“GODS” by League of Legends and NewJeans, Monday, May 6, 2024

Around 2015, I started hearing an answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” that would have made the same teachers that I told “I want to be a rock guitarist” come out of retirement and give my current students detention. These students didn’t want to grow up and be musicians or professional athletes. They told me that they wanted to be a “pro-gamer.” It took me a while to realize that a pro-gamer wasn’t a mispronunciation of a programmer. A pro-gamer is a professional game player. And while there are pro-gamers who play card and in-person role-playing games, and sometimes professional gamblers are also categorized as progamers, my students were only concerned with video games. Beginning around 2000, electronic sport, or esport, competitions became a global phenomenon. No longer were video games something to play with friends after school; they had become a billion dollar industry, and winning an esports competition could be a profitable career. 

ONE MORE STEP; YOU’RE IMMORTAL NOW. One of the biggest esports is League of Legends. The game was first developed as a modification of a Warcraft III expansion pack before becoming a standalone game in 2009. The game originally was notorious for its “toxic online community.” According to a 2020 survey conducted by the Anti- Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish NGO, 76% of players had experienced in-game harassment. The developers have put in place a code of ethics and a system to report players who violate it. Furthermore, the developers have put in place an algorithm that censors profanity and other forms of abuse. League of Legends is one of the most addictive video games today with gamerant.com listing it as the second-most addictive game as of September 2023.  Also last year, the game reported an average of over 10 million concurrent players, according to The Spike. Most of the players of the free-to-play game are just hobbyists, but some aspire to be professional players. League of Legends holds 12 regional leagues, and in 2016 held a larger combined viewership and attendance than the NBA, the World Cup, and the Stanley Cup.  

THEY’RE GONNA CRUMBLE ONE BY ONE. NewJeans was asked to sing the theme to the 2023 League of Legends World Championship held in Seoul and Busan, South Korea in October and November. According to the theme song “GODS” genius page, the song references several features of the game, which is based on horror elements and medieval sorcery, and the players and the competition itself. The K-pop group sings the song completely in English. The song is interesting for its apparent usage of Christian terminology.  Usually, the idea of “playing god” is talked about negatively. In Jurassic Park Dr. Ian Malcolm scolds park founder John Hammond for “playing god” when he creates a park of dinosaurs that end up killing several of the humans on the island. But in today’s song, playing god is a form of in-game boasting. In the context of a game and a tournament, the song seems to be fun, but in almost any other context, the song feels like uncomfortable hubris. Maybe it’s just my Christian upbringing, but this kind of bragging makes me feel like the fall is coming to answer to this kind of pride.

Read the lyrics on Genius.