Summoner's Rift, Afar and Up Close

Published: at 03:07 PM

Summoner’s Rift, Afar and Up Close

The curious summoner

Over a decade ago, League’s lore attempted to justify why the champions on Summoner’s Rift were fighting. In that canon, the player didn’t embody the champion—rather, the player was the titular summoner, controlling the champion like a chess piece (or a puppet, if you prefer). Riot moved away from this explanation pretty early on, but the abstraction of the summoner as the observer and puppeteer remains useful to us. As a player, you are both the champion on the screen and the observer watching the screen. Both of these roles are useful perspectives to consider for contrasting purposes: implementation and observation.

Sometimes, it is useful to don the identity of the champion. The champion is your conduit of implementation. When you want to impart your will upon the game, you are translating all of your ideas into game inputs: movement commands, ability timings, etc. The better you know your champion, the more translation you get to skip; there is less distance between what you want and what your champion wants. If you have strong champion mastery, when you think “I want to hurt that guy,” you don’t need to account for the individual inputs as much. Your hands know what to do because you know your champion deeply, and your champion was designed knowing what to do. Let’s call this part of your player identity the embodied champion, since we’ll be using them for a while.

Sometimes, it is useful to don the identity of the summoner. The summoner is your camera of observation. When you want to learn something about the game, you’re watching the screen and processing all the information being thrown at you: shifting healthbars, moving targets, etc. Processing information can be a tricky task, however, especially in-game. When your perspective is that of the champion, you take in information through their eyes. Everything is more visceral—taking damage might feel like a personal slight, while winning fights feels like landing on the moon. Your takeaways may also be influenced such that any conclusions are a reflection of yourself, strengths and weaknesses. As the summoner, you’re much further detached from the game. The summoner, as was in the lore, is more of an interested observer. They watch from afar, noting the outcomes of events, regardless of their influence on winning or losing. The summoner isn’t engaged in some grand pursuit of higher knowledge, but just vague curiosity. Most of the time, their question is simple.

“What happens when…?”

League is an execution-heavy game. Most of the time, what League asks of you is to embody the champion fantasy and think as your champion does. Without relying on instinct, the game happens too quickly for every single input to be so deliberate. However, when you’re trying to learn about the game beyond the innate movements of your champion, it can be helpful to imagine yourself as the summoner. To the champion, the outcomes of your plays are evaluated with their contribution to victory, but to the summoner, all outcomes satisfy their curiosity. Taking the perspective of an observer, whom we’ll call the curious summoner, can thus inform you more about the game on every single interaction, regardless of success.

Dumb question: how do I ask questions?

Information is more than abundant in League, but useful conclusions don’t just hand themselves over of their own accord. As with learning any skill, asking questions is both natural and effective. Asking a question lets you direct your attention to the information that is immediately relevant to your inquiry. Instead of needing to interpret the chaos on screen in totality, you need only consider bits and pieces.

It is valuable to ask questions of all kinds! Everything will give you some kind of information that is useful. However, the more specific your question, the narrower your answer. How you frame your question affects what information you’ll need to gather for an answer. The corollary is that the framing also affects how much outside influence your takeaways need to account for and data cleaning you’ll need to perform for a satisfactory answer. Broader questions must encompass broader situations, and so they’re comparatively more difficult to break down to fundamentals. This doesn’t mean you can’t ask more abstract questions, but you should expect to receive noisier data.

Take, for example, the ubiquitous lethal question.

Can I kill this guy?

This question demands a boolean answer. The data required to answer this question is complex: you must estimate your entire kit’s outputs, assess your opponent’s general capabilities to respond to you, predict your opponent’s behavior as they respond, and organize your actions to account for as much variance from you, the opponent, and all other meddling sources, as possible. The accompanying reward for the answer is very high. Knowing if you have lethal—the capability of killing your opponent—allows you to play riskier, since any response they have will be filtered in greyscale.

However, the lethal question might be too difficult to answer, so it can be valuable to instead ask a question with smaller scope.

What happens when I hit the target with this button?

This question has an open-ended answer. The data required to answer this question is simple: you need only land the input on them and watch the ensuing outcome. The reward for this answer is more narrow. You can learn how much damage your action deals, what behaviors your opponent might exhibit upon being hit, but a single input usually doesn’t create large advantages on its own. In order to synthesize a similarly useful conclusion to the question of lethal from above, you must ask more of these sorts of questions and combine the takeaways yourself. Just as you can skip the details if you answer a broader question, you can derive the answer to a more difficult question with narrower answers in aggregate.

Forming a question need not be so specific every time, since coming up questions is a task that takes effort in and of itself. When you’re trying to embody the curious summoner, the goal isn’t to only enter situations when you have insightful questions, but rather the habit of question-asking itself. A constant stream of “what happens when…?” is all you’re looking for. We’re running this program in the background, not as the main driver of the game.

The champion-summoner rift

When you have a question about fighting (remember, this is an essay about fighting), sometimes you have to set up the appointment yourself. This necessitates taking initiative to pick a fight, or at least to start posturing for one. Setting up the situation that answers your question is the work of the curious summoner. However, playing out the situation is the work of the embodied champion. The curious summoner constructs the scenario with some intention, makes note of the conditions around it, but can only let the events happen as the dominoes fall. Once the fight is engaged, the curious summoner’s hands are off. The agency over the situation falls upon the embodied champion to deal damage, move around, and act in the moment. This isn’t to say you should stop thinking, but rather to let yourself be wordlessly involved. Organized thoughts take too long to read on the time scale of fights. Let things happen, and once the fight is over, only then will the curious summoner return.

As the curious summoner, your observations are twofold: you watch how the environment around you—minions, monsters, allies, enemies—behave, and you recall how you as the embodied champion felt. The abstraction of the summoner and champion identities is most useful here. In this lens, you are both the studier and the object of study. Part of the important takeaway is observing how you acted in the fight. Fights are a very emotional event, when tensions on both sides are highest, so it is common to feel strongly in different ways throughout the fight. As such, you can use your emotions to signpost various points of interest in the fight.

Reexamining the fight at these points is a good way to pick out discrete bits of information from the chaos. If the embodied champion tells you that the fight felt unplayable, the curious summoner can wonder why that felt like the case. The separation between execution and observation lets you parse more abstract feelings into useful takeaways.

The bounds of sight

Sometimes, the curious summoner will naturally come into conflict with the embodied champion. For the purpose of learning, the outcome is just another data point. For the purposes of winning and losing, the outcome holds weight in the champion’s eyes. The champion can lose while the summoner cannot. This fundamental rift between both identities can feel deeply unsatisfying for you outside of the summoner or champion. However, this relationship is not fully asymmetrical. Feelings of loss are comparatively strong and sharper than the feelings of gain. This phenomenon is formally known as loss aversion, and is inherent to human nature. Here, too, our emotions can serve as touchpoints for information. Because losing situations tend to result in stronger feelings, they give the curious summoner clearer directions onto where they should focus their observation. This isn’t to say that losses are necessarily higher in information, but that the signal processing is faster for the sake of the summoner. In a sense, both sides sacrifice something in both winning and losing outcomes. It is important, then, to value both sides for their contributions to your experience. Winning a fight helps the champion win the current game. Losing a fight helps the summoner win the future games.

It can seem like the curious summoner’s job is meticulous and laborious, but in reality their role is very casual. For the sake of the champion-summoner theory, the curious summoner is written as self-regulated, unbiased, and methodical. The champion-summoner praxis is more about habitual curiosity. The process of questioning, observing, and answering is not a formal protocol. What you’re really doing is flagging lightly in your memory when an interesting thing might occur, watching it as a consequence of the situation, and then lightly discussing with yourself why the events turned out in that manner. Asking questions is something you already implement in every game. Even without the champion-summoner framework, you’re still acting on uncertainty when you take a fight, which prompts the corollary subconscious question of “what happens when.” Adopting the champion-summoner framework is about being curious about the game in a slightly more structured manner, not turning League into a wet lab. It is useful to be curious about how the game works separate from the desire for victory, and that curiosity can inform your ability to effect improvement. League as a test of skill is cumulative; we’re just studying for it constantly now, moment to moment.