League of Legends is a humbling game.

I'm sitting in a cool room, the lights just low enough to keep my eyes comfortable as they dart from corner to corner on my monitor. My right wrist is an achy mess, resting on the table to support my fingers, which are always moving.

But I'm calm. I'm collected. I'm about to lose my goddamn mind if I can't get away from this tower in time and — crap, it's over.

I die and can lean back for a moment, waiting to spawn.

League of Legends, as it would turn out, can be addictive. I rush to fill my inventory with new powerful items and health potions as my respawn timer ticks down, and by the time my character pops up at my team's home base I'm already clicking away to get her back in action down the middle lane.

This is the third or fourth time I’ve played the game, but luckily I’m in the best place to learn.

Riot employees passing through peek over my shoulders as they walk to other cubicles, eyeing first the designer instructing me through my game and then me, as I break into a nervous sweat. I’m not a Riot employee and I get unusually excited every time I kill something. These people have to be wondering what I’m doing here.

Riot Games teaches League of Legends — its one and only game — to new employees, and also offers crash courses to the families of those who work for them. Learning to play, and love, League of Legends is a large part of the company’s culture. It’s rare they invite the press into this process, but here we are.

I feel like I’ve infiltrated some secret club where I don’t know the rules.

This is my first time playing a MOBA, any MOBA, in a serious way. Lucky for me I’m being taught the basics at the offices of a company that has created what may be the most popular game of all time.

Muscle memory Chris Cantrell, associate producer for creative development at Riot, put me through my paces as I settled into one of Riot headquarters' many play rooms, a cozy bank of computers nestled into a glass-walled cube decorated with numerous plaques celebrating the champions of Riot's in-house tournaments. Education starts simply: The first thing players do is choose a champion, the character they will control in combat. There are currently close to 120 different champions to buy, but players can pick from a limited pool of free champions which rotate regularly. You can pay for perpetual access to as many champions as you’d like, or put some money towards skins that change how those characters look. Codes for free and limited edition skins are huge hits at shows like PAX, but these only change how the characters look, nothing else. League of Legends is the rare free-to-play game that doesn’t hide needed upgrades behind a paywall. Words to live by ADC, Attack damage carry, or carry, or marksman: A champion with a high auto-attack damage and low defense, are great at "carrying" teams through-late games as their passive abilities scale up with their stats. Support: An advanced role, typically played as sitting back and trying to protect the ADC. Usually they do it so that an ADC can get a lot of gold. Support champions will directly aid the team with shields, buffs and other such things. Jungler: A champion without a lane that goes around killing all of the minions and larger boss creatures hiding in the forest. Now you have someone who at any point can jump out of the bushes and attack the other team. Eventually, experienced junglers can plow through minion groups quickly. CC: Crowd control, limiting the number of minion groups currently active. Leashing: Helping the jungler get his first buff more quickly. Example: All players crowd around a map monster (like Baron), attack it down to half it health or less and let the jungler kill it and get the final kill for buffs and gold. Getting this buff earlier on will make it easier for the jungler to route out and kill enemies in the forest and other minions because the jungler's level is higher. Farming: Killing minions forever and ever to get experience. Gank: Ambushing unsuspecting enemies. Each champion has four main abilities — one of which is their most powerful ultimate ability — and most have one passive ability. Cantrell explained that some earlier champions didn't have this ultimate ability, but over time the team realized that playing a hero without a super special powerful attack "just wasn't fun." As it would turn out, I would come to be a huge fan of these ultimates — just don't do what I did and spam them whenever you could. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Champions’ four abilities are mapped to the Q, W, E and R keys, where your left hand will sit during your matches. Most keyboard users rest our fingers on WASD when we sit at our gaming PCs. League of Legends is spoken in the language of QWER. You have to retrain your muscle memory from years of shooters and RTS games to play well. It began to feel like a shopping simulator. This is how basic, and how different, it can be to play MOBAs. Everything from your hand position on up has to change if you’re coming from any other genre. The D and F keys give you access to your magic, or Summoner spells, which can do things like help you move faster or heal. Both of these I did frequently, and also messed up frequently. I'd power-run in the wrong direction or not heal quickly enough. I made a mess of my first few games, but my teachers were patient. They were used to seeing people rid themselves of the skills of other genres, and slowly pick up the skills of League of Legends. Each ability has a cooldown period, which means after its use it takes time to recharge, although you can buy items to lessen the amount of time this takes. Items can be purchased at your team's base with gold, and can actually do pretty much anything, from granting speed boosts to bolstering attack strength. As for gold, that is automatically accumulated at a steady pace as you play, and sneaking in the final kill on enemies will also fill your wallet. You can also shop after you've died and are waiting to respawn, maximizing your time and ensuring you can jump right back into the action with buckets of awesome new stuff. There is a command that teleports you back to your base to heal your character or buy more items. It began to feel like a shopping simulator. Cantrell agrees that this emphasis on shopping can sometimes get to be a little too much. "That's why we have a recommended tab, and every champion has a different set of recommended items. But then, after that, if you want to, you can go to ‘all items’ and sort them by what you need based on what type of character you're playing." Every match I played under Cantrell's instruction focused around this action, this constant need to get better items to do more damage to earn more gold to get better items to do more damage. You don’t earn persistent levels, nor unlock more powerful weapons; you have to build your character from scratch every round. Which is an interesting dynamic. At the end of each match the character as you’ve built is essentially dead to you. And you will die often in League of Legends. The goal is to learn how to stay alive for as long as possible. This is a zero-sum game; your death makes the enemies more powerful. Making a mistake and dying doesn’t just hurt your team, it helps the other team gain levels. This is why new players are treated so harshly online; constant death leads to a numerical advantage for the other team, a condition called being "fed." If you die often, or die due to stupid mistakes, you’re "feeding" the other team. All of this — the champions, the abilities, the gold — feels overwhelming. It is overwhelming. The design of the game can feel unwelcoming. I started another match. I understood why so many of my friends spent so much time on League of Legends as the day continued. I wanted those awesome boots. I wanted the best sword. I wanted all the health pots. Your items help turn your character into a killing machine, and a well-built character can mean the difference between death and success when fighting another champion. Players post optimal builds online, the best combination of items that will work together to buff your stats to do different things. Characters who want to kill others will be built very differently from a character who needs to survive as long as possible while holding off the attacks of the other team. My coworkers at Polygon have talked about keeping their smartphone open to the best builds, so they can peek at a cheat sheet while they play to know what to buy. More Rioters pass in and out of the room with cans of soda and paper cups of coffee, eyeing me as they walk by. I’m taking notes. Cantrell comments that I’m doing an excellent job at the game so far, that it looks like I’m comfortable with the mechanics. I have no idea if any of this is true, but I shrink in my seat a little bit, still incredibly anxious. I notice the employees hiding grins as they leave the room again, peeking sidelong at me as I celebrate winning a match against bots with a small whoop.

Your minions and you During my first match I was startled by a row of small creatures, marching past me in single file to the enemy towers. These are called minions, and they are your best friends. Minions are expendable, but they're invaluable for whittling down enemy towers and giving players some breathing room to take down other champions. Towers, the automated defenses sprinkled around the map that can kill you in a few shots, are tough to take down alone. Your minions are helpful — oftentimes my team would let the minions eat slowly away at the towers’ health, only to swoop in for the finishing, gold-collecting blow. You earn gold and experience by attacking the enemy’s minions; building up your characters by attacking minions or the other enemies on the board is called "farming." "What's nice about minions is they'll run up and help you push your characters forward, making it so that when you're trying to attack a tower, it actually gets a lot easier," Cantrell explained. "And they're very useful in the game for going up in level and for getting experience and gold." These minions will continuously attack towers, and the towers will in turn shoot back at the minions. I wandered hesitantly into the range of a tower surrounding by my minions ... and nothing happened. So I shot the tower. And immediately, the tower shot me. And I died. Dying is bad, But it’s the only way to learn. This is why playing against bots for as long as possible is so important; you’ll find the game much more welcoming when you learn how to not die on your own time, not against other human players. Experienced players will often say that the best way to avoid abuse for being new is to not be new, and the best way to do that is to learn the game, and your champion, in bot matches. I was dying often, in many ways, but I was being new in a way that wouldn’t hurt others in the game. Besides, I was in a good place to learn, and Cantrell was about to explain how to kill the towers.