’ll even take on the entire enemy team if necessary. I could pull back and wait for help, but instead I rush right in. Bull-headed. Stubborn. Always looking for just one more hit on the enemy before I head back to base to heal my wounds.
This is basically the opposite of the seven habits of highly-effective people. In a nutshell, this shit needs to stop, both in real life and in video games.
League is a simpler world than real life, with straight-forward objectives and a clear goal. There are fewer distractions than real life and a limited number of side-paths to pull you off course. But just like real life, it sucks when the other team beats you. It sucks when your team is mad at you because you spent more time dead than alive. It sucks when you didn’t listen to reason and it got you killed. So here’s the life lesson that
League of Legends taught me: don’t be a stubborn idiot. Pull back a little. And for god’s sake, stop trusting that ice attack to be ready in time. It’s going to get you killed.
