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Bridging Worlds is a series by LA-based artist and VGT author Eron Rauch about the blurred line between games and art. His multi-part essay "Demystifying MOBAs" takes an in-depth look at the game design of esports and MOBAs.

In the previous editions of Demystifying Mobas I’ve broken down some of the basic elements such as the maps, characters, and history of the three major esports mobas, DotA2 (Valve Corporation), LoL (Riot Games), and HotS (Blizzard/Activision). Now that we’ve shaken the hypothetical box, looked at the game board, and examined the pieces, let’s set these games in motion.

Bridging Worlds is a series by LA-based artist and VGT author Eron Rauch about the blurred line between games and art. His multi-part essay "Demystifying MOBAs" takes an in-depth look at the game design of esports and MOBAs.

In today’s instalment of “Demystifying MOBAs” we’re going to move on from the characters and take a look at the maps and landscape of Valve’s Defense of the Ancients 2 (DotA2), Riot’s League of Legends (LoL), and Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm (HotS). One interesting way that many MOBAs resemble traditional sports fields (and chess) is that they have a single standard map for all competitive play. LoL has added a couple of variant game types which each have distinct maps, but these aren’t used in professional play so the focus here will be on the core map.

Bridging Worlds is a series by LA-based artist and VGT author Eron Rauch about the blurred line between games and art. His multi-part essay "Demystifying MOBAs" takes an in-depth look at the game design of esports and MOBAs. Part one, part two

Wait, What’s A Mid-Fielder Again?

Moving on from last week’s examination of representation and art styles in mobas, each of the three games we’ve been looking at in the series also has a rather different idea about your relationship to your character and what it should be doing in the game. It’s important to note that in all three games, each of the five players that make up a given team will fill different roles, which are similar to positions in other sports like baseball or football. DotA2 has by far the most complexity and fluidity in character positions, but as is typical for all three games, each player will eventually come to specialize in a particular role or position.

There are unofficial subsets of the characters that are considered “correct” in each role, though there is nothing aside from poor strategy to prevent “wrong” characters to be used in any given position. At the most basic level, each character in all three games has a combination of six or more abilities. These abilities determine the characters’ usage in any given team. For instance, one character could be very fragile but have abilities that rain down damage afar, while another character might be able to only attack up close, but can go invisible to close that gap to the fragile character. Similar to a football match, games are played out strategically based on the strengths and weaknesses of each team.

Bridging Worlds is a series by LA-based artist and VGT author Eron Rauch about the blurred line between games and art. His multi-part essay "Demystifying MOBAs" takes an in-depth look at the game design of esports and MOBAs. Part one is here

While MOBAs seem quite basic, their design decisions are often focused on the interaction of small details and procedures. What can on the surface seem familiar and simple from other video games can quickly blossom into a panoply of complications in MOBAs. As such, there are innumerable places to start our comparative re-examination of Defense of the Ancients 2 (aka DotA2, published by Valve Coportation), League of Legends (aka LoL, published by Riot Games), and Heroes of the Storm (aka HotS, published by Blizzard Entertainment), but I’m going to open by examining and exploring one of the first things that any player will do after starting one of these games: picking a character to play.

In DotA2 and HotS the characters a player picks from are simply named “heroes” since they are the virtual representation of you, the player, while in LoL your character is called your “champion.” This is because in the LoL world mythology, you, the player, are actually playing as a separate but never shown in-game personality called a “summoner” who is a wizard and political figure who through some manner of unexplained virtual-reality-mind-control elects and takes control of another character in the world for each combat. This interposed (and rather meta) relationship of the player and character was written out of the backstory in late 2014, but Riot has kept the term champion and somewhat confusingly now uses the term summoner interchangeably with “player” during their esports broadcasts. It is still possible to see a number of other legacy uses of the term such as the main map of LoL being called “Summoner’s Rift” e.g. the place where summoners disagree and work out their political differences and personal grudges.

Bridging Worlds is a series by LA-based artist and VGT author Eron Rauch about the blurred line between games and art. His multi-part essay "Demystifying MOBAs" takes an in-depth look at the game design of esports and MOBAs.

“And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time.” T.S. Elliot

“Every art is produced by the tension between a series of aims and a series of resistances to their achievement…” Arnold Hauser

The triple glories of money, terror, and fame rule the landscape of the mass media press. On the rare occasions when they talk about video games, this usually means that we get to hear about the creator of Minecraft outbidding Jay Z and Beyonce for his new house, some attempt to shoehorn a troubled youth’s love of Call of Duty into his violent behavior, or the inevitable hyperbole about how Hollywood has been superseded in revenue by the video game industry.

But one curious manifestation of the American fixation on the spectacular is that, when it comes to coverage of video games, the two games that have received the highest profile and subsequently the most exposure to non-game-fans, are two of the most opaque to outsiders and the least covered by the game criticism community. The games are League of Legends (Riot Games) and Defense of the Ancients 2 (Valve).

Games can be more than mere entertainment. In our column Alt+Home, intermedia artist Kent Sheely explores the ways independent developers are challenging the status quo, creating brand new experiences, and making a difference in the world.

The video game industry stands astride a long, sordid history of plagiarism that stretches all the way back to when games were first starting to become a commercially viable industry. In 1981, a company called Holniker released Meteors, a game that so closely resembled Atari’s Asteroids that Atari attempted to sue the other company for copyright infringement. Although the court found more than 20 distinct similarities between the two titles, it ultimately did not award damages to Atari, stating that game mechanics and rules could not be trademarked and the visual appearance of Meteors was distinct enough to set it apart from its predecessor. This court precedent laid the foundation for numerous subsequent cases, in which game developers and publishers managed to squeeze their reproductions into the industry right next to the titles upon which they had based their own work.

Bridging Worlds is a series by LA-based artist and VGT guest author Eron Rauch about the blurred line between games and art. These articles are intended as conversation starters about the burgeoning intersection between the fine art world, academic studies of games, virtual photography, and video game creation. This essay follows up on his thoughts here.

We live in a world of screens, simulations, rendered representations, and hybrid media. The deluge of digitally-generated spaces are all-pervasive in our businesses, in our media, in our hobbies, in our leisure, and in our relationships. Underpinning all of these virtual places are complex systems of code and hardware that create the rules of that particular feigned reality. The physics, the lights, the textures, and even the rules governing the rendering of perspective, are all crafted to seamlessly let us experience the space as being as visually real as possible.

The virtual photograph, whether it is a screenshot from a video game or from a Google Street View scene, is particularly compelling in our time regardless of whether it features a glorious moment of beauty or a jarring glitch precisely because it is leveraging one of the simplest ways we know and share in the Instagram age, photographs, to directly explore the immensely complicated systems that produce the myriad of digital realities that swarm around us.

Games can be more than mere entertainment. This time, for a special summer edition of his column Alt+Home , intermedia artist Kent Sheely takes video game tourism to another level and goes bird-watching in Skyrim.

There are a staggering number of games that include birds as elements of their worlds, usually as background ambience or environmental nuances that most players will never consciously notice. Even in a lot of cases where birds are rendered as objects with which players can interact, these hapless creatures are dangled as soft targets that will rake in a handful of points when shot, or to provide comic relief through well-placed poops. Birds are overlooked and underrepresented as subject material and as playable characters, so I decided it was time to take a stand and turn that around. I immersed myself in a modified version of one of the most popular open-world games ever made, Bethesda’s Skyrim, and documenting its feathered fauna in a way that would do them justice.

With the mass acceptance of video games and the general rise of nerd/geek culture both in visibility and as a marketing base, it was perhaps natural that Ready Player One by Ernest Cline would be developed as a big budget studio release (with Spielberg at the helm, no less). It is a favorite of video game fans and also a best-seller success, offering both a name-check-romp through the eccentricities of fandom and a titillating peek into shouted mists of video game history for outsiders. Despite being positioned as a scion of fandom, my recent experience playing through Gone Home, with its far more complex portrayal of the way people interact with art, made me think back to all of my many experiences in subcultures, and deeply question this "beloved novel’s" vision of fandom, both past and future.

In Fredric Jameson’s book on utopian literature, Archaeologies of the Future, he proposes a nifty Occam’s Razor for science fiction. Which is that one way you can judge a sci-fi work is based on the potential veracity of its imagined version of future or alien art. Works that have art that seems to make sense for its world, both historically and socio-economically - say sculpture on a Mars colony that incorporates its barren landscapes and low gravity, or in a bug-person district whose inhabitants see and smell with a wildly different set of sense organs - seem to Jameson to correlate with novels that have a strong grasp of the multitudinous, often idiosyncratic and conflicted, perspectives and forces that come with any imagined society, small or large.

If you look at Ready Player One, it fails this test with the dullest colors. In Ernest Cline’s version of the world, there is nothing but pasteurized nerd culture and buzzing-fluorescent white corporate wasteland. Is there any thought put into what the evil corporate guys listen to while they cheat at the grand contest? Nope. Any kids making music with hacked gear in the slums? Nope. Virtual environments where you don’t have to grind levels as a class from Dungeons & Dragons? Nope. Fifty years in the future there is just 3D virtual reality based on Everquest that is divided into “planets” which are individual recreations of assorted 80s movies and arcades.

Mark Johnson is the creator of one of the most ambitious rogue-likes currently in development. Ultima Ration Regum still has a way to go until it lives up to Mark's vision, but already the game offers some of the most fascinating procedural world-generation, down to a level that is unheard of in most other games. Like Dwarf Fortress, URR's algorithms create an insanely detailed world; unlike DF, Mark Johnson's game tries to innovate the very basics of roguelike gameplay by sending players on a hunt for clues in the world's rich culture and history to "uncover an intellectual conspiracy to rewrite history in the most culturally, religiously and socially detailed procedural world ever generated".

Mark was kind enough to answer a big list of questions to discuss his game, literature and procedural narrative with VGT.