The unexplored profits of mass appeal.
As my group presented on spectatorship, I thought there was significantly more to say (like most topics of this class) about the effects of spectatorship on gaming that I'd like to go into more detail about here.
Just in case you hadn't heard, League of Legends’ eSports scene is one of the most dominant in the rising field, with its most recent world championship peaking at a total of around 200,000,000 viewers. While spectatorship was not the primary goal of the development of the 5v5 MOBA game, as Twitch and broadcasting of games became more common and League emerged as a major spectator sport, pro-level play became a driving force for the popularity and proliferation of these games. Most recently, the American and European leagues have franchised in a manner similar to NBA Basketball, professionalizing Riot-approved organizations to permanent institutions in the pro-play scene. All of these factors contribute to the current balancing act in League of Legends: currently, the developers of League of Legends, a game primarily made for those playing it, must also decide how to consider and market to spectators as an audience. On a larger scale, this balance gets at one of the central questions of spectatorship in relation to videogames: how and why do spectators affect how games are made?
In this example, spectatorship becomes a driving force for diversification of content. This, in part, is due to the looser relationship the game development has with spectators themselves. While Riot Games directly facilitates eSports, there is not a lot of overt crossover between the game development and the game’s consumption as a spectator sport. Riot Games repeatedly emphasizes that they take both professional play and normal leveled-players into account when ‘balancing’ the relative strengths and weaknesses of the ever-changing game mechanics. As such, on the developmental side it seems that the game of League of Legends exists largely independently from its eSport participation, and aside from tweaks for better visual identification of health bars (that also benefit players as well as spectators) the two worlds remain fairly distinct.
But this seemingly clear separation between game development and eSports starts to blur when one takes into account the broader expanded universe of League of Legends. One of the most direct implications of spectatorship being a serious financial driver for a game like League of Legends is the company’s increased consideration of non-participatory markets when crafting out-of-game content. While out-of-game content serves many purposes and The most notable example of this is in the wide variety of media that Riot Games produces surrounding League of Legends. For a free-to-play game, League of Legends pours financial and resources into an formidable amount of content: short stories, animated short videos, comic books, fully orchestrated music, animated login screens, detailed champion lore, artistic teasers for their cosmetic skin lines, behind-the-scenes Q&As, alternate universes, fully functional maps of the world, and detailed art of non-game elements.[1] Some of these significant investments in worldbuilding can be explained through the notion that players themselves appreciate and be more invested in a robust world. But as Riot continues to make more and more involved content, and as eSports becomes more and more popular, there seems to be a kind of responsiveness of mass consumer pressures in the broad spectrum of content that Riot produces.
One specific example of this is a recent skin line, a sort of costume change for in-game characters that has no effect on gameplay besides aesthetics. Riot Games crafted a fictional band, “K/DA”, that was made up of four League of Legends Champions. Skins cost developer time and energy to make on their own, and Riot produced not only skins, but also created a full music video to promote the line. This involved composing new music, paying an animation studio to make an indulgently beautiful video, and hiring (undoubtedly expensive) famous K-Pop and American stars to vocalize the song. Sure, the K/DA skins cost a pretty $10 each, and selling them to players generated plenty of revenue for the company. But in addition to the consumer base of gamers, the crafty marketing of K/DA stretched beyond the scope of people who play League of Legends. The video was trending on twitter, became a meme, and was widespread among artists, K-Pop fans, and even casual viewers who stumbled upon the video and enjoyed the music. This popularity, and the very nature of making a video that would have wide appeal, was undoubtedly tied to spectatorship. The singers who sang the K/DA single also performed live at the World Championship event, in a show with high production value that was visually and functionally similar to a Super Bowl Halftime show. In addition to this live performance, the very nature of a K-Pop inspired music video was most likely intentionally designed to be broadly appealing, marketing to a currently popular genre of music with a deeply involved fan social media presence. The K/DA line, and an artful usage of popular culture to promote gameplay-tangential content to the level of brief cultural moment, is one way that spectatorship can push games to a new kind of artfulness and cultural meaning.
(Disclaimer, I obviously don’t work at Riot and I am just speculating as to how clever they were to capitalize on these markets and broad appeal of an all-female videogame K-Pop group, but I think it’s safe to assume there was a significant degree of intentionality behind this decision.)
League of Legends’s massification of ingame skin lines is a rather specific example of how spectatorship can influence the production of game content. It is also a type that implicitly exists due to the separation of game content and lore/story based materials, which is only one model for how games with a spectator base can choose to organize their content. There is much more to say about games that, for instance, include spectatorship in gameplay that is a completely different issue entirely. However, the distinct choice to separate spectatorship in the way that Riot does, and to produce broadly appealing content surrounding its game, is what I think is a good example of a way that spectatorship can affect the development of games – that of diversification and a sort of un-specialization of gamer culture. Reactionary movements and those prone to gatekeeping might see the attempt to appeal to broad masses as a negative. After all, gaming culture has developed meaningful distinct art forms out of its partial insulation from other forms of media – ranging from glitch art, chiptune music, pixel landscape imagery, fan art and many others. But as League’s current model demonstrates, making out-of-game content in many different fields and turning their game’s marketing into a sort of jack-of-all-trades in response to mass spectatorship, spectatorship can actually push content production to be more accessible, more able to be broadly disseminated to people with ranges of interests from K-Pop to traditional Chinese imagery. When done sleekly, the sort of promotional materials that are created out of this drive for mass appeal actually add to a diverse understanding of game content, and in this way, spectatorship seems to be a net benefit to the world of videogames.
Footnotes:
[1] Most other similar games produce much of the same kind of content: Overwatch, for example, has animated shorts and comic books, and most MOBAs feature some backstory of their champions. However, I think League’s content production is the most expansive and robustly funded by the company that I’ve encountered. I'm happy to learn/look at other examples!
Image Citations:
Cover Image/Image 1: ESPN ESports, http://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/14555655/latest-league-legends-news-esports
Image 2: Screenshot of the League of Legends Website, https://universe.leagueoflegends.com/en_US/regions/
Image 3: Screenshot of K/DA "POPSTARS (ft Madison Beer, (G)I-DLE, Jaira Burns)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOxkGD8qRB4
Image 3: (Screenshot) Julia Lee, Polygon "K/DA, Riot Games’ pop girl group, explained."
https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/5/18064726/league-of-legends-kda-pop-stars-video-akali-ahri-evelynn-kai-sa