“You can never end on a loss.”
That was our reasoning when we played League of Legends and lost, only to spend hours more playing the multiplayer game in search of victory. Whether we won or lost, we continued to queue up for another game even if one of us was tired.
Sadly, our skills for the game aren’t the best, but that contributes to half the fun. We’ve learned all the names of 168 champions in League but somehow still don’t know all 118 elements on the periodic table.
The fun of getting annoyed at our teammates and losing motivates us to play even more and get better.
As you probably know, League of Legends is one of the most popular games in the world, with 151 million average monthly players in 2023. It’s a 5 on 5 game where you try to destroy the other team’s nexus — a large crystal at their home base.
Within the game, there are numerous game modes, and we mostly play All Random All Mid (ARAM), as it is the least stressful for the two of us. Decreasing respawn timer and walking distance, it provides for consistent fighting, respawning and fighting again.
Playing ARAM allows us to effectively skip early and late portions of the game, so we are just constantly team-fighting. It’s been so long since we have played the original game that we probably wouldn’t know how.
When possible, one of us (Victoria) likes to choose whichever champion she thinks looks the best, while the other one (Sam), prefers to play ranged champions.
One of us ends up reading the champion abilities, understanding what they do and how to combo them. The other one button mashes as much as they can, hoping to decrease the enemy health bar. The saddest fact may be that we play this game for fun and let our happiness cling to whether we win or not (as of recently, we’ve definitely been losing more). But on the off chance we do win, it all becomes worth it in the end.
Like everything else, every good comes with the bad: Playing league ups our blood pressure, while lowering our productivity. Sometimes, to cope with wanting to play league but being unable to do so because of mountains of work, one of us will stream the game while the other does homework on the side.
In sophomore year, we both started playing in order to become skilled at a degenerate game. It was a matter of principle. Through our hardships, we eventually became friends — our games now consistently consist of one of us (Sam’s) blood pressure flying through the roof while the other (Victoria) blindly runs into the enemy and dies.
Even during junior year, when our schedules were filled with exams and homework, League of Legends still remained a constant element in our days, acting as a checkpoint for our busy schedules. Every weekend, we would hop online and play at least one game. It allowed us to keep our sanity while not stressing too much about the test that we were going to take the next day.
During college applications, it acted as a means for releasing steam, exploding each other’s headsets with rants about our teammates or about college applications questions.
Now, two years later, we are at levels 73 and 261, still bickering over the same things as years before: Stupid teammates running blindly into the enemy or one of us missing the easiest skill shots ever.
At the end of the day, as cliche as it sounds, we think it wasn’t about winning or losing, but the fun we had and the friends we made along the way.
For the games we lost, it was probably inevitable. Blind teammates and smurfing enemies create the perfect combination for a forfeit at 15 minutes. On the off chance we did win, it felt as if one of us had to break our scoliosis ridden backs in order to carry us to victory.
As we both go to college, it is time for us to move on and focus on more important things and leave this trivial game in the rear-view mirror. Still, League for us was similar to being on a sports team and despite losing a lot of games, we enjoyed the feeling of team building and comradery.
