"League of Legends" is a team-fighting game of the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) genre. How this game works is simple. You play with a team of four other characters, each with their own role, and you attempt to take the other team’s base. There are five different choices of role in this game, and each one has a specific function to perform. Victory is most easily achieved as long as each teammate understands their role and executes it well. They also must be able to communicate with their teammates to make sure that every person is aware of the team’s collective strategy.
Out of all of the most recent fast-paced games, "League of Legends" is one of the easiest ones to see how one may learn a lesson from partaking in it. The game is complex; there's a significant learning curve, and it's full of complexities and is reliant on your other teammates. A bad team can take a sure victory and make it a devastating loss. While there's much to be learned from "League of Legends," such as the obvious: quicker reflexes, having to focus on multiple things at once and evaluating each situation, quick-paced decision making and the whole idea of teamwork, I've chosen to focus on two particularly important lessons this game teaches: self-control and selflessness.
I’ll start with the former. Self-control is necessary to learn for any video game, but "League" is particularly important to have this skill down in. When playing "League of Legends," you must always be focused. A lapse of concentration during the heat of battle can ruin a team fight that could lose you the game, or at least give them a lead they didn’t need. "League" can be extremely frustrating. Many things don't go as planned, and sometimes death is unavoidable. But if you get angry at the game because of this, you begin to lose focus. You take it out on your teammates or opponents, and you do this through chatting. Chatting wastes valuable time and strongly affects team dynamic. If the chat is heavily negative, it may be difficult for the team to get back on the right foot after a difficult blow. The more frustrated you get with the game, the less well you will play, and the more games you will lose, which will add to your frustration. Because of this mechanic, in order to effectively play "League," you must learn to control your anger and frustration, and not let it impede your judgment.
In the real world, this is a valuable skill. In a work environment where everything seems to be against you, but there's no hope of getting other employment, you must control your anger and frustration in order to keep your job. "League" helps fortify this skill in a risk-free environment, and allows you to hone it so that it's easier to accomplish in your everyday pursuits.
When you think of video games, you don’t think of being selfless. The thoughts that dominate your play are “How can I advance to the next level?" and "How can I get the highest score?” It’s all about you, as you're the player. In "League," it isn’t about you at all. It’s about the team. Unlike many games, "League" is often not “How can I get this kill?” but rather “Who should get this kill?” The game forces you to think of others before yourself, and makes you more sensitive to their in-game needs. In order for the team to run smoothly, each teammate needs to get experience from killing other characters on the opposite team, and sometimes it's advantageous to not take the kill, and allow a friend to do so instead. There are some characters that this is more important for than others, as some characters want as many kills as they can get. These ideas, however, very much apply to the role of the Support, whose job is to allow all of the other players to get kills and take none of his own. His entire game plan is to be selfless and sacrificial.
Selflessness is a very important lesson to learn. Putting yourself at the center is a good way to make yourself miserable, but when you put others before yourself, you have started on the pathway to happiness and prosperity.
