Thirty minutes before the meeting begins, laughter and shouts were already spilling out the door and down the hallway outside the Bradley League of Legends Club’s weekly gathering.
Video games are often disparaged as solitary pursuits, but here players come together in competition.
“You find yourself having a lot more fun when you’re … not just staring at a screen alone,” Griffin Kemp, the club’s secretary, said. “It’s nice to be surrounded by people who love the game as much as you.”
Kemp, a sophomore game design major has been playing League of Legendssince high school. He and the other officers are part of a concerted effort to revamp the club after it floundered for a few years after the departure of the original founders.
“We kind of hit a hard slump last year,” Kemp said. “So a lot of the … sophomores, we kind of stepped up.”
Club members cluster around desktops, talking trash and tapping at the keys. A projector screen at the front shows League of Legends videos, and a white board advertises door prizes for the most kills and promises the incipient arrival of pizza. Around 20 people gradually file in, pick teams and sit down to a battle royale.
League of Legends is a multiplayer online videogame game created by Riot Games. In it, gamers unite in teams of five “Champions” to battle others for supremacy across various maps and simulated jungles. The game is a massive online battle arena, or MOBA. There is an overall fantasy aesthetic, but science fiction and cyberpunk play their part.
League of Legends is free for casual play; the game generates profit through cosmetic add-ons like fancy armor.
“It’s probably the world’s most popular game,” Kemp said.
While casual gamers are welcome, the Bradley club’s competitive team participates in multiple collegiate-level leagues and tournaments, including the Collegiate Star League, which covers a multitude of college e-sports, and GEGE leagues, a smaller organization started by grad students at the University of Illinois.
Last fall, members of the club attended the GEGE League’s final tournament.
“It was good fun,” Kemp said. “All the people you were playing with in this online world, you actually got to meet in person.”
Porleark Tuy, a junior computer science major and the club’s competitive coordinator, handles the club’s smaller competitive team and attends tournaments, often for cash prizes. He said his favorite part of the club is getting together and just goofing around.
“That’s one of the things I really wanted to emphasize,” Kemp said. “The sense of community you can get … You find yourself having a lot more fun.”
League of Legends takes place inside Bradley Hall 150 on Fridays from 5:30 to 9 p.m.
