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Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video games are a multimillion-dollar esports industry. Glitzy tournaments draw thousands of game fans to light-studded stadiums with millions more watching the streamed event, all eager to see their favorite digital athletes show off their skills and emerge victorious. For two years, I have observed and assisted several Mexican semiprofessional League of Legends (LoL) teams as they trained together, each player aspiring to make gaming a full-time job and earn big money. For these young players, training is about more than state-of-the-art laptops and playing the game; it involves a process of socialization, dreams, tactics, and the ability to communicate with one another to win.
One of the world’s most popular esports, Riot Games’s multiplayer LoL involves two teams of five players in a competition of player-versus-player combat to defend their half of the map and destroy the opposing team’s base. To achieve this goal in the game’s flagship mode, “Summoner’s Rift,” players select from over 140 “champions” (characters) for each of the three lanes leading to an opposite base: assassins, fighters, mages, marksmen, supports, and tanks—each with specific abilities and flaws. Teams must carefully choose which characters, weapons, and tools to bring to each game in such a way that there is a balance between strengths and weaknesses and attack and defense strategies. But to triumph in the national leagues, they must also train.
Warming up
“Let’s warm up together, everyone… First stretch your arms forward. Join the palms of your hands. Now take your fingers of the right hand and stretch them up…” the physiotherapist intones, putting us though our warmup paces via our computer screens. It is June 2020, and COVID-related lockdowns have forced the team to train online. The young players, already video game fans, are taking the pandemic quarantine as an opportunity to test their abilities and try to forge a professional gaming future. I am not a player; I simply haven’t accumulated enough play hours to pass the minimum level the teams require. Instead, my role is to put my psychology degree to use to support the coach and physiotherapist, who also works as a team analyst. During training, I keep a detailed record of attendance, delays, and any difficulties or frustrations that arise among the players.
Training to become a LoL digital athlete takes more than tapping away on keys. It not only means learning to play well, but also maintaining a good physical condition to promote overall health and performance. The physiotherapist-analyst continues, “Now we are going to do an exercise for our back. You must remain seated with your back straight. Now, taking your waist, turn as far as you can to the right and then to the left….”
The physiotherapist is a 24-year-old woman who started playing when she was 17. Little by little she got to know players, some of whom were dedicated to competing professionally, and heard about the work that physiotherapists do in the competitive scene. The main trainer is 22 years old, and about to finish his veterinary degree. Stuck at home under lockdown he decided to give training a go and soon discovered that he enjoyed analyzing team performance more than playing the game: “It’s actually more fun for me to interpret the graphs of what a team does, from how many times they die to how many times they reach certain objectives together. You can really tell a lot about the players just by looking at that statistical data.”
On my screen I see two of the five players on Discord, doing the exercises and following the physiotherapist’s instructions. Of the other three, one says that his camera does not work, and the rest prefer to leave it off so as not to affect their connection speed. The players are aged 17 to 24 years old and are spread out across different states in Mexico. Most of them live with their parents and are at some stage of transition: from high school to college or from college to looking for a job. They don’t know one another face to face, and yet here we are online, warming up to start off the day’s training. We will spend a large amount of time sitting and the physiotherapist reminds us to notify the team at the slightest sign of discomfort and to take a break to stretch our legs, drink water, or eat a piece of fruit. The team’s owner has plans to rent a house so that players can train together in person, but until then we watch our screens and stretch our arms, limbering up for virtual combat.
Living the dream
The aspiration to earn money as a digital athlete begins as fantasy for many players. Every once in a while, I hear someone call this “living the dream”: playing games online all day, earning money, travelling to compete in tournaments around the world, and being watched by millions of fans.
But achieving this dream also means overcoming certain obstacles, not least of which is the opinion of family and friends. The parents of one gamer think that spending so much time on a video game is a complete waste of time, nobody in their right mind could do anything useful by sitting and anxiously pressing buttons—and they are not alone. Another player is allowed to train as long as he maintains good grades. Sometimes players must choose between going out on a Saturday night or staying to compete in a small online tournament, a conundrum one player joked about by saying, “Remember that friends don’t help you win tournaments!”
The next big hurdle is realizing that training can be tedious, yet one must stay motivated to learn as much as possible. The onset of training-induced boredom is often the time when players realize how committed they are to living the dream. Plenty of young players decide to leave the team after long hours repeating a single task or analyzing past games to exhaustion. Team players, coaches, analysts, physiotherapists, and psychologists often leave the projects. Sometimes this is because they find a more formal job, sometimes because they can join a larger team with the prospect of remuneration. Such turnover in players and personnel seems part of the dynamics of semiprofessional teambuilding in the current moment. The first big challenge for a team, therefore, is to get a stable lineup in place and then help those players to develop some synergy in their communication and game play.
The team is complete for today’s group training session, with two newly recruited players joining for the first time. The first training sessions serve to evaluate new players without neglecting the progress of the others; we will dedicate the training to observing and listening to how they communicate during a game. As I have learned, coaches tend not to look for perfect technique in a player; more crucial is the ability to anticipate or understand what the team wants to do or should do at a given moment.
Let the game begin
Today the team will play three games against randomly selected teams as a kind of warmup before a friendly game. Each game lasts approximately 25 minutes. The plan is for the team to go through all three games and then get feedback. Our team is nervous—especially the two new players—because they must show everything they have learned in the past week. Coach knows that we are likely to lose the friendly, but that is not the point—we want to see how the team copes with stress and ho