Sport and show in the narrative of e-sport: The case of ‘league of legends’

Abstract

e-sports have stablished themselves in the leisure and entertainment digital market with similar number of followers, turnover and advertising to those of traditional mass sports. In addition to fostering individual fantasy without space-time limitations as it happens with video games, esports are articulated on discursive strategies and techniques that expand the emotional bond between the player, the sport and the audience. This article identifies and describes the evolution of video games throughout their history, the conversion of many of them into e-sports —clarifying the elements that make a discipline such us a videogame becomes a spectacle—, and focuses on the ludic proporsal of e-sports from a case study on League of Legends, the world's most popular title, whose unique narrative strategy has made it a game, sport and spectacle hybrid.