League Of Legends: A Rhetorical Analysis

When playing online video games it’s common to run into strangers with unique names such as BongHit420, Unicorn Bae, and Goeasyonthekids. This is no exception to multi-player online battle arena games (MOBAs) such as League of Legends. Athanasios V. Kokkinakis, a research student at the University of York, decided to conduct research asking if usernames in League of Legends determined the social behavior of their users. After conducting the research with his colleagues they discovered that the usernames have at least two attributes that relate to their in game behavior. These being the player’s age and their strong anti-social words (ANT) founded within their username. Their research paper “What's in a name? Ages and names predict the valence
Athanasios V. Kokkinakis and Alex R. Wade both come from the University of York. Both have had previous publishes to other scholarly sources. Wade in particular is also a professor at the University of York with a BA in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Neuroscience. Jeff Lin and David Pavlas on the other hand work for Riot Games. Riot Games are the video game publishers of League of Legends and the esports tournament organizer that was made in 2006. This is a huge source of credibility for Kokkinakis and Wade because of how Lin and Pavlas work for the company that they did their experiment on. They also reference many other scholarly sources. The most common one of these is another addition from the journal Computers in Human Behavior titled “Personality and behavior in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game” by Narnia C. Worth and Angela S. Book. Both Worth and Angela work in the department of psychology at Brock University. Their work is referenced throughout Kokkinakis to back up his statements and results. There are also 54 other sources that are referenced to Kokkinakis work that shows his readers that their text can be accurate and
The graphs used come in multiple formats to show off their findings such as area charts, bar graphs, and scatterplots. Along with the graphs are screenshots from League of Legends showing some of the ways to communicate with one another and the honoring system. This can be important to show as some readers are more visual oriented rather than text oriented and will be able to understand it more than just reading the text of the journal. An example of this is seen when Kokkinakis and his colleagues explain their methods and results of the similarity between usernames with numbers in them and the ages of those players when they registered. At first glance the information can be seen as confusion when trying to read off the numbers. However, when looking at the figure 2a charts it becomes clearer to see that the usernames and the estimated birth years become more common and accurate as you go from the year 1985 to the year