Is League of Legends the Worst Video Game of All Time?

It’s official: League of Legends has been voted “Worst Game of All Time.”

At least, it is according to the small poll we at the Pixel Generation just ran. My opening statement definitely shouldn’t be taken as hyperbole. We ran a very official poll, I’ll have you know! We had dozens of respondents! Dozens!!

You and me both, Palpatine // Courtesy of Giphy.com

Joking aside, even a small poll like this can be indicative of a larger body of thought. While League of Legends (LoL) may not definitively be the worst game of all time, the results do beg the question: why does this game have a bad reputation? And is it deserved?

Even if you aren’t much of a gamer, you’ve probably at least heard of LoL. It’s kind of a big deal. LoL was first launched by developer Riot Games in 2009 and has ballooned in popularity ever since. It had 180 million active monthly users in 2022, 13 years after its release. It typically draws in over $1.5 billion in revenue every year. It’s easily the biggest game in the multiplayer online battle arena genre. It has spawned successful spinoff games, comics, and a critically-acclaimed animated TV series.

Lol has a wide variety of champions // Courtesy of nexus.leagueoflegends.com

You may be wondering, how can something so popular be hated enough to win a “worst game” vote? Well, let’s consider what it might mean to be the worst game and how LoL fits into that picture.

You won’t see anything like this in lol // Courtesy of thegamecrater.com

The first and most obvious indicator of a bad game would be mechanical and technical problems. I’m talking about things that we can judge objectively: unresponsive controls, game-breaking bugs, confusing interface, poor optimization… that kind of stuff. LoL doesn’t fit the bill. It’s a polished game with good production value, and the devs release regular updates.

There are complaints about long queue times for ranked matches, which Riot has struggled to curb. Some players report short waits of a few minutes or less, and others report waiting upwards of 20 minutes. There’s no perfect solution. This issue isn’t unique to LoL, however. Other popular competitive games like Overwatch have also suffered from this problem, and it isn’t a universal experience for all players.

An extreme example of how bad queueing can get // Courtesy of Pants are dragon

What about the more subjective aspects of the game’s design? Obviously that’s harder to quantify, but according to general critical consensus, the game is soundly made. The characters are varied and interesting, the art is nice, and the game feel is good. Most critics agree it’s accessible and addicting, with interesting and strategic team-based gameplay. It holds an average critic review score of 78/100 on Metracritic, which is pretty decent.

The user score on Metacritic tells a different story, however. It stands at an alarming average of 49/100, which the site deems “generally unfavourable.” User scores should always be taken with a big ol’ grain of salt (review bombing being a thing and all that), but just like the results of our survey, they do provide some insight into how the gaming community feels about LoL.

Browsing the user reviews sheds some light on the matter. There are a lot of players who cite a frustrating competitive experience, but that could be said of any competitive multiplayer game, especially those with ranking systems. The real problem seems to be toxicity in the game’s community. Even some of the positive reviews concede that other players are insulting and abusive in-game, and some even admit to engaging in the behaviour themselves.

Lots of games have toxic communities, but LoL is particularly infamous. In the Anti-Defamation League’s annual report on harassment in online games from 2022, 80% of respondents reported experiencing harassment while playing LoL. This number has steadily increased year over year. The problem isn’t unique to LoL, but it is certainly among the top offenders.

harassment is a huge problem in gaming // courtesy of the Anti-defamation league

So what is it specifically about LoL that bothers people so much? I myself tried it only once and was turned off from ever trying it again, largely because the environment felt very unwelcoming for a beginner. There was no tolerance among my teammates for error, and they weren’t shy about letting me know.

Even some that play the game regularly like to joke about how much they hate it, and everyone seems to have their own reason. Some talk about harassment, bad behaviour, long queues, slow progression, or overpowered new champions throwing off the game’s balance. Perhaps all these things come together to create a stew of problems that some find unpalatable.

So is it fair to say LoL is the worst game of all time? Not really. Objectively speaking, there areworse games out there. But I’d say it deserves at least some of the flack it gets. Among popular games, it has certainly earned its controversial reputation.

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Chris Hodgins is an aspiring writer and avid gamer, which is probably obvious enough from his involvement in this blog. He’s also a cat whisperer with wild dreams of opening a cat sanctuary someday, if he ever manages to strike it rich. Until then, he spends his time gaming, writing, and sharing his life with his lovely wife and three furry kids.

From Princesses to Power Armour - The History of Female Representation in Games

If I were to ask you to think of a female video game character, what would be the first to come to mind? A lot of people would probably name the likes of Lara Croft, Samus Aran, or Princess Zelda.

Now think about who you picked. What kind of character are they? How are they depicted? Do they challenge stereotypes or reinforce them? Maybe the answer to those questions have changed throughout the character’s history. Let’s look at how depictions of female characters in video games have changed over time.

We have to go all the way back to the early 80s to meet the first playable female character in gaming. If you guessed Ms. Pac-Man was first, you’re very close! It was actually the titular star of a game called Ladybug, which was a Pac-Man knock-off released in 1981, whereas Ms. Pac-Man was released in 1982. Both games featured artwork on the sides of their arcade machines depicting their protagonists posing like old pin-up models, seen below.

art from Game Ms Pac-man // Courtesy of arcade-museum.com

Art from game Ladybug // courtesy of Screenrant.com

Bizarre as it may be to sexualize a hungry yellow circle, the artwork kicked off a trend of objectifying female characters that persists to this day. Despite that, it was undeniably significant to feature playable female characters for the first time, and it’s worth noting that Ms. Pac-Man was created out of appreciation for the large number of female gamers who helped make Pac-Man a huge success, not to attract women to the arcade.

Samus revealed // courtesy of thepopculturestudio.com

More female leads began to appear in the years that followed, though male protagonists still dominated screens. The number of leading ladies was still scant enough that it came as a shock when space-faring bounty hunter Samus Aran removed her helmet at the end of Metroid in 1986 and revealed she was a woman.

For the most part, female characters at that time were more akin to objectives than actual characters. Princess Peach from the Super Mario series and Princess Zelda from The Legend of Zelda franchise fulfilled the damsel in distress stereotype and needed to be rescued by the male heroes (and often still do today), and this trope would be repeated far too often throughout the industry.

An older version of lara croft vs. her modern design // courtest of aminoapps.com

Sexualized female characters have also been a persistent trend. A study of female video game characters spanning from 1983 to 2014 found that sexualization peaked in the mid-90s but has diminished since then. Perhaps its unsurprising then that Tomb Raider debuted around the same time as the peak.

Its protagonist, Lara Croft, is one of gaming’s most iconic heroines. She’s capable and badass, but also oversexualized, further reinforcing an already unrealistic standard of beauty. The trend continued, especially in male-dominated genres like fighting games, with series like Soul Calibur and Dead or Alive leaning particularly hard into hyper-sexualization (the latter series even produced an infamous beach volleyball spinoff).

Ellie in the last of us part 1 // courtesy of pcgamesn.com

Thankfully, in the modern era of gaming things have been trending away from stereotypes. Female characters now often aren’t just damsels, or sexy, or one-note badasses. Increasingly, effort has been made to make them interesting, thoughtfully-written characters first and foremost, such as Ellie in The Last of Us or Edelgard in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Even Lara Croft has gotten a more realistic makeover in recent years, and greater care has been taken to make her personality more relatable and human.

There’s been some pushback against these modern trends. While developers strive to make characters more realistic, some gamers have complained that female characters are becoming too ugly. A lot of that is coming from men, and it’s kind of a gross take.

There are also women, however, who have noted a trend of “strong” female characters being depicted as women who exclusively exhibit traditionally masculine traits. There’s obviously space for this kind of character – people are diverse and nuanced after all – but these commentators argue that this shouldn’t become the only depiction of what a strong woman can be. A character can be strong and feminine at the same time. A character being attractive is fine too; the important thing is not to oversexualize.

Above all else, characters, female or otherwise, are most interesting when they’re written well. In that regard, I think the industry is moving in a positive direction.

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Chris Hodgins is an aspiring writer and avid gamer, which is probably obvious enough from his involvement in this blog. He’s also a cat whisperer with wild dreams of opening a cat sanctuary someday, if he ever manages to strike it rich. Until then, he spends his time gaming, writing, and sharing his life with his lovely wife and three furry kids.

Difficulty and Accessibility - Not an Easy History

Do you like hard games? I know I do. Games like Bloodborne and Monster Hunter are among my favourites of all time, and both are well known for the intense challenge they offer. There’s a certain sense of pride to be had from facing up against a difficult obstacle, like a tough boss or a tricky puzzle, and overcoming it through skill and wit. A lot of us think that challenge is what makes games fun. But what if the obstacle you’re faced with isn’t a boss or a puzzle, but your ability to read text on the screen or make out colours and objects? What if you can’t reach every button on a controller at the same time? For gamers with disabilities, struggling to simply play a game isn’t fun. Thankfully, a lot of modern games include accessibility features like subtitles, colour-blind modes, descriptive audio, customizable controls, and some developers have even experimented with high-contrast filters for the visually impaired. One simple way to help make games more accessible is to select an easier difficulty option. But with this last option comes a sense of derision from the gaming community. Why is that?

Game: Pac-man // courtesy of vintagearcade.net

Back in the late 70s and 80s, arcades were at their peak popularity. Games like Donkey Kong and Space Invaders turned the industry into a titan of entertainment, raking in $8 billion in the US alone in 1981. How’d they do this? Easy. They were hard. Difficult arcade games meant kids would keep spending coins to try and beat them – after all, if they actually won, they’d be satisfied and might stop playing. Of course, if they were too hard, gamers would quit because the game felt cheap, and so a careful balance had to be struck. For all their difficulty though, these games were generally simple to control. Some games, like Pac-Man, only required you to operate a single joystick to play. This meant that gamers with physical disabilities were generally able to play, though difficulty still proved to be a hurdle. One of the earliest home consoles, the Atari, emulated this simplicity, so much so that John Dutton, a quadriplegic gamer, was able to operate it, though it took a little modification. The Atari even had switches that could modify difficulty, making it more accessible than arcade machines.

the nes hands free // courtesy of Ian hamilton

Home video game consoles rose to prevalence with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. A lot of conventions carried over from arcades, like lives, continues, and of course, making games tough as nails. A lot of older gamers could probably trace their anger management issues back to Battletoads on the NES. One thing was certainly new though: the controller was designed to be held in two hands with thumbs resting over the buttons. Between the more complex controller and games so tough that “Nintendo hard” became a saying, things were getting tougher for disabled gamers (to their credit, though, Nintendo did eventually create an accessible device called the NES Hands Free).

As tech got better in the 90s, it became easier for developers to implement multiple difficulty modes, and the practice became widespread to broaden the appeal of video games. Was this finally the start of gaming becoming a more accessible hobby? Yes and no. There were more options, but some developers gave these new modes colourful names, with dangerous, cool-sounding names like ‘nightmare’ or ‘legendary’ for harder difficulties and belittling names like ‘baby’ or ‘timid’ for easier ones. Wolfenstein took things a step further by labelling its easiest mode ‘Can I play, Daddy?’ The accompanying image of the protagonist wearing a bonnet with a pacifier in his mouth added insult to injury.

Game: Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus // Courtesy of SVG.com

Is this funny? You could argue that, sure. But it also feeds a toxic culture where the hobby is gatekept by self-declared elite gamers, and anybody who dares to play on a lower setting is shamed. Ask for advice on any gaming forum and it’s almost assured that the first response you’ll get is “git gud.” Modern games are much more diverse than their arcade predecessors, and many have done away with concepts like scoreboards and limited tries in favour of art and experience. The options are expanded too, with many devs making accessibility a priority. This also means more creative attempts at managing difficulty, like Nintendo’s Funky Mode in Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze or Assist Mode in Super Mario Odyssey. Despite these steps forward by devs, some gamers balk at the very idea of making games easier. Any attempt at discussion about adding difficulty options to games like Elden Ring elicits pushback and contempt. At best, it’s elitism. At worst, it’s ableism. In either case, it’s toxic.

Difficulty is malleable. It arises when a player meets an obstacle and is relative from player to player. The goal should be to achieve enjoyable difficulty, not frustrating difficulty. Not every video game is made for everyone, sure, but everyone should be able to at least play without being barred by a lack of accessibility, and difficulty options are a part of that.

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Chris Hodgins is an aspiring writer and avid gamer, which is probably obvious enough from his involvement in this blog. He’s also a cat whisperer with wild dreams of opening a cat sanctuary someday, if he ever manages to strike it rich. Until then, he spends his time gaming, writing, and sharing his life with his lovely wife and three furry kids.

Introduction

Hi, welcome to Pixel Generations! Have you ever wondered about how video games have come this far? We hope to enlighten you on this subject. Join us on this venture to the past as we explore the journey of video games, from joystick to Joy-Con.