It’s a little after 8:30 on Esports Elite Night here at Bartlett Hall in San Francisco, and Deft looks pretty bored. This is unusual — Esports Elite Night is a one-night publicity barnacle on the month-long League of Legends World Championships (2016 edition), and when it comes to League of Legends Deft is often the center of attention. Concisely, that’s because he is one of the world’s very best clickers — now that video games like League of Legends are being produced and consumed with the breathless urgency of high-dollar meatsports, stars like Deft are a big deal. Tonight’s a kind of promotional press buffet, held in a gastropub in the glitzy Union Square end of the Tenderloin — press and hangers-on are here to meet each other and to eat little margherita pizzas whose cheese keeps trying to escape, but mostly to get a glimpse of Deft and the other fifteen or so e-athletes in attendance, most of whom are arrayed around the room in poses of mannerist exhaustion.

They’re here at a delicate time — it’s midway through the group stages of the World Championships, and almost every playerhere is still hoping that this weekend’s matchups will qualify them for quarterfinals in Chicago. This is taken very seriously — League of Legends is a 5-vs-5 activity, variously described as video game or esport and among the most prominent of either. Riot Games, who invented League of Legends and produce the esporting event, have made arrangements for this year’s World Championships to occupy Madison Square Garden and Staples Center — but maybe a more immediate datapoint is that when you google a League of Legends term like ‘Rabadon’s Deathcap’ or ‘Kassadin’ google automatically offers details on this item, as though it were a notable film or a foreign nation’s GDP.

Like most of League’s best players, Deft is South Korean. His given name is Kim Hyuk-kyu; tonight he is 19; he plays ‘AD Carry’ for a Chinese team called Edward Gaming. Deft is famous in part for his skillful command of Ezreal, The Prodigal Explorer. Ezreal wears goggles on his forehead and too many belts and uses an enchanted glove to shoot magic bolts and sparkle spray and is possibly queer. As Ezreal, Deft hits you with every bolt and every spray. He is rumored to make over a million USD annually, for which he puts in something like 12 daily hours of tendon-shredding practice. To anyone sufficiently dedicated, reality is just a system of distractions.

That Deft — one of the best Korean players — is playing for a Chinese team makes him a plausible protagonist in the tournament’s competitive plotting. So far this plot is about something called the Gap: is it closing? The gap-antagonists are South Korean teams like the one Deft left to take the Chinese league’s higher salaries — the big question isn’t whether anyone will beat the South Koreans but whether anyone will even manage to compete with them. Deft’s talent means that he and EDG are possible gap-closers — so too are top American seed Team Solo Mid, whose coinlike white-on-black logo is about as common among the local fans as flag pins at a political-action conference. “I personally see anything less than playing in the semifinals as a failure,” said TSM mid-laner Bjergsen, a Dane with stylish social-democracy glasses who’s spent much of the pre-tournament news cycle being hyped up as perhaps the best Western player ever. But the party is about closing a different kind of gap — it is about a business case, and the physical body of Deft is less essential.

Esports Elite Night is sponsored by ‘Blemobi,’ a tech company represented in the US by only a LinkedIn page and a nice guy named Jay, though apparently well-funded in China. Blemobi’s business pitch, which happens to be pretty similar to the pitch for you continuing to read this article, is that an enormous number of people around the world are playing or watching League of Legends, and something about that has to be important. According to League’s developer, Riot Games, over 100 million people play League every month. It’s free, but for about the cost of a metropolitan lunch players can unlock additional characters or outfits. Ezreal can be purchased for $6, or earned over about 26 hours of play, but Ezreal in a time-traveling Pulsefire outfit that turns everything he does blue and hexagonal costs $25 — no earning-by-playing. In 2016, Riot Games did nearly $1.6 billion in these microtransactions, and viewers on watch-other-people-play-video-games service Twitch.tv watched over a billion hours of LoL gameplay. Blemobi’s hoping to profit from this media stardom — if you use a Blemobi platform to follow your favorite player’s #content, Blemobi thinks you might hang around for some nice endemic advertising, specifically for high-margin video-gaming equipment.

The business plan is better than the party. In attendance are three teams, a socially inclined subset of the English-speaking press, and a throng of Chinese press, many bearing complicated triaxial Steadicam setups that look far more expensive than the iPhones riding them. The apparent idea is for midmorning Chinese fans to consume some great footage of their favorite stars having authentic real-life bar-type interactions, but the stars seem not to have been notified. Deft’s leaning over a ribs-high table, limbs arranged in sleepy absence like a child waiting for his mother to be done with a surprisingly long shopping trip. Imay’s Baeme is reading manga. AHQ’s Albis, on his smartphone, is dragging small delegations of barbarians towards his opponent’s towers. One or two Chinese team-owners are here, along with their two-meter probability clouds of supplicants. Jay is just up here from Los Angeles for a day or two, but he’s eager to try out the San Francisco nightlife later, especially if anyone from the press wants to come along and maybe hear a little more about Blemobi. By the time the teams clear out, around 9, Deft looks positively comatose. He’s 19. He is one of the greatest clickers in the world. Fans in Korea think he looks like an alpaca. He is so small, and his arms so thin, that it is easy to believe that he might exist in a dimension other than our own. One of his teammates lifts him up from underneath his shoulders, and together they lurch out into the Tenderloin. Men in seven-winter coats and varieties of throe look up at him, wonder if they ought to ask for change.

*

When I flew to San Francisco in late September of 2016, I like all of my friends knew that the center was going to be holding, thank you very much. It was a country of police shootings and student loan debts and fertilizer plant explosions, a country so terrified of zombies it had fallen in love with vampires instead, a country holding open Supreme Court seats on the chance they would be filled by an incoming autocrat. We were crashing our cars into bridges, and prescribing opiates to manage the pain in our backs, and then becoming addicted to the opiates. We were getting well and getting sick again. Jobs that had disappeared showed no indication of returning. But it was also a country that was beginning to respect victims of sexual assault and insist that black lives mattered. Most of the citizens had health insurance, the planet was melting at a slower rate than before, and we’d taken baby steps to restrain the most acquisitive among us. Everyone could agree that the wounds were very deep but we were going to pull through after all.

Anyways, the autocrat was behind in the polls. What seemed apparent from Brooklyn and Oakland and Silver Lake was that we would be going back to normal. We were going to go on growing older, at the usual pace and with the usual concerns, sometimes wiser and sometimes more bitter, and we would feel well-ordered and mainly innocent. The herrenvolk would be contained, and various moral arcs would continue to bend, slowly, years at a time, and one day we’d be old and get to make the rules ourselves.

I landed in San Francisco on the last warm day of September, a Sunday. I ordered Thai Chili Lime ice cream and swam in the cold waves at Ocean Beach. When my toes were good and numb I looked up at the sky, then at the Stanford MBA picnickers who’d worn khakis to the beach. I texted an iPhone panorama to my father. I knew exactly what I wanted to say about League of Legends, which was that we ought to make time to feel a little more alarmed than we were planning to. The case was simply that daydreams have the shapes of the nightmares they displace, and that the shape of this particular daydream ought to make us nervous. That center — for whose holding we were so anxious — had we been happy there? I planned to suggest we had not. We ought to consider returning to a different center than the one we’d left.

*

Group Stages of the League of Legends World Championship are held in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium: four groups of four play their groupmates twice and the best two from each move on to quarterfinals in Chicago. There is seating for seven thousand; there are nineteen separate livestreams. On the second day, TSM get off to an early lead against China’s RNG, with jungler Svenskeren swaggering through RNG’s side of the forest, but RNG Mata keeps Pulverizing (he is playing as an enormous cow named Alistar, who Pulverizes every time you press the Q key) TSM’s Doublelift and Biofrost. RNG eventually win in 37:00, which is a poor indicator for North American gap-closure. Drawn faces in the press room. Riot Games has hired local teenagers to sit at the Coca-Cola sponsored make-your-own-sign stands and ensure no forbidden signs are made[1]. There are thousands of free League-of-Legends-branded Thunderstix. You can sit down on your folding chair in the middle of the arena floor and blow them up with a plastic straw. When you are delighted, you clap the Thunderstix together and the LEDs in their tips light up like startled fireflies. Meanwhile, you crane your neck up at the forty-foot projection monitor. The pale human faces of the players occupy probably 8% of the screen; every other color is brighter and more saturated and looks like it’s having much more fun.

Down beneath the screens, the players are seated at two rows of five computers, clicking furiously. Physically, the notable difference between someone playing League of Legends and someone practicing modern email capitalism is that the person playing League of Legends uses fewer keys and seems to care a whole lot more. Here is a paradox: video games are effortful, and almost unimaginably thymotic, but for some reason those of us who aren’t playing video games tend to find it easiest to discuss them with codes of failure and indolence. Leave the world for an hour or ten to sit in front of Netflix, or dissolve your friends at brunch for a little bump of Tinder, and you remain a well-adjusted modern citizen. In these cases we’re prepared to admit that the embodied world’s painful, and an otherwise-upstanding human may need a bit of photopharmakon. But video games make us skeptical. Look at this gamer, bedroom or basement, lit in blue flickers of ruin: surely something has gone wrong, a thwarting has occurred.

Except, listen: you can’t sit upstairs in the hastily-outfitted interview room for five minutes before someone starts telling you about their growth mentality. Take Darshan Upadhyaya, dba CLG Darshan, top laner for the North American second seed (and TSM archrival) Counter Logic Gaming. Darshan’s 21, born Canada and raised Southern California, probably descended from brahmins, the kind of twenty-year-old who can make offhand references to a possible second career in modeling or music without inspiring the faintest hint of bathos. “Mental resiliency is something that’s really really important, no matter what you’re doing in life, just being able to control your emotions and your own mental well-being,” he says. He’s been playing professionally since 2012 — practically prehistoric. “I meditate every day,” says Darshan. “I’ve been very focused on meditating for almost a year and a half now.”

Here’s ANX[2] Likkrit, interviewed for Riots’ website after becoming the first-ever wildcard seed to qualify for quarterfinals: “People don’t [scrimmage] us but we don’t care because you can improve not only as players but as people — as teammates.” Likkrit has nut-brown hair the length of his scapula and matching eyes that double in size every time he gets excited about the genius remark he is about to make, which is often. Likkrit plays support, usually a background role, with revolutionary aggression. Immediately after group stages, he contracts a disease that appears to be chicken pox and has to be chauffeured cross-country to the quarterfinals in Chicago because he’s not allowed to board a plane. Sometime after his arrival in Chicago, it is determined that he only had a rash.

Bjergsen meditates before his games. Faker, star of South Korea Telecom and so legendarily talented he can’t even really be summarized in a single dependent clause, is rumored to constantly be reading self-help books in the green room. TSM’s coach, a Minnesotan named Weldon Green — mid-apotheosis at this tournament for coaxing Koreanesque levels of regular-season performance from TSM — offers, for a $20 one-time fee, a seven-week course of Vimeo lessons which guide you in the use of mindfulness meditation to become a better gamer. Focus on your breathing, become fully aware of the sounds in your environment, and now think about the type of teammate you’d like to be. Think about your mechanical goals as a League of Legends player. On the League subreddit, even the non-meditators share near-daily self-improvement devotionals for climbing League’s 27 tiers of ranked play. Sometimes it’s gameplay, but more often it’s just advice about how to be a human being: Ignore people who insult you in the chat. Encourage your teammates even when they screw up. Always focus on what’s under your control. Find a way to contribute.

When League professionals talk about the growth mentality, what they seem to mean is that we can be a little better than we are, as human beings, and the best way of so improving is by paying very close attention to a particular worldly task. It is a language of concrete goals, mental resilience, and iterated selves. It has a religious structure — a certainty that mundane attention can have an ecstatic effect — but not a religious mechanism. It asserts a mechanical relationship between the superego and the being-in-time: I, choosing these mindsets and routines, become a better soul. It also looks for a consoling reification: I will know my soul has grown because I am more successful in the worldly task. In this way, the tournament, and the game itself, become both hygiene and episteme. Competition both makes us better selves and informs us of our growth.

One appealing thing about the growth mentality is that it is easy to practice at home. There is one core idea: everything is your fault. No matter what occurs in life, the answer is to scrutinize your own behavior and attitudes — these are all you can control. Lose once and you could have played better. Lose many times and you are failing to learn from the previous losses. Solipsism is given as a habit of highly effective people. The growth mentality is a common modern code, expected from Goldman Sachs trainees or Teachers for America. It forgives the world beyond the self: whatever pain or alienation the grower feels, their growth begins with the agreement that the fault, like all faults, lies in themselves. “From a personal growth standpoint,” Darshan says, “losing is actually way better. Because honestly, people don’t really learn that much when they’re winning.”

The biggest question is, why video games? A League of Legends professional like Darshan or Bjergsen has probably spent a minimum of seven thousand hours playing just this game specifically. There is a privilege here — the professionals are boys between about 18 and exactly 23[3], and those are seven thousand hours spent on a modern computer, connected to swift internet, with various fears about homeostasis and reproduction shoved far enough back (by some conspiracy of property lines and mac’n’cheese and four-door-sedans and new bookbags in the fall) that they were able to spend hours a day on an activity that made them no more likely to eat or sleep or procreate tomorrow. They could have turned professional at anything — in ‘Late Capitalism 2k17,’ available for Earth and cerebellum, ‘boy with seven thousand spare hours’ would be something like the easiest configuration. No one is more encouraged to locate their personal growth story in the realized world of dates and paychecks and purchases to which League is specifically an alternative. What are video games offering that the world is not?

*

One answer has to do with the risks you usually have to take to grow. Core to the growth mentality is an effort to treat everything that happens — even the defeats — as material for learning. But that turns out to be much easier when you’re not in pain. And out here in the phenomenal world, any effort you make at personal growth or achievement carries with it some kind of risk of failure, and the costs of these failures are often expressed in actual losses and pains. And phenomenal violence — the violence of striving — is senseless and accidental. It is full of illness and flat tires and stained t-shirts and financial crises. So often what you have worked for does not come to pass for reasons unrelated to the work you personally have done. Or else it does come to pass and it is only an A in Algebra, which is not the ending of anybody’s fairy tale. There is a gap here, between your actions and the world’s comment on those actions. It is almost precisely the gap that let Milton’s Satan — Mr. Sense-of-Injured-Merit — out of heaven.

The thing about video games is that someone made them to make you feel good. It is not by removing the effort. You’ll work harder and longer being a space marine or Ezreal than you can bear to work on homework. But every time you press Q, Ezreal fires the exact same magic bolt. His feet never hurt and he is never feeling sad. He always does his exact best, which means that the only thing that matters is your aim and your expertise — things you have grown. In this way video games pay enormous attention to you.

And watch the proximity of failure and reward. Here victory is immediate and gratifying — VICTORY, says the screen, and points are gained. But failure is limited and severable. Die in League and you’re back after a few seconds of gray screen, just as able as before. Lose a game and you’re invited to start over. The cost of failure in life is that you cannot try again, and that you wish to. In League the cost is that you must. Here even the punishments are fantasies. “The best thing about video games,” Darshan tells me, “was that no matter how many times you failed it didn’t really hurt you physically…when I was playing video games I could die, I could fail, and then that was it. I could use that as an opportunity to learn and grow.”

Death’s just one example. Take damage, League’s true currency. Everything a champion does — sword-whacks, ice-freezes, sparkle bolts — is expressed in terms of damage. Even death is just a consequence of damage. But what kind of damage really? Phenomenal damage is, loosely, an experience of harm that impairs our ability to recover. A little damage hurts for a long time, and we lose some capacity for action while we’re damaged. Not in League: the champions, no matter how damaged, are as fierce and able as they ever were. Imagine a world whose negative feedback informs but does not harm us, a self diminished by no trial other than our deaths. We like to say that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Usually when we say this we’re lying — what doesn’t kill us often harms us. But in League of Legends it’s something like true.

*

We are in the blue side tribush, just north of Gromp, and it takes about as long to happen as it does to read this synopsis — TSM Svenskeren, playing Lee Sin (the Blind Monk, a scooty martial-arts fantasy) against Korea’s Samsung Galaxy, dodges a cocoon from Ambition’s Elise (the Spider Queen, web tricks and poisons) and then skims in on his Resonating Strike. TSM Bjergsen arrives from mid lane, TSM Hauntzer from top, and TSM end up two kills ahead. Later, back in mid lane, Bjergsen kills SSG Crown all by himself and the molossan T-S-M chant ignites in the arena. At 25 minutes TSM leads 8–1 in kills; at 34 minutes it is over: the first real gap-closing result of the tournament and for TSM a great relief after the first day’s frustrating loss to RNG.

Afterwards, in a hallway, I interview Weldon Green. Weldon has small early-thirties wrinkles around his eyes, wears a TSM flatbrim cap, and is as responsible for the growth mentality in western League of Legends as anyone. He is the one who runs the seven-week meditation course, and also the one who convinced TSM’s players to give up lucrative daily streaming to spend 15-hour days laboring to close the gap. You can see how: he has a frank and certain magnetism, the affect of a Youtube revolutionary, a Galileo or Lenin with a like-and-subscribe button. In general he is happy to explain — but there is a certain recitative swiftness, a sense that if you’d done better research on his YouTube channel — where there is so much about practice regimes and personal care it might as well be sponsored by Goop — you might not need to ask.

Tonight, after the big win over Samsung Galaxy — evidence for a closing gap! — Weldon is something like triumphant. He can see a whole future ahead, in which dynamic Western methods overcome Korea’s decade-long head start in esports. In Korea, he says, “they took the same model they use in their business and corporate structure and applied it to esports.” Weldon narrates it as a model of linear advancement, heavy on loyalty and institutional wisdom. Coaches become assistant coaches become head coaches. “So that infrastructure comes out of the box in Korea. As soon as they started Starcraft they were like, this is how we’re gonna do it, because this is how they do everything.” But Weldon has faith in Western systems and attitudes. “In the West we’re…when we decide we want something…we find out the optimal way to do that. And it could be the optimal way is a 22-year-old who’s just brilliant beyond means. And we’ll make them the head coach. That would never happen in Korea.” Weldon connects this directly to national mores. “We have brilliance and we have exceptionalism and have talent, and so we test it, and if it works we do it…in Korea and Japan, if something doesn’t work they’ll just keep plugging away at it until it does. I think that bullheadedness really helped them out in the beginning, because they were training longer hours.” But soon, he feels, the West will catch up. “Now we’re training just as long hours and we’re questioning why would we do this…I think that’s leading to a more refined process, and I think we’ll see just like in other sports where the West has risen.” What’s attractive about Weldon is that, like most great sages, he admits no separation of categories. Esports is only another kind of striving, and we — we in the West — know how to strive.

After interviewing Weldon, I walk back to my Airbnb in the mission — south on Polk, then 10th. The downtown icelikes subside to lower buildings; gyms and gourmet groceries to mini-storage units and garages offering state-certified smog checks alongside neighborhoods of tents. The tents — like the rents — of San Francisco seem related to the kind of experimentation Weldon is concerned with. New things are tried, and the things that fail or are replaced are forgotten.

What I want to believe, walking south, is that Weldon is right: that in the long run being capitalists of the most disruptive kind will inflict on us a moral hygiene, that precarity will make us better people than we might have been. That something in struggle refines us. I can tell that story for my own life. But I also think of what Darshan had said, about how League specifically had made failure painless and, therefore, learning almost effortless. Who, I wonder, is ennobled by eviction?

After the first week of games, TSM stand at 2–1, tied for the group lead. If they repeat their first week’s performance they’ll almost certainly qualify. If they beat Samsung again they stand a good chance of winning the group outright, and avoiding another Korean team in the quarterfinals.

*

Since roughly Mario, video games been a convenient index for the bourgeois experience of life — something about striving-from-comfort. Mario and Pokemon and Final Fantasy all offered to the posthistorical administrators of the ’90s a representation of life as a collection of whimsical solvables, problems occurring on the way to the gym. It was fun to learn and grow and triumph with our friends! The MMORPGS of the 2000s, too, expressed a frictionless and ultimately victimless development-of-self — an epaulet on every shoulder and a gryphon in every roost, and all the players fretting over who got things first, not who got them at all. Growth and becoming, throughout these decades, were uncomplicated — they came at nobody’s expense and had no consequences. But the defining video games of the 2010s have been Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) like League of Legends. MOBAs are darker stories than before; they are explicitly dramatizations of inequality.

For each player, the plot of any given MOBA is a growth plot — something like a bildungsroman battle royale. Everyone starts pretty helpless, with one of four combat abilities and a little bag of gold. You buy a little magic bauble from the shop and jog off to find the combat. Your enemy’s base — a ‘Nexus’ in the far corner of the square map, across a loosely symmetrical forest and mediating river — is defended by the five enemy champions, and by rings of defensive towers whose red death-loogies kill you in seconds. You and your champion are prodigies of warfare, but for the moment you’re in something like hero kindergarten — you’re helpless, but only until you grow. The task is to grow faster than the others.

Fortunately, acts of violence are available. Every thirty seconds each team’s base spawns groups of minions. They look like pastel jawas and they waddle in gangs of six towards the enemy base. They come up to your knees. Meeting, they fight and die. Just witnessing minion-deaths helps you gain levels — accessing new spells or abilities. But if you execute an enemy minion yourself, if your bow or claw lands the critical ‘last hit,’ you get a little dose of gold that you can use to buy better items from the shop. As in the real world, wisdom is from witnessing but wealth only from perpetrating. As in the real world, the wealth matters much more.

The minions march on three paths (called lanes), and meet in three melees, — at NW (top lane) and SE (bottom lane) corners, and in the exact middle. You and your enemies meet there, in ones or twos — everybody wants to profit from their little deaths, but getting close enough to kill minions means getting close to the enemy player, who wants to kill you. It’s rock-paper-scissors, but real-time and asymmetrical — some of your abilities outdo (‘counter’) some of theirs, and vice versa, but the abilities are only available every so often. You wait for them to misuse something important, or step into a position where your abilities are stronger. Then, you consider a fight. Killing an enemy champion is worth ten or fifteen minions’ worth of gold — it accelerates your champion towards their crucial purchases. Whoever is killed respawns after a few seconds, but now the killer is ahead.

Soon, the inequality determines: whoever is ahead buys better items. Sharper swords and grimmer tomes and thicker hides. The rich swagger into lane and the poor cower at their own turrets, hoping to scrounge the minions they can. Soon one is strong enough to shove the other’s minions back and roam to other lanes or begin sieging the tower. Eventually — after 15 minutes or so — you will meet with the rest of your teams, and wander through the jungle, hoping to outfight or outmaneuver one another. The inner shell of enemy turrets is hard to crack, so you’ll want help.

More violence: in the long river that separates the blue side from the red live a family of dragons and a large purple worm called Baron Nashor. Killing the dragons — easy when unchallenged, risky when confronted — grants small permanent bonuses. Killing Baron Nashor or the Elder Dragon who spawns after 35 minutes — always a challenge, extremely perilous if the other team is alive — gives large but temporary powers, the kind you’ll need to end the game. Close games tend to end at Baron or Elder — taken successfully by the winning team, or tempting the losers into a fight they will not win.

What you are simulating is the replacement of an equal society with an unequal one. Some champions have thrived and others have starved — some rampage through fights assigning death, others tiptoe in the bushes hoping to contribute. Afterwards, you will probably want to do it again: half-hour exposures to inequality prove quite addictive. You will need to recreate the feeling of power, or wipe away the feeling of helplessness. Eventually you might count to seven thousand hours — throughout them, you will feel that you had agency. What happened is exactly the result of your choices and your actions. You will have that promised noumenal feeling, the feeling that after all the violence you got what you deserved. And, in bed that night, you will have ideas about how you can do better next time.

*

For Weldon and any American-methods triumphalists in attendance, the high-water mark is a little before 2:00 on day seven — TSM’s second match against Samsung Galaxy. So far it’s been tight: Svenskeren and Hauntzer swagger into some early deaths, but SSG’s bot-lane pair misplays and gives some gold back. SSG Crown, playing evil-inventor Viktor, is far ahead of Bjergsen (groovy time-wizard Zilean) but overall TSM are in touch — TSM Doublelift has 5 kills, 0 deaths, and 70 more minions than SSG counterpart Ruler. At 30 minutes Samsung have about a 5% gold lead — meaningful, not decisive. TSM just need the right fight.

“If I had a chance to coach them for a year,” Weldon writes on reddit later, he’d have “worked on the GO button more.” The GO button is the wholehearted commitment to a fight that can be hard making in real life: full presence, full certainty. Right then, all at once. GO. They fumble for it. Samsung get another couple kills. Four thousand gold. TSM are down to just the base. Samsung’s support CoreJJ is playing as Tahm Kench, a fat Cajun frog. Every time TSM thinks they’ve caught someone, Tahm Kench eats them and trundles to safety. “My diet is expansively unique,” says Tahm Kench. He talks the way you imagine Republicans talking when they’re alone.

The GO button comes at 37:36. Samsung press it. SSG Ambition’s Rek’sai (growly tunnel monster) burrows, erupts, knocks TSM Doublelift’s Lucian — a double-gunslinger, nicknamed Obama in China — into the air. He’s vulnerable. SSG Cuvee (Rumble, canny rat in mech suit) lands a barrage of rockets. But Samsung haven’t fully GONE — they’re disconnected. SSG Crown’s Viktor is just moseying around the river. TSM scatter backward, but survive — now TSM Hauntzer, on electric-ninja Kennen, is teleporting onto Samsung’s fragile damage-dealers. SSG Ambition burrows underneath to fling the ninja skywards — too early. A minion flies instead. Kennen’s lightning storm stuns three of SSG. TSM Doublelift and Svenskeren hurry forward. SSG Crown’s safe beneath his turret but not helping. TSM Hauntzer, near death, uses ‘Zhonya’s Hourglass’ to turn into a statue. The players’ faces vanish from the screen. SSG Cuvee and Ambition are nearly dead. No one’s hitting Doublelift. He’s in back braiding bullets. Rumble dies, Tahm Kench dies, Jhin dies. Rek’sai limps away. SSG Crown on Viktor walks in circles. A bad loss. TSM will get Baron, likely more. At this exact moment — 37:57, 5-to-2 alive, eyeing the Baron — TSM look like favorites not just to qualify but win the group. Four veer off toward Baron. Crown on Viktor steps back forward. He’s at one-quarter health, maybe. Doublelift, on Lucian, flow state, two kills — goes back in to finish things.

Doublelift is Yiliang Peng, called Peter. He grew up in Mission Viejo playing the 90s litany — Star Fox, Diablo, Starcraft — and, eventually, League. Early tournaments featured friends against friends, paid in the thousands of dollars. He played for Epik Gamer. 4th place Raleigh, 4th place Season 1. His parents were — in his words — “traditional Chinese.” Disapproved of games. In family pictures he wears silk jackets or ‘Doom’ shirts, and looks turgid in either, like he is standing up too straight and afraid to breathe. At 17 he fought with his mother and was asked to leave the house. He posted on reddit for advice on how to live with “$1400 when the IRS form goes through…the computer I built…my bike and $50 cash, $50 in my paypal.” Doublelift’s gift lives in his hands. Like Deft he is an AD Carry. Click to shoot and click to walk, again to shoot, and then again to walk. Stay safe and your champion melts the enemies, misposition and you’re dead. “He can click accurately very fast,” said Chauster, an ex-pro who played as Doublelift’s support. “That’s the best summary I can give you.” It was shade: League is a game about decisions. To be merely mechanical implies a talent unimproved by wisdom. And he’s been a poor, caustic teammate in the past. But this was long ago. Weldon has his head right — this year he’s a supportive teammate, one of TSM’s in-game tacticians, and still a threat to carry any game with clicking — as here. He’s going to kill Viktor, and they’re going to take Baron, and then they’ll win the game. America is going to win. Meditation, ingenuity and ruthlessness are, in fact, pathways to a better self.

Meanwhile Crown, on Viktor. Viktor is an auto-Vader, an inventor unconcerned by invention’s consequences for humanity. Limblike devices protrude in various directions. The champions all have growth mentalities. Viktor’s is perfection. For years Crown played only Viktor — a one-trick, the community calls it. He was good, but Korea was hard to break into. He went to Brazil, played a few months, then came back. 2016 Crown is Fakeresque in fights but can lack vision for the game as a whole. He’ll stay in mid-lane while fighting is elsewhere, or loiter in the river while his team engages. On Viktor he’s better — confident, predatory. On Viktor you’d say he achieves an untrammeled self-expression. There is nothing that he means to do that cannot be done by Viktor. Doublelift is moving towards him.

Viktor has about 1/3 of his health. Lucian has almost all of his. Doublelift probably kills Crown with two or three light-bullets —shots in League don’t miss, but they’re on a metronome, one-pause-two. Spells can (usually) miss but go as fast as you can hit the buttons — longer cooldowns between cycles, but Crown just needs one Q-R-E rotation to kill Lucian. If he hits more than one, Doublelift’s dead. Doublelift scoots forward. Crown Qs — a little flying spider-gadget. Doublelift fires a shot. Crown drops R — blue whorl of death — on top of him. Crown’s robot arm fires a laser. The laser’s too late: Doublelift’s already dead. In the TSM green room Reginald, the owner, leaps backward in his seat and punches his chair. Weldon screams in horror. Many people yell ‘Fuck!’ There are only four of TSM alive. They choose not to do Baron. 7 minutes later, they lose. That afternoon, seeming ill-at-ease, they lose to RNG again: that is the end of their worlds, and the end of this particular dream of closure.

The next morning, Weldon posts a picture of a San Francisco sunrise to his Instagram. The shot looks east, back across the bay towards the ridges of Sibley and Redwood. The sun’s a white burn in the upper right corner, about where TSM’s last shattered nexus was positioned, if the Instagram square were League’s map. “The sun always rises, even for the losers breakfast for losers. [sic] Finally made it to the 46th floor around sunrise to meditate on the last 4 weeks, over delicious coffee of course.”

*

Quarterfinals are in Chicago — specifically the Chicago Theatre, spelled out on the marquee in vertical incandescents. Inside are inch-thick carpets and regal gold-red filigree handed down from previous generations of exuberance: call it interwar treat-yo-self architecture. The crowd wear Teemo hats and Rammus hats and plod in sequence towards the bathrooms. The line for the women’s room is nonexistent.

The quarterfinals are played in tennis-like best-of-5s. First, Samsung Galaxy play the last American team, Cloud9. Some of the crowd are feeling so star-spangled they actually start booing SSG during the introductions. Whoever runs the audio for the Riot streams is apparently pretty sharp, because the booing isn’t ten seconds in before the crowd-noise channel has been muted from the broadcast. SSG make very polite faces as though they’re mildly ashamed by this, and then go on to beat Cloud9 3–0.

The second semifinal is South Korea Telecom vs. Royal Never Give Up. As per Chinese-league stereotypes, RNG are five excellent players thought to be too mindlessly aggressive to succeed. But they’ve worked hard on their DON’T GO button, and beat SKT in a tight, controlled game 1. It’s a surprise: SKT are cofavorites, and they’ve got Faker. Faker plays midlane and constantly rearranges his just-fine-already bangs and is the consensus best player of all time. But this tournament they haven’t needed him — SKT have mostly won on impeccable team play. They just keep playing correctly until the opponent makes a greedy-or-antsy-type mistake — then SKT win inexorably. RNG lose 3–1, and at points in the later games look less like a competing team than an audience volunteer at a martial-arts demonstration, a limp text on whom the Correct Violence is modeled for the other students.

Stylistically, SKT are the opposite of co-favorite ROX Tigers, who play in the third quarterfinal against Deft’s team EDG. For a long time ROX were good but a little boring — stolid veterans, stalling and hoping to win a single late fight. They won — making worlds finals last year — but didn’t inspire. Then, early this season, they replaced their jungler — a playmaking role, the one who roams around to make plays happen instead of just sitting in lane gobbling minions — with a new player, Peanut. Now ROX make plays. Some work, some don’t. Mostly they’re initiated by Peanut. Peanut has dusty grey hair that makes him look like a child psionic. He is a comically aggressive player who regularly dissolves in earnest glee when one of his/ROX’s whimsically overconfident plays pans out, and can go bedtime-protest limp when one doesn’t, and is comprehensively adored. “Every team needs exactly one player who does stupid shit,” is one press-room wag’s remark on Peanut. Since ‘stupid’ on the part of a team usually translates into ‘dramatic and fun’ for the spectators, ROX are the clear sentimental favorites among both spectators and press. ROX get a little silly in game 3, and lose to some sublime clicking from Deft, but otherwise win smoothly.

After these matches the Korean players express a growth mentality uncomplicated by the recent-convert fervency you get from the Americans. “Before I would get mad at people and sort of lash out,” says SSG Ruler, just 18 and in his first months of professional play. “But now when I get mad I think about what would happen, so I don’t do that.” Earlier he made C9 veteran Sneaky look utterly helpless. “The rest is just practice and willingness to put in yourself,” says SKT Toplaner Duke, 22, an unusually old pro. “I think it’s important to have a mindset that…I can beat anybody else,” says ROX Pray.

On the fourth day, H2k beat ANX in a curt 3–0, and I don’t get any interviews. That’s because I’m staying with my friend R. R is an artist, and she lives on the manyth floor of a grand old building on Chicago’s north side, and because she is also a hallucinogen enthusiast on the final day of quarterfinals we eat a sufficient amount of mushrooms and walk around Chicago.

Reader, if you have not had the good luck to ingest psilocybin in the company of a comic genius, the way it works is you sit around for about twenty minutes feeling vaguely warm and wondering if anything is happening, and then someone tells a small joke about somebody you both knew when you were younger, and you discover that all the vents and zippers of your consciousness have been abruptly opened, and an unusual breeze has been allowed to rush in, and is having a kind of scouring effect, and, wow, it is possible to laugh at that particular joke with no cost or consequence at all, and aren’t these some delicious cookies, and isn’t the whole world Very Good, and aren’t you a Very Good part of it, and shouldn’t you go experience a little more Very Goodness than you might be able to find in just this particular apartment?

After this, you may have hilarious encounters with such items as a squirrel, a tunnel, the single large child in a children’s soccer game, a lake, various items in the lake, Nordstrom Rack, a neon sign reading Everybody Loves Shoes except a crucial S is obscured by a pole, a smoothie place, a license plate reading ID VS EGO, and etc., and then you may arrive at the League of Legends World Championships, midway through H2K vs. ANX — but when you arrive you may suddenly lose your sense of humor, because, yeah, this is exactly how it ought to be, and this experience is at once so touching and so puzzling that you really can’t even imagine wanting to sit down with any of the victorious H2k players and ask them what they think of the current jungle metagame.

Later that night, writhing on your friend’s layer-cake airmattress, fumbling for the weird sleep of the no-longer-high, you may wonder why this is. The best thing you’ll come up with is that the hallucinogen pleases us by loosening some of our default assumptions about the rewards and punishments of momentary reality. Does that license plate matter? Is Nordstrom Rack a Very Good thing? In all likelihood not. Think of supply lines, factories, carbon footprints, bulldozers and sheetrock. The mushroom liberates its user from managing across this gap. There is no future and no history. There is only a sign, and because in the blastoff stage you heard the song ‘Panda,’ in which a young rapper made an automatic-gunfire-sound that sounded a little bit like the word ‘Rack,’ and because you can transpose to ‘Nordstrom Br-r-r-at,’ things must be Very Good indeed. If this feels League-apropos (and oh boy does it ever) then that’s because one key experience of late capitalism is a kind of chronic bad conscience, an infrared awareness that most of the things you enjoy from day to day are products of a system that’s now-actively and now-passively not just antihuman but anti-life-on-this-planet-existing-at-all, and that in many cases the more enjoyable those things are the more deeply complicit they make you in this ongoing ruination. In this way you are always dragging an anchor, always throbbing on some margin between resistance and acceptance — from this the mushroom liberates you. It is possible to experience the notable riches of the moment as minor miracles unto themselves. In this way it is sympathetic to League of Legends: both render an infinitely fulfilling and ultimately victimless now. There you feel free.

*

League of Legends was released on October 27, 2009. It was not a news event. That morning the New York Times front page ran a photograph of German vehicles in the Kunduz province of Afghanistan, a report on Harry Reid’s vow to pursue a public option in the upcoming healthcare bill, and part of a series on runaway children. Beside this, some good news — Maurice Greenberg, former chairman of crisis-culprit AIG, was building a new venture with ‘familiar talent.’ It was a fitting story — this was the autumn of the jobless recovery. The Dow Jones was up more than 50% since a March nadir, but the job situation was bad — especially among the young. That October, 27.2% of American 16-to-19-year-olds were unemployed. 20-to-24s (15.8%) and 25-to-34s (10.6%) were a little better off, but for each group these unemployment numbers — measuring people actively looking for work but unable to find it — were at or near their highest points in the last decade[4]. Since then employment among young job-seekers has recovered to the single digits, but more and more young people simply aren’t looking for work at all — labor force participation is down from an ’09 high of 74.5% to a ’16 low of 70.1%. Young Americans are less interested in work today than they have been at any time since Nixon.

Between 2009 and 2016, many video games were released. Few are earning billions today. These were also years when some of the fundamental assumptions in the American economy changed in ways that penetrated even the numerous securities of bourgeois youth. Whatever privileges and circumstances had made it possible for the end-of-historical Boy (with all his privileges and all his expectations) to expect a smooth noumenal progress through the world was gone. That faith had been securitized, collateralized, sliced in tranches, rated AAA, and sold off to the proximate sucker, which turned out to be everyone. Non-boys and boys of other colors had known for a long time that the world was something other or more painful than a venue for one’s own becoming. Boys — some boys — had not.

The average age of League of Legends players, as measured by EEDAR in 2015, was 25.9 years old. The fans in Chicago seemed about the same — most were boys or ex-boys with transit passes and opinions about craft beer. EEDAR had them an average of 40 biblical days from losing their parents’ health care. They would have been about twenty when the game was released, 19 when Lehmann Brothers collapsed. On their way to the theatre perhaps they thought about mortgages and student debt, 401s(k) and credit scores. Their generation — my generation — is a recalcitrant participant in the rituals of debt and acquisition that might have defined a past America. Maybe this is simply because we’re poorer, or because we’re tending to live in cities and pay in rent what used to be paid for equity. Most flattering to millennials would be the claim that our faith has been shaken somehow — that we’ve somehow seen that the rules of the economic game aren’t operating correctly, and that we’re beginning to feel we might prefer a different game.

But the pain we’re expressing in a game of League of Legends isn’t a very radical pain. A daydream about League of Legends is not a wish for a fundamentally different world — it’s a wish for a world that’s still denominated by acts of violence, and where only one team can win, and where the winner’s distinguished by their greater facility with violence than the loser, except just that everything is predictable and numerical and countable, and that it doesn’t hurt as much to lose. It is a desire for a system of violence that is fair and safe, especially for the violent. The expressed urge, like the growth mentality itself, has less to do with revolution than with customer service; it relates to late capitalism not as a call to arms or manifesto but as a snitty yelp review.

*

Semifinals are in Madison Square Garden. It is a sinister New York October and the cosplayers huddle in the warm grey yawn of the atrium. ROX and SKT should have been the finals but the draw is random — SSG will 3–0 H2k on Saturday, and ROX-SKT is Friday. Forbes, Time, Vice are here, curled in the Garden’s blonde press-cubbies. Inside, three banks of angled seats surround the players on a central platform, six steps high. They sit at long tables arranged in elegant parenthesis underneath an enormous cube of screens.

ROX-SKT is a magnificent series. There is a bus-sized crystal arrow traversing 85% percent of the map to win game 2 for ROX, a entire four-game pick/ban contretemps around Miss Fortune, a pirate-lady ADC with fanservice-scale breasts who hasn’t been played competitively since the cretaceous period but is somehow winning games for ROX as a support[5], and canny veteran SKT Bengi unexpectedly carrying a game on showoff champion Nidalee, who he’s practically never played, and there are moments when it feels really beautiful, related to a feeling that each of us contain at any moment — even from these limited tools — the capacity to astound ourselves with our capacity. But the closest moment, the moment on which everything depends, comes in the very first game.

ROX start out pressing, SKT absorbing. ROX make flashy plays in one corner of the map and SKT gobble up resources elsewhere. By 30 minutes SKT are far ahead on gold, but ROX have killed three infernal dragons — each grants 8% free damage-numbers, so if they stall till ~45:00 when everyone maxes out on gold[6], they’ll be ~24% more dangerous and should win eventually. Since they’re ROX, they instead decide to go all-in on Baron at 36 minutes, and (since-they’re-ROX) actually pull it off — they make it to 40, 41, 42. SKT push for the Elder Dragon, which gives a powerful combat buff. Whoever gets it probably wins.

It comes down to microseconds. ROX pile in, a little late — the dragon’s at nine thousand of an original thirteen thousand health. As with minions, whoever gets the very last hit takes the entire profit for their team. The junglers, ROX Peanut and SKT Bengi, have a ‘Smite’ skill that’ll do 950 damage to the dragon, once, from close range. The game is to smite when the dragon has exactly 950 health. Smite at 951 health and it lingers for your enemy, smite at 949 and he might just get it first. Meanwhile the entire enemy team is trying to kill you. Peanut rarely loses these but he’s got to get close enough first. SKT’s Duke and Wolf do a swaggering velvet-rope routine in the river while Faker, Bang and Bengi hurry down the dragon. Seven thousand, six thousand. Smeb skips past the SKT blockade and aims a magic underground hammer at Faker and Bang; Peanut crawls forward. Three thousand. SKT Bang fires the bus-size crystal arrow back towards Peanut — if it hits he’ll be stunned until the dragon’s dead — he’s spider-aristocrat Elise — the game detects collisions at the very back of the arrow — he rappels up into the sky just as it arrives. Bang and Faker, clonked by the hammer, wobble back into the distance. Fifteen hundred. Peanut rappels back down, skitters down into the dragon’s pit. Fourteen hundred. Bengi hacks at the dragon with his axes. Peanut gets in range. One thousand and fifty one. Bengi pulls his axes back to clonk the dragon once again. Peanut presses smite.

One hundred and one.

On the next frame Bengi kills the dragon with two axes. He never even uses smite. Pillars of fire lick down the z-axis and anoint SKT. Peanut walks a sad circle in the dragon pit. Faker and Bang, back from the jungle, kill ROX Kuro and Gorilla almost instantaneously. SKT win within a minute. Peanut holds a napkin on the way down from the stage. ROX Gorilla stops to have a talk with Smeb. Peanut wipes his fingers, and he wipes both palms, and he wipes the backs of his hands.

ROX win the next two games, then lose one, and then it is game 5. ROX pick champions who need to get almost impossibly ahead in the first 20 minutes. It works for a while, and then they start taking stupid risks and lose miserably.

What we will hear, tomorrow, from two drunk girls with a sign reading ‘looking for my ELOdaddy,’ is: “When I was watching SKT, when SKT won they banned MF, I was just like [makes a choking noise, twice], like freaking sleeping, cause that’s all they do, is strangle somebody, who, when Peanut, when ROX wins, they actually do shit.”

On the night TSM beat Samsung Galaxy and dreamt of semifinals, Weldon Green said, “League of Legends is a game revolving around errors — it’s impossible to play perfectly, and so there are forced errors and unforced errors. The more that you can force the other team to make errors in front of you when you can take advantage of it the better you’ll be.”

Personally, I began playing League of Legends in midwinter 2013, in the midst of a realization that the revolutionary novel I had been working on was not revolutionary at all. It was just bad. I was still writing it. For years I had been writing a bad novel. I lived in a scummy apartment in a fancy part of Brooklyn and every night when I sat down to work on the bad novel, my roommate was playing League of Legends. He clicked in 4/5 time and moved his head in small sharp angles and arranged his lips unusually, and he seemed to be having far more fun than I.

At this time, when I passed attractive young New Yorkers, I usually reflected on how lucky they were to still be in control of their lives. Life was a game revolving around errors; all it was ever going to do was strangle somebody. I had the sense that the course of my life — next and forever — would be determined by forces other and larger than myself. I felt that I had squandered my one chance to be an individual, and would henceforth live instead as an object, a flotsam. I played one game, to see how it worked. Then another, to do better than the first, and then many more after that.

Say that there are kinds of gap: one is between the vivid life you dreamt and the one you find yourself living. Another is between the promises made on behalf of the economy and the debts it gives you instead. The third — topic of the growth mentality — is between the self you are and the self you can imagine being. The last is between the self you can imagine and the scale of the things that self must fight. Lately this one seems to be most painful: what if our best selves are not good enough? Ours is a moment when the forces seem larger than the hearts, when it is better to be irresistible than strong, a shape than a soul, an institution than a human. In the end we are flotsam in fact. It hurt to watch SKT win — SKT, who always win and seem never to have grown — precisely because it reminded us of this.

Except, we could also say that Peanut should have smited a frame later in Game 1. A single frame — so possible. But this too is part of League’s romance. Compare the villains in a game of League of Legends with the villains in the world. The modern enemies are mass nouns: the rich or the poor; the corporations or the government; neighbors of various colors, police or pipelines or protestors, unions and twitter eggs. As a general rule these enemies are everywhere but where we are — they are out there, televised and intangible, waxing and breeding in every hour, lodged as fears in some inalterably habituated region of your soul, and you — a living soul — your great big plan is to exercise on Tuesday and cook your own dinner on Wednesday and make a phone call to your senator and be brave enough to send an email to someone you once loved, and — oh, and these are real accomplishments, but one question, reader, whatever your feelings about video games, one question is: when you consider the problems in your life, the things that hunt you into bed at night, do you feel you have the tools to fight them? Can you hit them with a magic bolt? Do they have hit points? Have you ever been just a single frame away from solving them? Do they feel that they are of the size or stuff that you are? If not, then — you might like League of Legends. You might like it more than you like liking it.

You might like that there are rules, and that the rules are the same for everyone — that Faker’s shockwave is only exactly as powerful as yours. Or you might like knowing exactly who you are and what you are for. When you are Ezreal you are meant for magic bolts. When you are Cassiopeia you are meant for poison and for statue-turning. You might like the feeling that the thing you are or will become is precisely adequate to the problems you will face. And you might like the certainty that your enemies — whether Faker or fourteen-year-olds — are exactly your own size, and want only on the scale of your own wants, and act only on the scale of your own actions, and that their efforts can always be dodged or endured or outdone. In League this feeling is called counterplay.

*

Finals are in Los Angeles, at the Staples Center. I fly from JFK and stay with my friend A, who is subletting a professor’s house. On the back porch she smokes cigarettes and discusses her graduate program. She stands on a wooden chair and picks lemons from the backyard tree. Here there is no water in the sky and everything — homes, dreams, automobiles — seems to last forever. I am sleeping in a vacant bedroom and there are pink towels and the cats are on a raw diet and on the morning of finals, October 29, there is news: Her Emails.

In America, these centuries, we have believed in counterplay. We have believed that there is always something to be done — we can tar the tax collector, or drop a new variety of bomb. A bootstrap is always close at hand for upwards-hauling. The growth mentality is something like an absolute faith in life’s counterplay. It is because of our belief in counterplay that we — Darshan and Weldon and TED Talkers and friends of Terry Gross — are able to sustain our nearly religious national belief in competition.

Another way of saying this is that Americans tend to imagine that America is a video game: a place with fair rules and fair systems, which encourages from each of us our best becoming. Here League of Legends seems to function as something like ac bible study group for citizens of capitalist economies: it is a place where it is easy to believe in the things you must believe in, because here they are true. But was odd traveling with this tournament in fall 2016, a moment of national apostasy. In the press room it was a fall of sweating turkey sandwiches in morning airports and gleaming young growth-mentalists — also a fall of ‘rigged’ and ‘crooked,’ words reflecting a collapsing faith in counterplay and competition. There was an increasing awareness that as long as America (or the world America had made) was a tournament it was only going to have a certain number of winners, and a profound fear that the wrong people might be winning. Notions of ‘wrong’ differed dramatically from website to website and from precinct to precinct, but almost all of us wanted some relief from competition and its outcomes.

For these reasons — and because it’s on the internet — I had thought that looking into League of Legends would tell us something about right now specifically. If it were not for the mortgages or the financiers or r > g, I had believed, we would not need video games at all: League, like other elements of the modern photopharmakon, must reflect a new distress, a pain we have only felt as recently as we’ve been medicating it.

But then we came to Los Angeles, for the Finals. In some manifest-destiny sense Los Angeles is the end of America, but it doesn’t feel like an end — it feels like an apogee, a brief and weightless middle. Everyone is just on the verge of being noticed, just on the verge of their own deserved becoming. Los Angeles feels most American in the performed triumph of an exciting idea over an undeniable reality. Here we still believe that the destined will always overtake the manifest. Here is where League was imagined and made — in some sense League of Legends is just a version of Los Angeles.

And so a version of America. The fundamental fact about America in the first few centuries was the durable availability of more. You can imagine the white arrivers — second sons and heretics — experiencing before their departure a sense that London or Munich or Amsterdam was too old and too owned, too full of bishops and baronets and older brothers. No counterplay — better to go somewhere else — and, look how many trees there are, and nobody white owns any of it. We’re here and willing to despoil — we can all become ourselves. Whoever gets rich over here has got to be the one who most deserves it — a tournament!

Like League of Legends, this was not a different system. It was a postponement: a hope that in New York and New London we would find fairness and counterplay that had been lacked in crowded Europe. The big American surprise was how long we managed to keep believing in this idea. Mostly this was an accident of the continent’s width — as long as there was another valley to despoil, another tribe to swindle, you didn’t have to worry about the entrenching bourgeoisie back east. Real capitalism, where you became yourself and were rewarded, had been postponed again. It was just at the frontier.

But nobody wins a tournament by being interested in fairness — they win by being interested in winning. Within a generation the American East looked just as owned and strangled as Europe ever had, and a new generation found themselves discomforted. Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, California[7]. Historically speaking America is a coral of pained optimism. The subject of the optimism is that this time — in a new and vacant country — capitalism will make us happy. The direction of the optimism is West.

But what was going to happen when we ran out of West? When there were no more tribes and no more slaves? For a while this question proved postponable — just when we’d filled up the whole breadth of the continent, we got so rich that everyone could grow in place. For a few decades just moving forwards into the future had the same invigorating West-facing feeling Americans had always wanted. And then that ran out as well.

In League of Legends or Los Angeles, it is not that we lately reached the limits of an American idea, an American economy. We have always been at the limits. It is a project of limits. True American becoming, like truly fulfilling capitalism, has always been elsewhere, over some horizon. And it is not just now that Americans have been unhappy. We have always been unhappy. We have always been abandoners. It was only by abandoning the manifest that we could ever keep the destiny. It is only somewhere undespoilt that we could keep the faith in capital.

But every time we find ourselves despoiling it. Now we are playing video games. It may be that League of Legends is a late case of America. A last step that we are taking, past the exhaustion of the West — call it a virtual West. Or it may be that America was an early case of League of Legends. Call it — America, the habit of colonies around the world — the first video game. Say for League of Legends at least that it has committed fewer killings, IRL.

Today we are desperate for a further wilderness — in San Francisco a wilderness of bits, in New York a wilderness of credit, in Los Angeles a wilderness of stories, and, in your computer, a wilderness of games. What separates us from the paradise of true capitalism, according to the new administrators, is that we have not yet been violent enough to deserve it. We must be crueler — to the poor, the sick, the earth, the other, and ourselves — and then we will be happy.

*

At the end of the tournament, the best team wins. By excitement-and-intrigue standards it’s an excellent series. SKT win games 1 and 2 easily, and then SSG win an interminable, punch-drunk game 3. The teams are seated in opaque black quarter-barnacles at either end of the arena floor — like snow forts after the apocalypse. SSG win game 4, and then it is the last game. After 36 minutes they are within 300 gold of one another, and then SSG Ruler walks up towards three members of SKT, right in the middle. He nearly dies, and SSG CoreJJ waddles in to save him with Tahm Kench — eventually Ruler crawls away but CoreJJ dies. SKT do the right thing, and then the right thing, and then within a few minutes they have won the game. Beneath blue lights they gather to collect medals and jackets from the inventors of the game.

It is SKT’s second win in a row, and their third in three years. It is a poor result for the growth mentality — SKT are the best mainly because they have Faker. When he was a teenager playing on the Korean ladder, people assumed he was a professional using an alias to practice. In his first professional game he killed four of the enemy team in under a minute. Where is the growth? In 2015, ESPN’s Mina Kimes went to Seoul to do a feature on Faker. He told her that he liked water and keeps two plants, which he described as “the tree-ish one and the grass-ish one.” Later, asked by Slingshot Esports about the fatigue of playing so much, Faker said, “I always stretch before practice and take health supplements, such as vitamins.”

Still, there is something about Faker that the world prizes: a voracious talent for becoming. He loved a thing, and before we were watching he learned to do it better than anybody else — just for himself, almost before there was professional community — and now he is rewarded. This agonic urge — to become and be recognized for your becoming — is something like the holy mystery at the center of our faith in markets. It is on behalf of this becoming, and the market’s purported mastery at rewarding it, that we are supposed to tolerate its damage.

But there is only one Faker, and at only about 90 professionals at the League of Legends World Championship — perhaps 500 worldwide. The sport is likely to grow. The Philadelphia 76ers, Paris St. Germain, and numerous venture capital groups all now sponsor teams. At time of writing, Riot is entertaining bids for a permanent place in the North American League. Filing a bid costs $10mm.

What that money expects is to make more money in return — primarily from the 160mm players who are not and who will never be professionals, but who watch and log in anyways, just because they enjoy it. These players seem to be acting on the same desire as Faker. To begin playing a new champion is a foreshortening of League’s overall high: in your first game you flail weirdly, in the fifth you achieve erratic glimpses of yourself, and in the twentieth you begin a calm communion with the world. In a day, you have reminded yourself how strong you are, how quickly you learn. Your faith in your potential is refreshed.

But while Faker has been paid for this feeling, you are paying for it. You are paying money for the champion, or you are watching ads on the broadcast. It would be easier to blame League if this were more unusual. Mortgages and student debt and this presidency are each cases of our willingness to pay to have the feeling we are supposed to be paid for — the feeling of rising, of expanding and affirming. You might call this an ouroboric phase of capitalism, in which we have lost the difference between the things we are supposed to feel and the things we are supposed to buy.

Squint and you can recognize this feeling — call it thymos, or dharma, or whatever — as an urge for things to change. But change is difficult. League, like other video games, achieves a balance at once brilliant and horrible. It delivers an authentic personal experience of change, a better experience of change than reality can offer. But that is only because it does not disrupt reality. While we are playing League of Legends, what is owned remains owned, who is repressed remains repressed, that which is melting continues to melt, and that which is dying continues to die.

At the press conference before finals, I posed a question — to the players, but mostly to Faker. “For the players — ahh — how are you growing as people, what are you working in your lives outside the game?” I suppose I was also asking about myself. Riot’s luminaries were drinking bottled water on the nearby deck. I had spent most of my twenties pursuing projects that filled me with a rich feeling of becoming, but usually I had stayed the same person, and the world had continued in its course.

For reasons known only to them, my question was translated from English to Korean, and then laundered back into English, even before anyone answered. “You, both as pro team and pro players,” said the translator, “you’ve been spending all your life into these games, but, you, as a person, what do you do outside of — away from these games? What is your personal life?” This, down to the terrifying ontology of ‘what is,’ may have been a more elegant phrasing than my own, but it was a different question. Faker and Bengi, 24 hours from their third world championship, turned their necks and peered at me through their glasses.

Crown was the first to answer: “Not as a player, if you ask me about the future I haven’t done anything yet. Right now my life path is, maybe this is my first and last. And working as a pro gamer and then maybe, get into an accident and die, I don’t know? But until that day comes I’ll do my best to work and play as a pro player.”

Then Faker, who apparently speaks better English than officially disclosed, replied. “Me as a pro player, I may have grown as a pro player, but not as a person, as an individual. So as a gamer, I’ve been receiving a lot of stress, and that has interfered with my other personal life. So I need to find a way to receive less stress from my pro player, so I can grow as a person more. That’s what I wish.”

On the facebook livestream, Etienne Boone said “Faker #1.” Sear Nuong said “So negative.” Lilyanne Alice Metcalfe said “Is he quitting or something?” He was not quitting. Hours later he would win his third championship in four years, and soon afterwards fly home to Seoul across a sea that was, like him, growing very rapidly indeed.

***Footnotes below***

[1] The ‘forbidden’ category here includes the expected profanity-n-hyperviolence forbiddings, but also some other league-specific forbiddings, most prominently relating to a streamer called Tyler1. Tyler probably deserves his own article, but here it’ll have to be enough to say that Riot is as interested in keeping his name off the current broadcast as some fans are in somehow getting it on, which is to say quite — many more signs are rejected for Tyler1-related reasons than for more ordinary offenses.

[2] ANX are Albus Nox Luna, a Russian Wildcard team. Wildcard teams — from outside the major regions of China, Korea, North America and Europe — are chronically underfunded and usually terrible. ANX spend the first day being famous in the press room for their long hair and wear-your-own-blue-jeans team uniform, ie for looking a lot like a late-80s guitar band just setting off on their first tour, and then on day two they start beating teams they’re not supposed to beat, and Likkrit kicks up the whole bodhisattva routine, and soon they’re all anybody can talk about, even if ‘talk’ in this case just means ‘grumble about how they’re only succeeding because teams are underestimating them.’

[3] 18 is a contractual standard enforced by Riot; 23 more of a loose practical parameter having to do partly with decaying reflexes, partly with seemingly-chronic repetitive stress injuries, and partly with the fact that since League of Legends can be practiced for as many hours out of every twenty-four as you’re willing to not sleep, the competitive standard tends to be set very high indeed — take an active interest in almost literally anything outside the game, and you’re immediately getting outstripped by younger, less-distracted competition.

[4] 20-to-24s had a particularly rough time in the early months of 2010, but other than that October ’09 was the actual worst unemployment month

[5] For fans of other sports, this is roughly the equivalent of a second-or-third string pitcher making a surprise playoff appearance as designated hitter, and hitting so well that the other team’s obliged to start intentionally walking/pitching around this player even despite the fact they weren’t very good at all at their original intended role.

[6] The key variable is actually inventory slots — each champion can only carry 6 items at a time, and each big item’s between two and three thousand gold, so while the difference between 12k and 15k on a particular player, or between 50k and 58k on a team, is enormous, the difference between 17k and 20k, or between 80k and 100k, is practically meaningless.

[7] California like several times — gold rush, hollywood, haight-ashbury, silicon valley. For something like the last hundred years we’ve been hauling out California to perform for each generation some updated mythos of self-manufacture; it’s notable and somewhat odd that this seems to be less exhausting for Californians than for the rest of us.