Teamfight Tactics: The Circle of (Videogame) Life

Teamfight Tactics is a ripoff of a mod of a game of a mod that is a mode within a spiritual successor to the same mod as the second mod in this sentence.

Let's unpack that.

GTMTM '18: Laser League, *Almost* One of the Big "League"s

Laser League

In 2009, a startup game studio calling itself Riot Games released a little game called League of Legends. It was relatively well received at the time, but with constant game updates and canny business strategy, LoL grew to become one of the biggest games in the world.

In 2015, a different independent developer released their second attempt at an idea so simple it's amazing no one else did it first: car soccer. Thanks in part to a hyped beta period and a free download for PlayStation Plus members, Rocket League exploded out of the gate, and rose to also be one of the biggest games in the world.

In an alternate 2018, yet another indie studio released the final, worthy conclusion to the League trilogy: Laser League. In that 2018--one that looks very much like ours but with just 3 key differences--Laser League found success on the same level as the first two games in this smash hit trilogy, with huge player numbers, constant press coverage, and countless stream views. But we didn't get that 2018. Instead, we got one of the saddest Steam charts I've ever seen:

Modding's Mighty Influence

This post originally appeared on a blog for a digital culture class. See it here.

One of the major aspects of remix culture that Dr. Burton touched on but didn't have much time to get into is modding. Essentially, modding is digging into the code of an existing game to alter it in some way. Mods range from basic "unofficial patches" that just fix a few bugs that annoy players to complete overhauls that change nearly every aspect of the game such that it's unrecognizable from the original.

Interestingly, modders haven't faced much trouble with copyright issues, and many of the best mods have been adopted by the games' original developers and released as official content. The main reason for this is good mods sell games, and bad mods get ignored. If a mod is good enough, people will buy the original game just to play the mod, so it's in the developers'/publishers' interests to just let the modders do their thing. On the modders' end, it's good for them because it's an easy way to show their coding skills and get it out to a lot of people quickly without having to build a game from scratch.

Just like music remixes, however, mods have produced an entire subculture, and many of the world's most successful games actually began as mods. I'll show you three quick examples: Counter Strike, League of Legends/DOTA 2, and DayZ.