Article: Participation in a Virtual Fandom: Spatiality and Sociality in League of Legends
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Abstract
The video game industry has become one of the biggest media industries in the world and subsequently an important
producer and distributor of cultural commodities (cf. Kerr 2006; Sotamaa/Svelch 2021). While the latter can
be said for most media industries, video games are unique in their cultivation of culture, spatiality, and perpetuity.
Video games are not simply consumed, they constitute virtual realms that are interfaced, interactive, and multimodal.
Games are places of their own (cf. Boellstorff 2008). Thus, fan cultures regarding specific video games,
especially online games, often form unique dynamics of movement between spaces, distinct social etiquettes, and
activism (cf. Cronin/McCarthy 2011). Important ethnographic work in and around such ‘virtual worlds’ has been
done (e.g., Golub 2014; Taylor 2015) but not necessarily been updated to current debates around the growing economic
importance of online games, their monetary practices, and virtualised and participatory fan cultures that
develop in these contexts. In this paper, the online game League of Legends (2009-) will be used as a case study to dissect virtualized fan
culture and its unique participatory practices. In doing so, the paper complements existing approaches within
game studies with an ethnographic reading of fan materials. League of Legends is not only a popular and longrunning
online game; the publisher Riot Games is also becoming one of the biggest ‘broadcasters’ and organizers
of international e-sports tournaments and an advertiser of real-world commodities and celebrities. Fan culture
surrounding this game formed unique practices around activism and protest against actions and decisions by Riot
Games that will be examined and contextualized within the game itself but also in regards to larger shifts of cultural
practices in and around video games.
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