Masculinity’s New Battle Arena in International e-Sports: The Games Begin

Abstract

While e-sports fans and participants claim that digital play can subvert traditional conceptions of masculinity, offering alternative narratives of worth not as reliant on the physical body, it is becoming clear that competitive video games are still reinforcing certain toxic behavioral and linguistic patterns, particularly along ethnic boundaries. This chapter focuses on League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena game whose recent, international tournaments have been rife with antagonistic confrontations extending beyond the computer screen. The persistent East versus West dynamic, and the accompanying rhetoric that at once dehumanizes and effeminizes the perceived “enemy,” are symptomatic of a cultural friction rooted in notions of masculine superiority.

Keywords

In April 2014, a Chinese-based League of Legends (League) team, LMQ, permanently moved to the United States, and qualified for the North American Championship Series, sparking questions of nationality and global representation. Could a team full of Chinese-born citizens ever truly represent North America (NA) in international tournaments? Or were they “North America” in name only, forever a reminder of foreign encroachment? For a vocal set of e-sports fans, there could be no national pride, for if LMQ won, it would still be a victory for China; as GG08 (see Zhu 1) writes, “imagine if they actually won worlds … it’d pretty much just be china winning … not NA.” Formal discussions of green cards, citizenship, and nationhood gave way to disputes over less tangible measures of identity, such as arbitrary standards of “sincerity” and compatibility with American ideals. While plenty of League players did welcome LMQ as an “American Dream” Cinderella story, the team’s arrival nevertheless exposed a racial divide that persists to this day (see Fig. 13.1).

Fig. 13.1

Reactions to LMQ’s relocation from China to the United States

In this chapter, I trace the progress of a reactionary rhetoric in the League community, generated by North American and European perceptions of Asian dominance in e-sports. Because five out of the past six World Championships have featured South Korean, Chinese, or Taiwanese finalists, fans have often treated the event, and the state of the competitive scene as a whole, as a battle of East versus West, with North American and European players putting aside differences for the sake of a common goal: defeating the undefeatable giants of East Asia.¹ The hemispheric division exceeds simple patriotic fervor, and has spawned a racialized discourse that eschews body-dependent manifestations of masculinity² only so another troubling model can be constructed in their place. By studying player and audience responses to world championships, team playstyles, and player trades, we can see how the feminization and roboticization of East Asian opponents reflects an attempt to mitigate the threat that these individuals and teams offer to Euro-American hegemony , in a virtual domain where the male body—its overwhelming presence, its potential to force submission through physical strength—no longer dictates the terms of masculinity in quite the same way. In “Let’s Get Physical,” I study the rhetoric of physical emasculation that e-sports participants have co-opted and modified to dismiss the individual as an outlier, and in “Man versus Goliath,” I study the correlating rhetoric of dehumanization that allows the large-scale, group erasure of East Asian difference. Though digital masculinity—that is, masculinity expressed through digital means—overwrites some remnants of nineteenth-century race theory (e.g. the “sick man of Asia” trope David Scott references in China and the International System [2008]), it does so at the risk of spawning equally dichotomous, if updated, conceptions of East and West that encourage an ethnic antagonism veiled as nationalism. e-Sports thus functions as a point of cultural friction and exchange: where global diversity meets monolithic impulses.

My project is a case study of League culture and relies on forum posts and team publicity statements as primary sources. Though I address a range of competitive games, I choose to focus on League, a MOBA with increasing numbers of external investors and consumers, a structural emphasis on player leagues, and a professional scene less consistently regulated and systemized than those of contemporaries (e.g. Defense of the Ancients 2). For instance, the president (Marc Merrill) and other high-profile employees of Riot Games , League’s developer, frequently post on Reddit about a variety of issues and in response to player concerns voiced through the venue. The line between public and private has yet to be clearly defined in this game space: fans play with and against professionals; retired professionals become game analysts and interviewers; and Riot employees interact directly with their consumers. The sources I’ve compiled for this project reflect the same sense of fluidity. In the League community, news articles and academic statistics hold just as much weight (perhaps less) as the real-time, unpolished interactions published on Reddit and the official League forum. I approach these e-sports artifacts with critical discourse analysis and Pierre Bourdieu’s work³ on embodied practices in mind because nonacademic voices have directly impacted ongoing policy changes and influenced the competitive climate.⁴ League is a game that is—for good or ill—particularly sensitive to its player base, reproducing and embodying the underlying sociocultural struggles of its consumers through the policies Riot Games enacts in response.

Let’s Get Physical

The focus on dexterity elements ⁵ rather than on strength has led some to conclude that competitive gaming is an egalitarian space, where differences in gender and sex are made irrelevant. Ralf Reichert, CEO of the Electronic Sports League (ESL), stated that “there is no reason why a female gamer should not be able to compete with a male one, and surpass him in terms of skill” (Gera 2014). As egalitarian as this may sound, the prioritization of strategy over brute force has done little to diversify e-sports, which remains a masculine domain with a skewed gender distribution. Rather, masculinity, stripped of its traditional connection to the body, has been redefined according to intellectual patterns of dominance and toxicity that continue to intersect with a player’s physical form.⁶

The objective diminution of physical barriers to entry into the competitive scene does not signal the community’s lack of interest in physical markers; in fact, the verbal abuse that is frequently leveraged against opponents is anchored in a preoccupation with the body—with how a player’s size, race, sex (and sexuality), and able-bodiedness are represented through his/her successes and failures in the game space. In “A Silent Team Is a Dead Team: Communicative Norms in Competitive FPS Play” (2012a), Nick Taylor discusses e-sport’s engagement with “verbal antagonism,” “which traffics in the kinds of homophobia, misogyny, and hyper-masculinization commonly associated with professional sports” (257). Interestingly, were you to ask any casual or amateur e-sports participants about the presence of such gendered behavior, they would likely respond that it is more a vocalization of psychological play or frustrated insecurity than anything else. Kwak and Blackburn (2015) state that “computer-mediated communication” is particularly susceptible to a “hostility and aggressiveness” that “players themselves sometimes fail to recognize … as toxic” (209). When expectations fail to be met or failure seems imminent, players “… grow increasingly aggressive, eventually lashing out with purely abusive language” (215). Competitive gaming enthusiasts refashion standard, masculine locker-room expressions as strategy, or at the very least, a byproduct of passionate, intellectual investment. What does it say, though, about those claims that video games free us from cultural biases against certain bodies when the goal to “tilt” an opponent or to defend one’s own ego relies on reinforcing the primacy of the physical form? Toxic language circumvents the perceived emasculation of virtual loss by associating manifestations of masculinity and power with phenotypic qualities unrelated to the play at hand.

With the rising popularity of competitive gaming, there has been a return to, and privileging of, bodies that have shaped conceptions of masculinity in recent history. A player’s body—not the eyes, hands, fingers, and fine motor skills necessary for e-sports, but the body in its entirety—has the potential to debunk demeaning stereotypes of the marginalized, unhealthy gamer, and to elevate games in terms of artistic merit, activity, and social interaction (Kowet et al. 2014). Several idealized, male figures have thrown their weight behind e-sports, increasing the urgency of making e-sports events and professionals fit (literally and metaphorically) for public consumption. Former American football player Christ Kluwe (2014) drew from his background as an athlete and gamer to indict #GamerGate while celebrating the assimilation of games into popular culture; his article is an expletive-laden diatribe that notes the very hostile, masculine nature of verbal interactions in game culture. Gordon Hayward, an NBA basketball player for the Utah Jazz, featured in a video interview for League, touting the similarities between physical sports and e-sports as he plays informal League matches with the professional team Curse (Dorsey 2014). And Rick Fox, retired basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers, purchased a North American League team in December 2015, rebranded it as Echo Fox, and plans to expand it into Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Mueller 2016).

What is notable about these events is that while they serve to validate the legitimacy of e-sports as an actual sport, they do so through the filter of a distinctly Euro-American masculinity, one that has historically exoticized and effeminized Asian bodies. Asian studies scholars have long discussed the roots of “stereotypical representations and images of a feminized and emasculated Asian American masculinity” (Eng 2001, 33), tracing its lineage through the immigration of Chinese railroad workers (Cheung 2007) and further back through the effects of, and justifications for, the nineteenth-century British imperialism. Modern globalization has guaranteed the international ubiquity of this effeminized (East) Asian masculinity. Take, for instance, Jeremy Lin’s experience in (and prior to) the NBA. Jason Whitlock (2012) of Foxsports.com tweeted, “Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight” following Lin’s high-scoring performance against the Lakers. Former NBA athlete Rex Walters attributed the lack of collegiate and professional interest in Jeremy Lin prior to his draft to this same stereotype: “It’s the Asian thing …. people who don’t think stereotypes exist are crazy. If he’s white, he’s either a good shooter or heady. If he’s Asian, he’s good at math. We’re not taking him” (Reilly 2012). Both comments expose an artificial hierarchy of bodily characteristics where height and build are certainly important, but not as important as racial markers in determining gaming skill and social success. When an Asian male undermines these expectations, he becomes a spectacle, a subject of confusion and discomfort who must be simplified.

The virtual realm is not emancipated from gender or race, and like physical sports, places an undue burden on those who are visually othered. On February 21, 2016, following the impressive performance of Balls (An Le) in C9’s League match against TSM, a Redditor—“Skiipie”⁷—began a top-voted thread that banters about Le’s sexual and physical abilities. A posted picture of An Le jokingly flexing his bicep for a female fan led to a sub-thread comparing Le to another Asian American team member’s success with the “hunnies” (barteks10 2016), though the eventual conclusion was that “Hai” (Hai Lam) remained the “Whiz Khalifa of E-sports” (Promasterchief 2016). While the fans’ gentle ribbing is clearly supportive and affectionate, it is dictated by regulatory curiosity toward a foreign masculinity that has been desexualized in the Western hemisphere. This racial component is never addressed outright, but becomes more explicit lower down in the thread, when “GhostshipDemos” contributes another photo of Le , this time of his face and chest during a workout session. The photo generates a series of comments that reveals discomfort, defensiveness, and stereotypical rationalizations having little to do with the intellectual activity of e-sports. I have transcribed the Reddit thread below, while maintaining the original nested format:

• GhostshipDemos: http://i.imgur.com/NMyZPMs.jpg

  • HEBushido: I wasn’t gonna say Balls is that jacked, but damn those cheat striations are nuts. Is he southeast Asian? I know a dude who’s Thai who isn’t big, but he’s strong as fuck.

    • Banana_Fetish: That feel when you’re a 6′5″ 200 lb white dude whos been lifting for 5 years and your bench is still 60 lbs below 5′3″ Balls.

      • Aspiring_Physicist: 200 at 6′5 is pretty skinny still … especially if you’ve been lifting for 5 years.

        • Banana_Fetish: I had meningitis and was on a fluid only diet for quite a while, I’m currently trying to regain what I lost, I agree, 200 is quite small, I was sitting around 215.

          • Aspiring_Physicist: Gotcha. I wasn’t trying to take a shot at you, just pointing out that you could eat more and probably see some strength gains. Congrats on being healthy again!

        • Pachinginator: He has to bench literally twice the distance balls does …. being tall and having long arms makes lifting a lot harder for bench especially

          • Aspiring_Physicist: Trust me I know. I wasn’t taking shots at him.

        • Turboswag: Not everyone lifts to get big tho

      • Bearrison_Ford: Don’t feel bad, it’s way easier for short people to lift than it is for tall people.

[removed: section on the relevance of height to lifting ability]

• Kalesvol: yeah. hes Vietnamese.

  • HEBushido: That explains it. He looks like Tony Jaa right there.

• My_elo_is_potato: He is Vietnamese.

• KumonRoguing: Low body fat shows muscles well.

Based on the succession of comments,⁸ Le’s body is on display not because it is a body or even a male body, but because it is an East Asian (male) body. “Banana_Fetish” admiringly and somewhat jokingly writes, “That feel when you’re a 6′5″ 200 lb white dude whos [sic] been lifting for 5 years and your bench is still 60 lbs below 5′3″ Balls.”⁹ While “Banana_Fetish” intends to indirectly compliment Le , his insertion of “white” is telling. “Banana_Fetish” considers his own racial and/or ethnic identity to be deeply relevant to this conversation. Being “white” is listed as an addition to—not synonym for—height and weight. Regardless of whether his embarrassment is feigned, “Banana_Fetish” and other commenters normalize the inclusion of whiteness in a thread that is ostensibly about size differentials. It is so defaulted as to be invisible, the subject of no replies or debate; yes, whiteness is associated with masculine achievement , and yes, Le’s superiority in this respect has disturbed that foundation. The whiteness of “Banana_Fetish” is tied to his weightlifting achievements not just in his mind, but the mind of others too. Le’s performance calls into question the role of whiteness in setting the standard for international, physical masculinity.

As this thread continues, it quickly veers from admiration to qualified praise that renders Le’s body a racial outlier—anomalous and therefore dismissible in the Euro-American construction of Asian masculinities. A commenter notes that “Banana_Fetish” is weak for his size (and by proxy, his race), a point which “Banana_Fetish” concedes with additional information (meningitis).¹⁰ In other words, the failure of Banana_Fetish to equal or exceed Le’s lifting statistics is not representative of those in the same group as “Banana_Fetish” (i.e. “white dude[s]”), nor can his failure be used to reconceptualize Le’s place in Asian masculinities. “HEBushido” asks if Le is “southeast Asian,” to which “Kalesvoi” replies in the affirmative—an affirmative that offers comfort: “That explains it.” “Explains” what? Le’s disconcerting show of strength? Le’s destabilization of masculine expectations? Le’s performance is reframed through a rare sensitivity to the array of ethnicities and peoples in Asia, a rhetorical move made not out of respect, but out of the desire to exclude. The monolithic treatment of Asians is temporarily halted so that any threat An Le could potentially offer to masculinity is made anomalous. It is imperative that Le be separated from the rest of Asia (still monolithic) so that the stereotype of general Asian male docility can be protected. Le’s abilities are the result of a particular region and a particular minority group that is too specific to function as the impetus for a paradigm shift. Paradoxically, the recognition of Asian diversity, of Le’s Vietnamese background as distinct, is what maintains the Redditors’ confidence in regressive understandings of Asian physique as a whole.

The increasing relevance of male bodies in determining competitive worth in e-sports is symptomatic of general anxiety towards the intrusion of markedly different people into a history of Euro-American homogeneity. As with traditional sports,¹¹ the East Asian body must once more face speculation and juxtaposition against the international standard of (western) masculinity.

Man Versus Goliath

By discounting the Asian bodies that would otherwise demand attention and consideration, it becomes easier for the e-sports community to dehumanize and erase entire ethnicities. The international viability of e-sports is dependent on a perception of racial and ethnic homogeneity that regulates and contains “Asian” presence within the simple narrative of East versus West—of those robotic, voracious consumers versus those daring entrepreneurs who designed the game(s) in the first place, and now seek to reclaim their rightful places as creators and e-sports champions. The variety of Asian nations and individuals involved in the competitive sphere are akin to League “bots,” difficult AI opponents to be overcome rather than appreciated as global participants in the creative process.

Over the years, it has become an ironic fact and a sore point that though massively popular games are produced and distributed in the western hemisphere, their competitive scenes are co-opted by East Asian nations such as China and South Korea. Whether it is Starcraft II (Blizzard Entertainment 2010), Defense of the Ancients II, or League, many e-sports and real-time strategy (RTS) games are developed by American companies, and released first in North America and Europe. At the same time, the increasingly profitable e-sports industries in North America and Europe are dependent on the economic and cultural infrastructures previously set in place by gaming giants like South Korea and China—a fact most gamers openly acknowledge (D. Devil 2011). In his article for Venture Beat, Jay Eum (2015) expresses a sentiment common to fans and professionals alike: “the games may be American, but the associations and tournaments with the longest history, and the most dominant teams and players are overwhelmingly Asian.” While the opposition of “American” and “Asian” seems insignificant here, it is an unintentional shift that reflects a greater dialogic trend—fostered by players of all nationalities and ethnicities—pitting individual Western nations against the perceived cultural and ethnic collective of Asia. Prior to this statement, Eum had been detailing South Korea’s early, pivotal role in revolutionizing the landscape of e-sports; and yet, the moment historical background must transition to a comparison of South Korean and American gaming culture in present day, Eum abruptly replaces “South Korean” with “Asian.” The discussion of America’s receptiveness to competitive gaming is not subsumed within “North America” or the “West,” but South Korea is made synonymous with “Asia”—an entire continent. Eum is unaware of his linguistic slippage, referring to South Korea once as “that Asian nation” (the United States is never “that North American nation”), and titling the 2015 article “The Next Multibillion Dollar Tech Trend from Asia” despite referencing one other Asian nation (Japan,¹² and only as a contrast to South Korea). According to this common style of e-sports journalism, in the face of Euro -American diversity, Asia is a homogeneous monolith, a vast region wherein one nation is equivalent and interchangeable with any other nation.

Western culture and Eastern culture are poised in opposition, with the former portrayed as conducive to production and innovation, and the latter as … not. Keith Sawyer (2011) argues that the “creativity beliefs” of the “Western world” are “rooted in a broader set of cultural assumptions known as individualism”—of being exceptional, unique, and separate (2028–2029). Because individualism is equated to fragmentation, cultures in the “West” can remain distinct from each other even as they are home to an overarching set of ideologies. On the other side of the binary are “cultures at the collectivist end” (Sawyer 2029)—cultures , we can safely assume, that are non-Western, that are proponents of the unexceptional, and that are therefore monolithic. Within this paradigm, an individualistic United States will not be mistaken for an individualistic Germany, but a collectivist South Korea can be substituted with a collectivist China which can be substituted with a collectivist Taiwan. The current dichotomy of creative individualism and unimaginative collectivism originates from a long, imperial history of Asian exclusion, and is driven by a similar impulse to minimize the racial/cultural/national threats that Asian achievements imply:

Takaki (1992) writes of how white workers in nineteenth-century US, when accusing Chinese workers of posing unfair competition, described them as ‘human machines’ and ‘steam engines’ that could work endlessly. Echoing these accusations, current hostilities towards Asians often focus on their inhuman, robot-like and one-dimensional qualities …. (Kibria 1998, 953–954)

The relegation of young, Asian gamers to this same inhuman and erosive category of “robot” takes on an additional intonation when we contextualize creation in Western masculinity. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar begin the first chapter of The Madwoman in the Attic (2000) with the evocative question, “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” They trace a history of sexist thought that linked (and still links) “the creative gift” to males, and authorship—by virtue of its etymology—to fathers (3–4). To dictate ownership of creativity and creative potential is to define the boundaries of masculinity, in this case, along troubling lines of the nineteenth-century “whiteness” (Kibria). In a discourse where they are denied creative abilities, Asian nations are essentially being stripped of manhood, of virility, and of masculinity.

The susceptibility of Asian nations to generalizations by European and North American countries¹³ is exacerbated by the neutering of Asian masculinities. Discussions of work ethic are routed through robotics¹⁴ and mechanics, diminishing the human, sympathetic component of play and castrating the Asian male gamers who enact those same plays. The former Senior Editor for Fnatic (a premiere European e-sports organization whose team won the first League championship) writes, “[the] level of sacrifice that is required to become the best, is almost second nature to the Asian teams, as it is something they have grown up with since birth” (Carson 2011). Carson touches on the “strict collectivist environment” and what would be “for many kids in western society … almost unreasonable”: the sacrifice of time (“14 hours a day”), family, friends, and “general freedom.” Carson’s language is, if anything, honorific; yet his reductive description of “Asia” as a singular entity further isolates Asian gamers from “the rest of the world.” Their willingness to forgo creature comforts, to forgo society even, in favor of gaming practice is treated as unrealistic, unattainable, and inhuman. Rote gameplay is dominated by an invasion of hive-minded, homogenized Asian drones who are not quite male, and, as I will soon show, not quite American either.

The emasculation of Asian players sublimates anxieties manifesting from a threatened, Euro -American masculinity into xenophobic nationalism. Rather than confronting the ways in which South Korea and China destabilize confidence in a specific type of aggressive, male power—largely derived from, and bolstered by, imperialist race theories—players and fans are free to reframe the conversation in terms of nationalism and patriotism. With help from the underdog trope, “Asia” serves as an immovable, technically skilled behemoth that ultimately dominates the landscape of professional gaming. Until the World championships every year, the primary, heated rivalry is North America versus Europe; with a quick Google, you can find no shortage of “EU > NA” jokes—but enter South Korea, enter China, and the map reorients itself. Now, North America and Europe must band together¹⁵ to topple the Goliath that is Asia.

To return to the beginning of my chapter then, the explosive responses to LMQ’s 2014 entrance into the American League scene are the underlying dynamics of international e-sports laid bare. While LMQ competed its way from the bottom NA tier all the way up to the North American League of Legends Championship Series, many fans felt that this alone did not fully address what it means to represent the United States and NA. Of course, neither did learning English, streaming personal team moments, or sharing stories to the public. When friendlier, progressive voices cited the American dream, this also failed to placate those who claimed that a formerly Chinese team full of Chinese nationals could never be North American. This resentment bled into various playoffs, when LMQ was repeatedly “booed” for defeating other NA teams. During one memorable case, the audience for LMQ’s match against Complexity Black began chanting “USA USA”—which in itself was, sadly, not unusual for LMQ—when “Brokenshard” (Ram Djemal) defeated an LMQ player. The sportscaster , “Phreak” (David Turley), ironically and laughingly comments, “They are USA chants for the Israeli jungler” (LoL Esports 2014, 11:00). His observation immediately cut short the jingoistic shouts as it was intended to; however, it also highlights the hypocritical racism at play. How is an Israeli national any more “USA”-worthy than a Chinese national who may or may not apply for American citizenship (a fact that was indeterminate at the time)? What does Ram Djemal have that Zhou Qi-Lin does not?

Because the members of LMQ are treated as inherently othered, with humanity and masculinity erased, they cannot be comfortably assimilated into the American identity. Whereas Djemal’s passing whiteness preserves his status as person, “Asian” foreignness defines all of LMQ as alien. Complexity Black is/was hardly the only League team with non-American players. There is, for instance, Evil Geniuses (EG), whose starting roster during this same period of time featured a single American: Eugene Park; however, the distinct lack of American nationals on EG did not catalyze a debate over tournament eligibility rules and concerns over representation. North American teams composed primarily of Asian American players are legitimate. NA teams that undergo extensive “boot camp” training sessions in East Asia are still NA. NA teams with European players face the occasional snide remark from other Europeans, and little else. It is when standard (re: Western) conceptions of masculinity cannot be directly credited for an athlete’s abilities and e-sports dominance, when alternate, drastically different cultures of masculinity prove just as effective at earning recognition and respect, that a default to the Asian monolith narrative is triggered (see Fig. 13.2).

Fig. 13.2

Swedish player Dennis Johnsen changes his in-game name to “Taipeichingchong”

The damaging effects of such a dehumanizing process were made abundantly clear in the months after the LMQ debacle. During the 2014 World Championships, a Danish professional player Dennis Johnsen changed his in-game name from “Svenskeren” to “Taipeichingchong” while on the Taiwanese server, chatting with a Taiwanese fan. In doing so, Johnsen invokes an old, racial insult¹⁶ that at once condemns “DiexOxO” for being part of an unintelligible culture, and mocks “DiexOxO” for his ignorance of the humiliation he is suffering. It is telling that while under the world spotlight, Johnsen did not seem to consider the consequences of such an action against one of the championship’s host countries. Yes. Dennis Johnsen, who would soon be in Taipei, Taiwan, for the playoffs, had no qualms about using his public account to insult a Taiwanese fan. Part of this can be attributed to teenaged folly, but I argue that a larger part is the result of masculinity—of a privileged, Euro-American masculinity that has little understanding of, and respect for, Asian masculinities. The interaction shown in Zhu 2 indicates that Johnsen reads a normal display of fan worship as East Asian submission and docility, perceiving himself to be the aggressor who has stripped masculine pride and power from “DiexOxO.” The backlash that immediately followed was thus unexpected. Unsurprisingly, the “Official apology from SK Gaming [Johnsen’s organization]” registers confusion and fails to confront the lack of humanity with which Johnsen viewed the Taiwanese fan: “We want to sincerely apologise officially for our players [sic] actions and as an organisation to anyone who felt or feels offended …. Even though we understand Svenskerens [sic] actions today were not meant to harm or disrespect anyone, they caused people feeling [sic] offended and therefore go against one of the core arguments SK Gaming is standing [sic] for” (Müller 2014). There is a sense of bewilderment, as though the writer is wondering why an ostensibly quiet group of people might have reacted so negatively, and why that reaction could be warranted.

League’s tumultuous year concluded with little fanfare. LMQ tied for the 12th place at Worlds and was rebranded as Team Impulse. Dennis Johnsen faced a temporary fine and suspension—and now plays for an American team (this despite the amount of American fans who roundly condemned Johnsen’s actions). In other words, while these incidents might have exposed festering issues of masculinity and race, they did not motivate any immediate changes. “Asia” is still the goliath of competitive gaming and its players, neutered, emotionless drones.

Conclusion

LMQ’s presence in North America correlates with the late 2014 implementation of a new “interregional movement policy” (Allen 2014). Teams can now have no more than two “non-resident” starters so that the majority (three) of the starting members will be “local.” Proof of residency requires government documents of some kind, and regular habitation within that region. This policy is a product of multiple factors, not just LMQ and teams like Evi l Geniuses. Rather, the global nature of competitive gaming has led to player trading on an international scale rarely seen in other sports. In an effort to foster local talent, Riot Games is curtailing such movements, which most directly impacts South Korean drafts (the most coveted) and the regions that depend on them. The United States is among those countries that have strengthened their e-sports position through East Asian drafts. There are benefits to the policy, of course. Countries with greater funding (such as the United States) cannot create an unbeatable team simply by luring the best players from around the world with outrageous salaries; and regional e-sports culture can be strengthened and promoted. However, less restricted trade could have, over time, helped dissolve the national/ethnic boundaries that encourage international antagonism; importing players raises regional standards to match global ones, as some have argued in the case of LMQ; most importantly, international player trades involve the open exchange of disparate skills, strategies, and cultures. The updated “interregional movement policy” limits cross-pollination, and implies that there is an insurmountable difference dividing local/regional playstyles from foreign ones. As I have shown, even when this policy did not exist, North America displayed a disproportionate discomfort toward East Asian player presence (as opposed to European presence). The 2014 “interregional movement policy” reinforces the either/or dilemma, suggesting that there is either the active preservation of local gameplay or the absolute surrender to foreign influences.

The discourse that motivated Riot to institute the “interregional movement policy” has shifted into a new, more introspective phase that may yet be reflected in future game changes. On October 29, the 2016 League of Legends season ended with SK Telecom T1 (a South Korean team) defending its title as the reigning World Champion against Samsung Galaxy (another South Korean team). North America’s and Europe’s teams performed poorly despite repeated claims—made mostly in jest by fans and professionals—that “the gap is closing.” While this infamous “gap” dividing East and West has been standard fare in popular discussions of League’s competitive scene for years, Season 6 involved Redditors explicitly confronting the problematic behaviors and rhetoric that stemmed from such divisive depictions of League’s professional teams. In very highly upvoted Reddit threads,¹⁷ contributors initiated discussions ranging from the disrespectful booing of a South Korean team competing in the United States (Kim 2016) to the lovability of the rookie South Korean player, “Peanut” (IM_12_YRS_OLD 2016). Most noticeably, a Redditor chose to comment on the sense of resentment and injured pride that was tainting the North American and European fan reactions to the progression of the tournament matches. Prior to the South Korean versus South Korean final, a Redditor posted that (s)he is “happy with Koreans dominating, as long as we get to see high quality league of legends,” acknowledging that others may find the matches “boring because they want western teams to do well” (Tarp96 2016). While commenters did not come to an agreement as to whether stagnation in the competitive scene would hurt public interest in League of Legends as an e-sport, or whether the dearth of EU/NA representation does indeed make tournaments lesser in some way, the mere fact that fans are addressing the issue at all is telling. With a 77% approval rating and 3369 total upvote points, Tarp96’s post implies that the Euro-American community of e-sports enthusiasts is in a better place to move beyond reductive binaries, or, to at least fruitfully debate them.

Because the landscape of competitive gaming evolves as rapidly as the games themselves do, it is important to keep in mind that neither is a static text and that the external narratives that emerge are constantly in flux. Players are replaced, teams dissolve, and strategies become obsolete.¹⁸ Even the representative pride common to most sports and games played on a global scale is complicated by the medium itself; game servers¹⁹ are currently located in regions, not in individual nations, player names and avatars are fluid—available for constant customization, and the nature of digital play reshapes standard borders and spatial barriers. Without these standard markers of difference, electronic sports (e-sports) battle lines are drawn and modified according to the protean system of competitive play unique to video games, one which hybridizes and confuses culture, nationality, regionalism, and ethnicity. The competitive scene is expanding so quickly and broadly that international gaming enacts sociopolitical forces which are not apparent in physical sports limited by popularity and geographical scope (e.g. soccer, basketball, rugby, baseball). E-sports clearly has the potential to be more geographically diverse and influential than any other global competition.