League of Legends is an online MOBA or multi-player online battle arena where you play with teammates as a team against another team to achieve victory. This game is an offshoot from the very popular game Warcraft 3 where Riot Games--the company who founded League of Legends--took one of the maps from Warcraft 3 and built it into its own world with different rules and more competitive play. This took place in 2009.
This is the most popular PC game, surpassing World of Warcraft by and any of the other competing MOBA's. Tickets to the world championship for LoL sold out an hour after they were available for purchase. There are 32 million active people playing LoL each month which is only surpassed by the Xbox users, Grand Theft Auto, and Call of Duty. More than 1 billion hours of LoL are played and each month with 90 percent of the players being male. 3 million people is the usual amount of people on LoL in a day more than doubling Call of Duty's 1.4 million. This game can definitely be classified as the most popular video game as of 2013.
This website is specifically engineered to help understand how a simple video game encompasses theories of New Media and what that means for users and observers. New Media has changed the lives of so many and League of Legends is a prime example of entertainment benefiting from the technological progression of media into New Media. Lev Manovich has surgically taken apart this new media and is forcing us to realize how the merging of the old media with the new technology has impacted our life. LoL is a "living" embodiment of the 5 theories which Manovich discusses in his book The Language of New Media.
The principles of numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding are apparent in this video game that has affected the lives of 32 million people and will continue to grow as new media integrates more and more fully into our lives. Unless we take the time to study these changes now and they way they're affecting our lives, soon we will not even be able to distinguish life before new media and the present.
That's crazy that 90% of the players are male. I'd never heard that stat before. Does that affect your playing experience at all or do you feel like you don't really notice it?
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