The “Boy’s Digital Club” of League of Legends

Your honor, League of Legends. Original graphic is from Ctrl+Alt+Del, a comic by Tim Buckley.

When I was in middle school, I played video games with an all-male friend group. Namely, we played the game League of Legends. I was considered “female-presenting” as a middle schooler, but I really wanted to be “one of the boys.” I attempted to do this by following the social rules of the group. I dressed like the boys in my group, not wearing anything particularly feminine. I talked like the boys in my group—even now, people say that I have a “gamer lilt” when I say certain sentences. When they insulted me as we played matches together, I would feel hurt but would hold it in, knowing that it was part of the culture to take shit-talking in stride, even though it made me deeply upset. But the more I attempted to join and conform to the male group, the more I understood that I was seen as less attractive compared to other girls by the boys in the group, as well as my peers in middle school. Boys did not find me an eligible target for romance—on the rare occasion when a girl who didn’t follow these male norms played games with us, the boys in my group would shower her with attention and affection. Because I tried to be part of the group, I was treated like less than a woman worth attracting. There was a lot of insulting, which was at the time explained away by my lack of skill in the game. Or just as being toxic, as a joke between friends.

No matter how much I tried to work around the social mores of my male friends, I was made acutely aware of the fact that I was lower than them through their rudeness, their rage at my mistakes. When a boy in the group messed up, they would poke fun but leave it at that. When I made a mistake, it was personal.  I wished very much that I was at least good at the game, so I would have some marker of value that I could offer to my friend group. But the truth of the matter was, I wasn’t very good, partially because they discouraged me from experimenting. I was instead pushed around and forced to play roles in the game that my friends didn’t want to play. This included playing exclusively support characters instead of my actual favorite role, mid lane. Out of the five roles that exist in League of Legends, there is one singular role that low-skilled players are put into—the support character.

Support characters create visibility on the map and help initiate or end fights by providing utility to other roles. They can heal, block, and buff their allies in team fights. Their main job in the early game is to help baby a “carry” character through their fragile, early stages until they are able to provide the power necessary to win. Supports are the all-around utility guy in high-level play and are extremely important to whether a team can survive or not. But in lower-level play, where teamwork and utility are often underused and winning games is determined less on overarching team strategy and rather on individual heroics, the support becomes a role to dump lower achieving members of the team onto. This is also the singular role that is considered a “female” role—woman players are stereotyped as playing this role, because either they aren’t considered to be “skilled” enough to play other roles, or because of the “female” traits that are inherent to it.

The avatars that correspond to the support role tend to have sexualized, hyper-feminine designs. Which would make sense: the traits described are “traditionally feminine” (nurturing, healing, supporting indirectly), and the design philosophy follows that. The one male support character in the early years of the game had a femininity to his design to the point that fans would often write him as being gay—which was later supported and made canon by the game developers. The main, more direct roles in the game are a form of the “dominant masculinities,” as Jackson Katz coined in his article “Advertising and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity.” Women or gay men (a “subordinate masculinity”) take the most passive (which is thus thought of as the least “skilled”) role.

Video game design must be informed by the real world, and the designers come from a culture where there are ideals of masculinity and femininity. An interesting “culture” that surrounds video game designers and mythos, especially in the 90s-2000s, is that video game designers in the US were men who were not traditionally masculine, the “geeks” and “nerds” of their time. In a sense, they were “non-normative,” as Thomas Gerschick puts it (“Masculinity and Degrees of Bodily Normativity in Western Culture”). So, it’s really interesting that the video games that came out of this generation featured white, overly muscular, military (or post-military) men who were rebelling against their social structure to take direct action to “save the world.” Think Call of Duty, Duke Nukem, Doom. The men who were making these games were not these overt masculine ideals—the creators of Doom (a notably violent FPS) all look like your prototypical engineer (image attached). But by the 2010s, which is when League of Legends came out, an alternative male form began to take shape. Instead of a “gritty,” real-world scenario where violence is permitted through military prowess, League is set in a fantasy world, where men can be physically strong or use their mental prowess as a form of violence through magic or trickery, such as the idea of a mage or a rogue.

Image of John Carmack and John Romero, the two programmers who worked on Doom.

The game designers are selling a “vision of Masculinity,” as Katz says, to the people who want to play this game and to themselves. A non-ideal man is not allowed to participate in the fantasy of attaining “masculine power” in the “realistic games” that came out in the 90s-2000s as himself. He instead is allowed to vicariously experience the ideal form and the pleasures of physicality that come with it. It bolsters their insecurity in being non-ideal in this way. They can only have power when they are like this perfect male, if they can get there. But by the 2000s-2010s, the League of Legends fantasy-style man became more prevalent. There was an opening of the male role; the “non-ideal” man, who was not physically strong, could still participate in this creation of physical agency through magical violence or trickery and deftness.

But both of these types of men still excluded women from the power fantasy of the video game realm. Female avatars were relegated to being pretty, having incredibly unrealistic proportions that could be considered conventionally attractive. While female avatars existed for other roles, woman players, as said before, played the singular support role. Men play this role, women play only this one. This also acts as a bolster to the male roles—because there is an explicit divide between the male and the female, the masculinity of the “male roles” are more edifying.

What about the woman avatars for other roles? Because of the hyper-feminine design choices made when designing a female avatar, men could play these characters safely. This is because firstly, they, as male players, were not playing a “female” role that was designed for passivity—they still had agency in their own gameplay. And secondly, the design: because of the overt “feminine” nature of the avatars, there was enough space for the player to create a mental rift between himself and the avatar he was playing. It also made the male characters and the male player seem more “male” in comparison. That explains the outrage when female characters are created more androgynously nowadays, such as the controversy over Aloy’s design in Horizon Zero West. Men can’t possibly feel threatened by playing an overtly female character, because they are aware that this avatar is nothing like them. They are comprised of all the traits they reject from their identity and are sexualized and objectified, just in case there is any threat of nonrejection. When a female avatar is more androgynous, it becomes harder to reject the avatar as being similar to the male player because there are more shared traits. They begin to lose their sense of “object-ness,” and thus forces the male player to ask: are they comfortable with playing as a character that is a “woman” but still has their own agency of physical power? Especially since not all woman characters are support characters, is it still okay to play a woman that is physically powerful and pretty close to who you are?

Women were not included in the discussion of video games or when they were, were outwardly rejected. There was a de facto “boys club” culture that surrounded video games, whether that was in the clubs of developers who created the games, the boys who would play these video games, or even the stores which sold them. You could not be “attractive” and be a “gamer” at the same time—even as these “non-ideal men” fantasized about these “perfect women” who could still “understand them,” there was a need for the rejection of all feminine traits and the feminine as someone who was not them, someone who could never be them. You could be a tomboy and play games, but it required the co-opting of male traits. In this way the gender binary was reinforced, through the design of the games being played, the culture surrounding the games, and the images and thoughts behind the narratives of these games.

There is more of a resistance to creating “gendered” games or even “gendered roles,” but game genres are still de facto gendered—calmer simulation games are attributed to female audiences (unless they’re about “male” technical activities like Truck Sim), even without labeling by the developers or the game studio. The action games today are much less violent, but still considered “male,” maybe due to their competitive nature. Gendering still occurs, but out of habit and societal norms. As the 21st century moves towards androgyny, I think that will also reflect across the games being created. Non-dualistic video game culture is possible and has existed throughout the culture of video games—just less in the mainstream than it does now. After all, games are just another form of art, reflections of the world we live in currently, and as it becomes more popular to question the gender binary, the more video game design reflects that, consciously or subconsciously.