Practice 2012: Building a Legendary IP: Growing Creative in League of Legends

Christina Norman, lead creative director at Riot Games, talked about the current problems of the League of Legends IP and how the company is taking measures to fix them.

Presentation

• Christina was previously the lead programmer of the dialogue system in the first Mass Effect, and then became the lead game designer focusing on combat in the Mass Effect sequels.
• League of Legends is currently the most played game with 32 million monthly active users (MAU) and three billion hours played a month. The average player plays above 30 hours a month. It's a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) with 107 champions at the time of the conference.
• League of Legends is an e-sport and not a narrative focused game, but the story is still important because the players love the characters. Players have deep emotional relationships with the champions.
• Outside of the game, players also spend time in forums discussing the game and making their own media about the game. Players love great stories, but the League of Legends lore needs work.
• The lore has issues. It was appropriate for a small action game, back when the goal was to get to 20,000 concurrent users. But now the game has reached 30 million concurrent users.
• There are four key issues with the current lore and storytelling.

1. Tournament IP.
1. The lore explains that to stop the warring between Noxus and Demacia, a magical tournament was created to resolve all conflict. In this world, all combat occurs in the field of justice, the powerful summoners control everything including the champions, and there is effectively no war. This restricts a lot of conflict and limits suspenseful storytelling.
2. The lore also over explains things, including game mechanics. To explain how allies or family members occur on opposite teams during some games, the lore says that the champions are mind-controlled by the summoners. To explain death and revivals, the champions are snatched right before they enter the underworld and are magically restored to life. The over explanations create an awkward and unbelievable world.
3. To create an awesome IP, you have to respect what the players love and revise when necessary. Riot Games want to tell stories outside the tournament and outside the game mechanics.
2. Lack of character depth.
1. The champions in the game have a lot of personality, but no depth. Mordekaiser, for example, is an undead death knight that's so badass that when he kills you, he makes your soul turn on your allies. But Pikachu is also badass that he deals extra damage when it's the trainer's birthday. Being badass doesn't give a character any depth.
2. The old process of creating a character involved someone getting inspired, they would write a one or two page bio of the character, the bio gets peer reviewed, and it gets iterated. This resulted in pretty good bios, but it was not good at creating depth.
3. Christina was inspired by writer's rooms, putting several creative people in a room for several hours to talk out all the details. She instilled a new process of character creation which involves a bio slice being defined, creative people from different departments would talk for 4 to 12 hours about the character, notes are taken and written into a full-fledged bio, the team approves and validates the bio, and finally, the group iterates on the bio.
4. This is a powerful collaborative process, but the drawbacks include long ideation sessions, needing a showrunner to provide leadership and creative direction, and potentially average ideas resulting from design by committee. The key benefits, however, are higher quality characters, team buy-in and shared vision, and the group is more creative than any one individual.
5. Depth is added to the characters by giving them motivations, relationships, and complications. In Mordekaiser's revised back story, he is an undead general who enslaves souls to join his army and doesn't remember his life before his death. Now the character is deep enough to write a television series about.
3. Lack of world depth.
1. There are 12 major factions in the world of Valoran, but they are not clearly visualized to the player. One of the locations in this world is the Shadow Isles, which previously was just the place where the evil undead characters were from. There was no sense of a real background history or visual identity of the place.
2. Christina looked outside of game narrative for inspiration. She found the House Lanister from Game of Thrones, which has a very distinctive personality and identity that support its characters. The characters in turn support the world. Riot Games also instilled a new world creation process that's very similar to the character process. 
3. The visuals of the revised Shadow Isles were inspired by x-ray flower photography. In this area, life doesn't belong here, trees and flowers are spectral, and if you die here, you stay here forever. Characters are not just an undead horde from this location; they have motivations and reciprocal relationships.
4. Wall of text.
1. The narrative and back story of League of Legends were told in long walls of text hidden in the character details. This is not the ideal way to tell a story, but when your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
2. Riot Games needed more tools to tell stories. One new tool they developed was login voice over monologues. These were delayed by 30 seconds so that they didn't annoy players every time they opened the game, but they had a positive side effect because it made them feel like a discovery.
3. Another tool was in-game voice over. This is not new to games, but it was especially hard to implement in a game with so much action going on. The team added some story bits when capturing alters at Twisted Treeline, a map that takes place in the Shadow Isles.
4. One other tool was themed content releases. In the month of October, they focused their content releases around Halloween and the Shadow Isles. The map, two champions, bios, icons, skins, and ward skins all released in tandem to set the theme.

• With a revised lore, characters, world, and storytelling techniques, the League of Legends IP is now ripe for future content. Movies, comics, and novels are all possible now.
• The key takeaways are to create lore that supports stories outside of the game, use collaboration to develop character depth and rich worlds, and promote less reading.

Question and Answer

• At Riot Games, anyone can submit a character idea. There is no formal structure to submit because adding a formal structure would make it feel like an exam and discourage people from doing it. The submitted idea then goes through curation and the creator makes a one-sheet. Keep the bio as short as possible because nobody reads documentation.
• Skins exist outside the lore, but some fan fiction are inspired by skins.
• People who enter the writer's room come in with the knowledge that 90% of ideas are going to get shot down. Sometimes an idea is saved for another character, but isn't right for the character they're talking about.
• Riot culture supports moving around a lot. Employees need to be talented in creative and technical fields.
• Christina plays about 20 hours a month of League of Legends outside of work.
• You need simple in-game, surface level metaphors for the characters.
• Christina is not concerned about the new narratives getting wasted if the company decides to never do anything with them outside of the game. She is more concerned about not having the opportunity to expand on the characters. She wants to keep the door open for these possibilities.
• Character names are the most debated and passionate topic at Riot Games.
• Be wary of code names because once the name is out, people get emotionally attached to it.
• Dota 2 mostly uses functional names than the character names. People get anchored to the name already and they stuck with it.
• In e-sports, people get and form narratives surrounding the players as well. Casters also help further these narratives.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Things Thereof

I love crossovers. I love the character interactions found in Godzilla vs. King Kong, Robocop vs. Terminator, Freddy vs. Jason, and Aliens vs. Predator. I love the bigger company crossovers like Marvel vs. DC, Capcom vs. SNK, and Kingdom Hearts. And I love the random franchise mash-ups like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Harvey Birdman, and Super Smash Bros. It's so interesting and rewarding to see these characters, who you've invested so much time in, come into contact with other characters that you love. You'll see your favorite characters put into funny situations -- a former-superhero-turned-lawyer defends Secret Squirrel for allegedly flashing a woman, Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny play a prank on a human detective whilst he's falling to his death, a team of street fighters challenges the super-powered X-Men to a match, and a pink marshmallow sucks in Solid Snake to grow a manly beard.

Yes, I've been playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl recently and it prompted me to write this post. The game is such a great homage to the Nintendo brand. You'll see obscure references like Mr. Game & Watch, R.O.B. the useless NES peripheral, and Dr. Wright from the SNES version of SimCity to newer characters like Captain Olimar from Pikmin, Lucario the fourth generation Pokémon mascot, and Mr. Resetti from Animal Crossing. The game is so entirely self-referential, from its playable characters and stages to its trophies and stickers, that it'll sure bring a nostalgic smile to any gamer's face.

There's a lot of great things to be said about the Smash Bros. series. It's very easy to get into, simplifying special moves to a directional tilt of the joystick coupled with a button press. Its gameplay plays off the familiar design of the platforming genre and has enough random elements to give an unskilled players a fighting chance. But I think the most important aspect of why the series is so fun is the variety that each character brings in. Nintendo's rich history and diverse franchises make me think that they are one of the few companies who can pull off a game of such magnitude. You see, it was common for games of yore to rely on a gameplay gimmick to differentiate itself in its oversaturated genre. Bionic Commando had his grappling hook, Mega Man stole powers from defeated bosses, Rainbow Islands had the rainbow arcs, Lode Runner had terrain deformation, and Castlevania had the whip. Nintendo franchises, many of which originated from that era, each had their own gimmicks and I'm glad to see these characters appear in SSBB with their gimmicks intact.

Princess Peach, whose incarnation is based off of Super Mario Bros. 2, has her floating skill and the ability to pick up turnips and items from the ground. Kirby has his multiple jumps and the ability to suck up characters to steal their powers. Pokémon Trainer controls three different pokémon and can switch between them at anytime. Captain Olimar has to pick up pikmin from the ground and command them to do the fighting for him. Yoshi has his unique second jump he received in the Yoshi Island games and all his egg-related glory. Sonic's gameplay is about constantly moving and staying on the offensive, much like how his games are about speed and forward motion. It's also great to see characters who didn't originate in gimmick-based games appear in the Smash series with original movesets like Captain Falcon, Fox McCloud, and the Ice Climbers. I'm personally a little disappointed to see Diddy Kong, who originated from a series that revolved around tagging and piggybacking, not show up with Dixie Kong as a partner. Instead, he's based around his later incarnations in Donkey Kong 64 and Mario Power Tennis, which is a bit less interesting.

Nevertheless, since each character came from a gimmicky background, they brought their gimmicks with them into Smash. Smash is a mish-mash of dozens of platforming ideas, which gives the game its variety. Not very often do we see a fighting game where every character is based on a different gameplay concept. I can only think of the Guilty Gear games and to an extent, Mortal Kombat II. And I'm not talking about Mortal Kombat's fatalities, which are completely useless aesthetic gimmicks. I'm talking about how some of the characters introduced ideas to the fighting game genre that did not exist back then like Shang Tsung's morphing and Reptile's invisibility. Square Enix is making their own crossover fighting game called Dissidia: Final Fantasy, but I'm not convinced that it'll be as good as the Smash series as their characters originated from a rather gimmick-less series.

Far too many games today try to do everything from your Halos to your Grand Theft Autos. What we're ending up with is a homogenization of ideas and design. Everything is starting to look the same to me to the point where I usually can't tell what open-world game or first-person shooter I'm looking at. I think we need to roll back the clock and start relying on gimmicks again to differentiate our games. We're seeing this in the independent scene with games based on space or time manipulation, perspective changing, obfuscation, shifting characters, and lots of other neat ideas. The only commercial game with the same design philosophy was last year's Portal, whose entire gameplay revolved around shooting portals and teleporting oneself from point A to point B.

Going back to Brawl, there are lots of gimmicky stages as well. My favorites are WarioWare, Pictochat, Flat Zone 2, Mario Bros., 75m, and Elektroplankton, in which it seems like you're fighting on an exact replica of the respective games. Other creative stages include the Mushroomy Kingdom where you play desolate versions of the first two stages from Super Mario Bros., Smashville whose time of day and various events are based on the Wii's internal clock, and The Summit where you fight on a large melting iceberg. These stages further epitomizes the brilliance of this fictional world that Nintendo created. Being able to stand on a line drawn in Pictochat is completely ludicrous, but in the context of this game with all its zaniness, it's actually somewhat believable.

That's because from the start, these characters are treated as figurines, as toys for the player to play with. In the original Smash Bros. game, the opening movie shows a child's room where the figurines come into life and start their fighting. In the Subspace Emissary mode in Brawl, when these characters die, they don't actually get killed but revert back to trophy form. The entire narrative is placed under the prospect of a child's imagination. The Master Hand is representative of our own hands playing with these toys and this is a common theme used throughout the entire game. In the character select screen, for example, players control a glove as a cursor that points at characters and can drag icons around, unlike other fighting games where players merely highlight characters on the screen. With this notion, Nintendo has perfected the art of creating a unified world from their various character mythos. Even with weird juxtapositions like a deformed Mario vs. a realistically proportioned Captain Falcon vs. a flat Mr. Game & Watch vs. a cel-shaded-inspired Toon Link, I accept it as a believable universe.

I wasn't really sure where I was going with this post. I just wanted to talk about some random thoughts I've had while playing Brawl. To summarize, I love crossovers, I love gameplay gimmicks, and as ridiculous as the Smash universe is, I love its fiction.