Participation in a Virtual Fandom

Spatiality and Sociality in League of Legends

Abstract

The video game industry has become one of the biggest media industries in the world and subsequently an important producer and distributor of cultural commodities (cf. Kerr 2006; Sotamaa/Svelch 2021). While the latter can be said for most media industries, video games are unique in their cultivation of culture, spatiality, and perpetuity. Video games are not simply consumed, they constitute virtual realms that are interfaced, interactive, and multimodal. Games are places of their own (cf. Boellstorff 2008). Thus, fan cultures regarding specific video games, especially online games, often form unique dynamics of movement between spaces, distinct social etiquettes, and activism (cf. Cronin/McCarthy 2011). Important ethnographic work in and around such ‘virtual worlds’ has been done (e.g., Golub 2014; Taylor 2015) but not necessarily been updated to current debates around the growing economic importance of online games, their monetary practices, and virtualised and participatory fan cultures that develop in these contexts.

In this paper, the online game League of Legends (2009-) will be used as a case study to dissect virtualized fan culture and its unique participatory practices. In doing so, the paper complements existing approaches within game studies with an ethnographic reading of fan materials. League of Legends is not only a popular and long-running online game; the publisher Riot Games is also becoming one of the biggest ‘broadcasters’ and organizers of international e-sports tournaments and an advertiser of real-world commodities and celebrities. Fan culture surrounding this game formed unique practices around activism and protest against actions and decisions by Riot Games that will be examined and contextualized within the game itself but also in regards to larger shifts of cultural practices in and around video games.