Memes are amazing pieces of "insider" jokes for the internet. They seem to cement and bond the culture of the meme together more than just passively partaking of the action might. They foment a sort of camaraderie within the community who know the funny idiosyncrasies of the subject matter or have undergone the same sort of trials or pressure that the activity presents.
For me, League of Legends is the perfect subject matter for memes with so many hilarious jokes and odd things associated with it there seems to be no end. The first meme below discusses more the attitude about actually playing the game the players and outsiders have. Probably most video games could fit in the meme below, but definitely the diction is situations are specific to LoL--not only knowledge of the game is needed but also the brand, the professional level of LoL, and to have some exposure to negative stereotypes associated with the game. When I read the meme for the first time, I thought "This is so true, I have the same problem with my family, friends, and other LoLers. I'm glad someone else knows what it's like." Memes come down to empathy laced with a lot of sarcasm and wit.
These other two memes are definitely game specific. You have to have played and become proficient enough to understand why a teammate going back to base in the middle of a team fight is terrible or why you can't ditch a game part way through (you'll be banned).
There are roughly 150 characters which you can choose from in order to play LoL and each character has at least one skin (cosmetic changes to the character to make it appear differently) going up to 10 or so. The fan art from all of these characters and their skin is unending. There almost seems to be more fan art than memes. Many of these are either hand drawn or digitally done. The most artwork seems to come from three categories: the most powerful champions, the "coolest" ones, or the sexiest ones.
To create the first piece of artwork, the creator must have had extensive use of Adobe Photoshop in order to take art that already existed from the game and bring it into a collage of sorts that did not look unnatural or computer generated. It seems the more skill one has in Photoshop directly translates into how normal the picture seems without the audience being "distracted" from the technology or computer graphics.
This second image has two characters which were graphically illustrated and then played around with the background and such in Photoshop. I'm not sure if you need a separate program to do graphic illustrations or not. I'm not well-versed with Photoshop. To be appealing to other people though, these definitely took an artistic eye just as a painter or a sculptor would need. Spacing, colors, and knowing what will appeal to the intended audience is key.
Everyone discredits nerds in areas of art and culture, but I think people need to look closer at the fan art coming out of the geekier side of society. Geeks like to show off their skills with Photoshop and make "cool" looking things that will appeal both to their own sense of accomplishment and to everyone else in the community. It might be an outlet to balance the mental intelligence needed to play the game. It seems like whenever ever one person has a great idea, many more want to take that idea and build upon it or reinvent it in a different way.
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