Sion and the Hero Complex

Allow me to regale you with a tale, fair reader, and with it, a greater understanding into the League of Legends community in specific and the Internet gaming mentality in general.

So, as those of you who know me are already aware, I have been playing a game called League of Legends lately. League of Legends is an online MOBA style game (MOBA herein standing for multiplayer online battle arena). Like most MOBA games, it is team oriented. Five (or three) players team up in order to push into the enemy's base and take their "nexus" (a simple central goal point) and win the game. The playing field is separated into three "lanes" in which the players separate and push down through creeps (hostile "monsters" or minions) and enemy towers. The nuances of the game are deeper than this, of course, but I shan't waste your time explaining it.

Anyways, a few days prior to this entry, I played in a game with my friend Hinote. Hino and I have been playing quite a bit lately in ranked games and have experienced a reasonable amount of success teaming up in the same lane together. This is a theme I would like to return to later. In any case, Hino and I were in a game a few days ago that had us in separate lanes, unfortunately. Fortunately, things were going fairly well early on. My teammate was competent and the other lanes seemed to be doing well, so I was pretty comfortable that we had another win on our hands.

I was not disappointed in the end, but the road to getting there was quite...enlightening.

So, as I said, things started out well enough with my teammates holding their own and indeed generally winning their lanes (meaning they pushed harder than their counterpart from the enemy team). Hinote was "jungling" (farming neutral monsters and occasionally coming into one of the three lanes to help out) and he was doing very well, killing the enemy in the top lane several times. Of course, things didn't stay simple for long...obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this blog. I still remember the tipping point. It was after one successful gank that the enemy, playing a champion called Sion, said:

"i give up :("
"jk im sion"

Things started going downhill from there. Our top lane player started slowly getting pushed back. At first, he was simply forced to leave the lane, but soon enough, Sion was killing him rather handily. Things began getting out of hand from here as Sion is a champion that snowballs fairly effectively. Soon, Sion was pushing hard, and I mean hard. He was in our base before we even knew it and it took all of us to force him out.

I thought the game was over here, but a peculiar thing began to happen. Sion began to think he was the hero.

"gg sion," Sion said about (and to) himself, "you carried hard."
"thx man," he replied (to himself again), "add me"
"KK <3"

While the rest of his team fought us (generally ineffectively) in other lanes, Sion continued to push alone in his own lane. Predictably, we caught on to his little ploy and put an end to his shenanigans. But he didn't seem to learn. Occasionally he would join his teammates, but more often than not, he just kept pushing his lane on his own. And mama Gacke didn't raise no fools...nor did the mamas of everyone else on our team. We continued to catch Sion, out of position and overextended. He was tough, a good player even, but all five of us had no problem defeating him every time. Once he was down, the rest of his team, which had been pushed around after having to work all game without him and was in no position to defend against us, was easy pickings.

Predictably, Sion began blaming his teammates. After all, he was so good at this game that he was able to push into our base on his own, right? He was the hero. The telling factor, however, is how Sion continued to react to how the game was unfolding. After being killed numerous times on his own by our entire team, did he change his tactics? Did he learn from his mistakes? No. He continued to push, on his own, continued to get caught alone by our entire team, continued to die. Even after his team pleaded with him to join them and win the game, he silently refused, never thinking for a second that the problem was him.

This is the problem I've been having with internet gaming for many years now. It started with MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games).The game conditions you into believing you are special. That you are the hero. Even though you are playing with thousands, even millions of other people. This mentality, which is basic human nature, carried over into first person shooters and, finally, MOBAs. Now, I have no problem with people believing they are special of course (sometimes it's even true, huehuehue), but in a team game, this is the exact wrong mentality to be going into the game with. You need to start out believing in your team, relying on them...and then you need to decide what skills and benefits you bring to the party. It is a team game and should be played as one.

It is not uncommon for someone in League of Legends to complain after being beaten by an entire team, to say something like "Hah, it took all of you to beat me!" I usually respond, "It's a team game." To be surprised that the enemy would attack you in force, particularly when you are strong and alone on the map, is to completely miss the point of the game.

My good friend Sion clearly believed himself to be the hero of his own little story. He was rarely with his team. When he was, we usually had a hard time dealing with them all, but more often then not, he wanted to continue pushing on his own, to grab the glory. If he had won, no doubt he would have, as he alluded to before, claim that he carried the entire game on his own shoulders...and when he lost, he blamed his team, even though he was never around to help them. This is a clear hero complex, and it is absolutely the reason his team lost the game...and, perhaps more relevant to him, the reason he lost the game.

When I play League of Legends, I play as a support. These characters take many shapes (I may write a blog about them soon, simply as a practice in theory), but largely they are there to heal their allies, set up plays, or control the flow of battle. They are not the champions that get kills. They are not the ones that start or end fights. Sometimes they help keep their allies alive during the fights. Sometimes they help them do more damage. Sometimes they help the enemy do less. In any case, they are not the heroes of the game. They help the heroes be heroic.

I enjoy playing support. I enjoying knowing that through my actions, someone else will experience the thrill of victory (and I may experience it vicariously through them...not that I'd ever admit it). I don't want to be the hero. The hero is the one that has to climb mount Doom and fend off giant spiders and twisted mirrors of themselves. The heroes are the ones that find out their fathers were corrupted by evil and want to conquer the galaxy. Heroes are the ones that have to take years-long journeys overseas and face trials and tribulations the likes of which we mere mortals could scarcely dream of.

You can have it.

I don't mind lending a hand. Hell, I don't even mind holding their hand through it all. But I'll leave the heavy lifting to Hino and let him enjoy the fruits of his success while I bask in the glow like the moon reflecting the rays of the sun. Do my efforts usually go unnoticed? Hell yeah. People constantly praise Hino (or whomever I am laning/fighting with) for excellent plays, completely forgetting that I put a shield on them so they could take more damage, or made them stronger, or stopped an enemy from getting to them. But I don't mind. I like being in the background. I enjoy succeeding, even if someone else gets the credit.

I don't know if it's the Internet or human nature, but this doesn't seem to be how people's minds work...and this, I believe, is the problem I see with a lot of people who play support in League of Legends. Let me be perfectly clear: I rarely have to fight tooth and nail to play support. 97% of the time (and I say that quite straight-facedly...out of 100ish games, I can only recall about three where someone wanted to play support instead of me), no one argues when I say "I'll play support" when we are chosing our champions. No one wants the job. It's boring and unrewarding and it's almost like they feel they will be unable to bask in the glory of victory when their team wins because they weren't on the front lines shooting people in the face or hitting them with a giant axe or throwing fireballs at them. Of course this is complete silliness, but it seems like this is how people think.

You'll even see people make silly mistakes playing support (arguably the easiest role in the game in my opinion, though maybe it's just because I have a knack for it or it clicks with me because of my mentality) because they fail to enter into the game with the proper mindset...to help make someone else the hero. Maybe they buy items that make themselves stronger rather than ones that make their teammates stronger. Maybe they level up skills that do damage rather than help their teammates do damage. Maybe they'll jump in for the kill on an enemy, even though their teammate could use the rewards for that kill (gold and experience) more. And I wish I had a nickel for every time I saw a support player who didn't spend their hard-earned money on wards (small, single-use items that reveal portions of the map for a short period of time...usually considered to be the support's job to get them), forcing the other members of the team to get them instead of items to make themselves stronger.

If it sounds like I'm a bit passionate about this, I am. I believe a team needs someone who's willing to think about other people first. Obviously, I believe that every member of the team needs to think of the team first...but it's the support's job to think of every member of the team individually. If that makes sense. Maybe not.

This brings me neatly back to our good friend Sion. Was he a bad player? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. He won his lane quite handily. Did his team lose because he was bad at the game? To a certain degree, yes they did. Sion defeated anyone that came at him. He pushed into our base single-handedly. But in the end, he failed miserably at two basic aspects of the game: first, of course, he failed to realize that his tactic wasn't working and continued to try and be punished for it every time. But more importantly, he failed to realize that he was playing a team game. He failed to realize that there was a reason those four other people were in the game for some reason completely unrelated to making him look good. He wanted to be the hero, but in the end, no matter how much he tried to blame his team, his team lost because of him.