The emotional side of League of Legends.

I enjoy League of Legends, you all do to, or you wouldn’t be reading this now. It is well designed, it needs strategy and planning, it has a huge player base and it can make you feel joy. It is not just joy though, is it? LoL is a very emotional game, there is joy, satisfaction and happiness but there is also rage and anger and several times, the changes between those emotions need only a few minutes.

Let me tell you a story, a story pretty much everyone of you has experienced in League of Legends.

A few days ago I was playing a normal game with a couple of friends, I was top lane Darius vs a Katarina and Tristana lane, very aggressive lane, very hard for me to control, so I did my best to farm. In the mid lane there was a Brand and at bottom we had a Draven (both of them unknown to me) with my friends picking a support and a jungler to complete the team.

So I was losing my lane, I was 3/5 and lost my tower by the 15th minute mark, at the same time our Brand was losing 1-4 to a LeBlanc and our bottom lane was 3 kills ahead because our jungler was camping their lane. All in all a soon to be lost game.

I was very frustrated at that point mostly with myself because I had lost my lane. At around the 25th minute mark and since we decided not to give up I had enough farm (due to farming at my 2nd tower and having 2 gold/10 items) and started roaming, our bottom lane was still winning and our jungle was fine. We turned the game around, I’m talking absolute domination, the next 15 minutes we got 8 kills ahead, took 3 more towers, a dragon and a baron. So you can imagine that I was happy and thrilled of how we turned the tables around and we were about to win.

This is where the frustration begins, when we decided to go do Baron and establish our advantage Brand decided to go take our blue, not the best move since we had their blue warded and it was up but OK. LeBlanc finds him at our blue and they start to fight, keep in mind we were doing baron at that point, Draven throws his ultimate to try and help him and he ends up killing LeBlanc (Brand was still alive and about to get that kill himself). You probably see what is going on right about now, Brand is screaming about Draven’s Kill Steal, decides to stop playing and starts raging on all of us.

We are literally in front of their tier 3 middle tower with baron buff and ahead on items but we are now 4 vs. 5 with Brand still raging, I’m doing my best to try and explain to him that this KS wasn’t planned, he was trying to help (remember he did throw his ultimate from baron to our blue, that is halfway across the map) and he should just come mid and win this game. We lost, we played 4 vs. 5 for 10 minutes and we lost, it was too far into the game so the enemy team had a decent amount of farm. 55 minutes game and we lost it because brand decided to act like that. I was furious, I was so furious that after I calmed down I was surprised of myself. I never expressed that anger in game though, I didn’t curse or offend anyone of my team or the other team, but I will come back on that.

So we had a game that we went from disappointment, to joy and excitement, to frustration and finally to anger. An emotional rollercoaster, so many different feelings in 55 minutes of a game, not all of them good feelings, in fact most of them were “bad”. It happens; there are also games where you are so excited and happy for the full duration that you actually smile. Being able to experience all this in such a short (and sometimes even less) time is something that not many games can offer.

I said earlier that I will come back to me being angered in that game. Anger is a human emotion; it is natural to feel anger in a game. You will see a lot of articles or arguments telling you to “don’t rage, it’s a game”, if you are like me then you know that is a game, but a game like any other activity requires time and effort. I do not feel anger because I just lost (even though I hate losing) I feel anger because someone wasted my time, my efforts and took the joy out of my game. “Anger is an emotion related to one's psychological interpretation of having been offended, wronged or denied and a tendency to react through retaliation”. This is how anger is defined.

So feeling anger is OK, the part that is not OK is the last word of the above definition. Retaliation. That is what you should avoid, do not retaliate in game, do not talk about someone’s family, himself or insult anyone even if he is the cause of your mishaps. Do not become that person that just insulted you, try to channel and manage that anger elsewhere, use it to kill the enemy team and move your team forward, use it as fuel to become better at the game. In time you will see that you rage less and react better to people. Ignore the one that is trying to get under your skin and move forward. It works.

You will experience many situations in League of Legends, some good, some bad, some great. You will go through many emotions daily, manage those emotions, use them to get better, use them to move forward. I understand that some of you may think that I am overanalyzing a game, well a game is a form of art, a way to intellectual growth, much like a book or a movie or a song. It can teach you many things, so use every experience to learn.