Wellesley College Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive Honors Thesis Collection 2018 E-boys and E-girls: Constructing and Performing Identity in League of Legends Yelim Lee Wellesley College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection Recommended Citation Lee, Yelim, "E-boys and E-girls: Constructing and Performing Identity in League of Legends" (2018). Honors Thesis Collection. 540. https://repository.wellesley.edu/thesiscollection/540 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Thesis Collection by an authorized administrator of Wellesley College Digital Scholarship and Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 1 E-boys and E-girls: Constructing and Performing Identity in League of Legends Yelim Lee Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in Anthropology under the advisement of Deborah Matzner April 2018 © 2018 Yelim Lee 2 The Degenerate Game “Video games will get you nowhere, no job, no love,” my mother says, scolding me for playing a game for hours on end during the weekend. There are far more productive activities, she said. I remember her pointing to my violin case (untouched until I am forced to practice) and ‘recreational’ math worksheets. I sit down for work, but I cannot help thinking about the vibrant world that I had just left. Within my games, I would be transported to a kingdom with political intrigue with the threat of betrayal around every corner, a tragic love rivalling the likes of Romeo and Juliet, beautiful desert ruins that I cannot hope to visit except in my fantasies.