10(ish) games for the 2010s pt 9

#2 League of Legends

	I don’t know how many hours of League of Legends I played over the past decade, but its probably a lot.  Quick searches give me numbers in the range of over a month, but its really impossible to be sure.  Regardless, I can think of only a scant few games that even have a chance to compete with the sheer number of hours I’ve played LoL.

	While technically released in late 2009, I didn’t learn about the game until 2012 when I saw my roommate at the time playing it.  As a Timmy/Spike I immediately dove in to prove I was better than him (I don’t know why people play games with me ever) and was lost near instantly.  Few games have ever captured my attention as well as LoL has; the strategic depth is insane, with over a hundred individual characters to understand with each have multiple unique abilities.  No two games of League are ever alike, and with constant changes and additions, the game has remained relevant for over 10 years now.

	For many years, playing a game of LoL was my baseline activity to any other activity I could be doing.  Many shows went unwatched, games unplayed, because the allure of LoL was too strong for me to resist.  Of course, not every game was a good game, but that’s what makes League so insidious: the twin possibilities that you can hard carry or get dumpstered (and the fleeting third of an even game, which all seek out yet rarely find).  The great games are truly great and make amazing memories.  Several of my best friends I’ve either met or got to know better by playing League.  Its nature as a long-form team game where everyone is needed to win (most of the time) sets it apart from other multiplayer games of the era, with similar games either being 1v1, too short to get to know your team, or where carry potential rules out some level of cooperation.

	Additionally, League set the bar for e-sports.  While previous games such as Starcraft and various shooters may have been doing e-sports before, the quality of League’s e-sports blew everything else out of the water in my opinion.  I started playing around the time of the Season 2 World Championship, and even being incredibly new to the game the shoutcasting and camera work allowed me to follow the games and understand what each team was doing.  Since then the game has only improved in this division, with regional leagues increasing in quality consistently and the scope and scale of the major world tournaments growing far beyond my initial experiences.

	Throughout the years, I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with League.  There’s been plenty of times where I’ve thought that the average game dipped too far below my threshold for an enjoyable experience, while others were the pinnacle of entertainment for me.  Beyond that, the number of LoL clones I’ve played has been very large, though none came close to dethroning the King (yeah DotA, you’re a bitch-ass clone of League now, how does it feel?).  With the recent 10th anniversary celebrations revealing a number of new games released by League’s Riot Games, I expect to interact with the League universe for the next decade very, very often.