Classics Gaming Collaborative Annual Gaming Lab & Lecture

The Ancients’ Guide to Esports Production: Manufacturing the Spirit of Competition from Antiquity to League of Legends

Led by Kevin Wong (Harvard University)

Since its first World Championship in 2011, Riot Games’ League of Legends has profoundly shaped the production, scale, and vision of esports as we know it today. Riot’s success at cultivating League’s esports scene can be traced, in large part, to an ambitious media strategy—one that has managed to create and harness a synthetic spirit of competition.

Using media to cultivate competition and market new modes of entertainment is, however, not a new concept. In fact, it’s practically ancient. This lecture will examine how League of Legends deploys, adapts, and innovates upon the same strategies of cultural production that the ancient Greeks and Romans were using two millennia ago to successfully market their forms of competitive entertainment.

While esports may represent the future of entertainment, looking back at the distant past can shed light on the timeless mechanics of cultural production: How do aesthetic decisions in League’s esports production help to transform top players like Faker into celebrities? Are there specific rhetorical strategies that commentators use to keep audiences primed for big plays and moments where players ‘pop off’? How exactly does the game’s extensive transmedia worldbuilding—cinematics, music, and now with the recently completed Arcane, television—work to generate suspense and hype for its esports scene?

The Greeks, too, sold and circulated statues, merchandise, and media based on their winning athletes. The Romans, too, hosted their action-packed contests in grand arenas equipped with the latest technologies. The epic poets, too, had specific ways of commentating on warfare that made celebrated heroes out of soldiers, and set all of their stories within an elaborate transmedia universe that gave each battle a larger cosmic significance. Employing these technologies of culture, the ancients managed to turn their competitive practices of war, athletic competitions, and gladiatorial games into some of history’s most enduring cultural phenomena—resonances of which we continue to find all over the contemporary world of esports.

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