League of Legends is an extremely popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre video game developed by Riot Games in Santa Monica, California. There are three different game modes players can choose to play: Classic, Dominion, and All-Random-All-Middle (commonly referred to as ARAM). In the Classic game mode, there are two different maps players can choose to play on: Summoner’s Rift, the largest map in the game, in which each team nexus, the essential goal in the Classic games, is located on opposite sides of the map. There are three different paths (commonly referred to as lanes) that each team of five players must traverse in order to complete various objectives (such as taking down enemy turrets along the lane, killing enemy champions,
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This is not at all unique to League of Legends; female gamers often get told they don’t know how to play games as well as males, that they’re just trying to get attention, and other similar comments. But because of the harassment females face in League of Legends, they often feel restricted to the support role and sometimes quit altogether for awhile, which is what my friend Evie Brown experienced since she began playing League: “Every game I get harassed. It sucks. Sometimes I’ll get off and almost uninstall because I find it ridiculous how much hate I get or how sexual people can be, just when they learn I’m female.” This is a common experience I myself have gone through when a friend of mine was being very toxic because I wasn’t playing the non-support roles correctly. Remilia, the female player in Renegades in the first game I observed, faced enormous amounts of harassment and hate just for qualifying for the League of Legends Championship Series: “She’s dealt with the harassment that seems to come standard for women playing video games, though it’s often exacerbated because of the public nature of the Challenger Series” (Conditt). These are problems the gaming community has tried to address but to no avail has a solution been
This is not at all unique to League of Legends; female gamers often get told they don’t know how to play games as well as males, that they’re just trying to get attention, and other similar comments. But because of the harassment females face in League of Legends, they often feel restricted to the support role and sometimes quit altogether for awhile, which is what my friend Evie Brown experienced since she began playing League: “Every game I get harassed. It sucks. Sometimes I’ll get off and almost uninstall because I find it ridiculous how much hate I get or how sexual people can be, just when they learn I’m female.” This is a common experience I myself have gone through when a friend of mine was being very toxic because I wasn’t playing the non-support roles correctly. Remilia, the female player in Renegades in the first game I observed, faced enormous amounts of harassment and hate just for qualifying for the League of Legends Championship Series: “She’s dealt with the harassment that seems to come standard for women playing video games, though it’s often exacerbated because of the public nature of the Challenger Series” (Conditt). These are problems the gaming community has tried to address but to no avail has a solution been