The e-sport of League of Legends seems to be years ahead of all competitors. Because Riot Games and their partners have now understood how to stage the stars of the game. With 2 mumbled sentences of “English” and bombastic images made with the help of the South Korean Ministry of Defense, the 26-year-old Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok becomes an action star.
This is the fundamental problem of e-sports: E-sports predominantly targets a young, male audience and needs stars that can be staged:
- One believes: The audience is actually fond of “tough, cool, ironic stars” that boys can somehow take as role models. People are interested in wrestling stars, action heroes, or super athletes like “The Rock,” Neymar, or LeBron James.
- However, the stars in e-sports are mostly relatively slight, rather shy teenagers and twenty-somethings, who might have been bullied in school, spend 16 hours in front of a PC every day, speak mostly through headsets, and do not exactly come off as very articulate. This may be a nasty stereotype, but it is true in many cases.
- Let’s put it kindly: If LoL players were characters in a role-playing game, many would certainly have fantastic stats in agility and intelligence, but very few would have a high score in “charisma.”
Faker is considered a living legend and is somewhat of a national treasure in South Korea:
LoL: Seoul stages Faker as a hero in bombastic 46 seconds
This is the solution: An example of how to ideally solve the problem is shown by the city of Seoul. Here, the world championship will take place in 2023, the biggest event in League of Legends.
Seoul took the South Korean star player Faker and staged a maximally bombastic video around him, where Faker only has to say two sentences and otherwise has to look as serious and threatening as possible into the camera.
He says in mumbled English, “This is my city” and “Not in my house” – sentences that could come from a sports star.
Otherwise: Quickly edited images, cheering fans, drone shots of Shanghai, triumph, fireworks, skyscrapers, goosebump music.
The lion’s share of the work is handled by the sound design and the music.
The Korean league LCK proudly announces: The drone shots could only be taken with the approval of the Ministry of Defense.
The trailer almost reminds one of videos that mock the “bombastic style” of director Michael Bay (Transformers, Bad Boys, The Rock), who supposedly stages even getting the daily mail as a “huge action spectacle” (via youtube).
Riot Games has been practicing this staging for years. It actually started with the “trailers” for the Worlds. Here they took the star players and transformed them into iconic figures in comic style who experience adventures and pull off crazy stunts.
Meanwhile, they are increasingly successful in showcasing the actual players impressively:
