The LoL Generation
Geopolitical consequences of a generation shaped by instant gratification, tribal thinking, and zero-sum competition
Between 2014 and 2020, League of Legends (LoL) was the largest digital arena our era has ever known, with millions of players permanently connected. The children and teenagers who spent their formative years there are now adults between the ages of 25 and 30, just entering professional life and increasingly close to the realm of public decision-making. In the coming years, some of them will become advisors, civil servants, parliamentarians, or ministers and will make decisions that affect us all.
Specifically, what did these young people do in their adolescence? They read little or not at all, reflected even less, and patience was completely foreign to them. Basically, what they did, hour after hour, day after day, was just fight. Five against five, on a symmetrical map, with a single objective: to destroy the enemy’s base. A match usually lasts around thirty minutes and allows for no nuances. Victory means annihilating the opponent, and defeat means humiliation. Negotiation never took place, compromise made no sense, because they did not even fit into the rules of the game. Everything was a zero-sum competition, and the world of these teenagers was reduced to two camps and a single final outcome: on the shield or under the shield.
Such a structure of existence is not merely adolescent entertainment. It enters your mind through repetition and eventually shapes your reflexes. The perspective of the game is not limited to reflecting a way of thinking, but shapes it, disciplines it, and reinforces it over time until it becomes automatic. Hundreds of millions of young people spend thousands of hours in an environment that rewards quick reactions and punishes hesitation, turning almost any situation into a confrontation between “us” and “them.” When you train your mind in this logic for years on end, the effects accumulate, settle, and eventually become a way of functioning.
I do not support the convenient idea that video games directly cause violence, an idea that research has already debunked. I support something more uncomfortable and harder to ignore, namely that the dominant type of game in today’s culture is rewriting, on a generational scale, the architecture of political and military decision-making. This type of game produces a predictable, reactive, tribal decision-making profile oriented toward immediate gratification. And the player’s profile does not remain only in the game or online. It will be seen in the way these people will engage in politics, lead battalions or institutions, and manage conflicts that arise. Here and there, the typology we are analysing is already beginning to manifest itself even at the governmental level. It can be said that self-selection also plays a role here – certain temperaments are attracted to the game – but that is precisely why the effect is stronger: the environment does not create the profile out of nothing, it gathers it, disciplines it and amplifies it.
The mechanism of immediate reward
All contemporary competitive multiplayer games (League of Legends, Fortnite, Valorant, Call of Duty, etc.) work on the same neurochemical principle, namely the rhythmic and predictable release of dopamine. Each elimination of an opponent (in gaming jargon, a “kill”), each objective captured, each advance in the rankings triggers a release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, which is the brain’s center of pleasure and motivation.
What sets these games apart from previous forms of entertainment is the frequency and predictability of the reward. In a novel, for example, the gratification comes after reading hundreds of pages. In a turn-based strategy game such as Civilization or XCOM, the major satisfaction comes after hours of planning and building. In a game of LoL, on the other hand, dopamine is released every few seconds. The brain is trained and literally forced to expect rewards at increasingly shorter intervals. Neuroscience research suggests that prolonged exposure to rapid and frequent rewards can lead to what specialists call dopaminergic dysregulation, a recalibration of the brain’s reward system, which makes activities with delayed gratification, such as reading, strategic planning, complex negotiation, or institutional construction, to be perceived as much less satisfying at the neurobiological level. I emphasize that this is not a cultural preference, but a significant functional change in brain circuits.
From dopamine to political decision-making
The political implications of this mechanism are profound. A study conducted in 2021 and published in the journal Policy Sciences shows that citizens are generally not as eager for dramatic political change as previously thought, but there is a clear difference in preferences based on education. People with higher levels of education tend to significantly support policies whose benefits are only visible in the long term, even in the distant future. The picture becomes disturbing when you put this finding alongside data on the effects of digital exposure on the brain’s executive functions. Essentially, education cultivates strategic patience and long-term thinking, but the digital environment in which all forms of learning increasingly take place today works in the opposite direction and erodes its very foundation.
Cognitive psychologists use the concept of delay discounting, the tendency to prefer small, immediate rewards over larger rewards obtained later. As far as I know, there is no single, unanimously accepted term for this in Romanian psychological literature, but the term “devaluation of the future” captures the mechanism very well, through the tendency to diminish the subjective value of the reward as the time distance increases. One hundred lei obtained in a year’s time is psychologically “worth” less than one hundred lei now, even though, rationally, the amount is identical. This tendency seems universal, but its intensity varies depending on the environment and daily attention training.
This is where the generational problem arises. Contemporary competitive games, by their very design, train and amplify the devaluation of the future. A teenager who spends several hours a day in a system where rewards come every few seconds unknowingly recalibrates their expectations, tolerance for frustration, and decision-making style that will accompany them throughout their life. Over time, the mind learns to demand immediate confirmation, to push aside anything that does not provide rapid feedback, and to treat patience as a loss.
Transposition, especially in geopolitics, is direct and difficult to avoid. A population with marked temporal devaluation will prefer policies with immediate visible effects and will sanction, electorally and in the media, policies with broad scope, those that require large investments, infrastructure, education, institutional reform, or long-term diplomacy. It is no coincidence that public discourse has gradually compressed, from the dense government programs of the 1990s to short messages, viral replies, and clips lasting a few seconds on TikTok. In such a landscape, the leader who best understood the change is Donald Trump, whose communication and political tactics have consistently relied on instant rewards, dramatic gestures, real-time escalations, and easily consumable “victories” on screen. This style does not appear to be a departure from tradition, but rather an effective adaptation to an audience educated, day after day, to demand quick gratification. Each message becomes a small dose of satisfaction, each show a display of strength, each conflict a competition broadcast live. That such geopolitical outcomes tend to be fragile and reversible matters less and less when the future is psychologically taxed with a commission that fewer and fewer individuals are willing to pay.
Tribal thinking, from “team” to “faction”
League of Legends and, in general, MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games impose a rigid social geometry. You are on one team and, inevitably, against the other. The space between the camps does not really exist. Basically, neutrality no longer makes sense, the role of active spectator does not involve you in anything, temporary coalitions and fluid alliances do not appear in the mechanics of the game. The scheme boils down to a simple and brutal sentence: you are with us or you are against us. Again, this binary is not a design accident, it is the very essence of game mechanics.
Viewed through the lens of social psychology, such a structure activates and reinforces one of the most powerful cognitive mechanisms of the human species, in-group bias. Henri Tajfel’s classic research shows that the simple, even arbitrary, division into groups automatically triggers a preference for our own and suspicion of others. Online games that involve competition between individuals are not content to merely tap into this mechanism; they exploit it to the bone. They set it in motion, reward it, and repeat it until it becomes a reflex. In a few months, the team is no longer just a group of young people playing a game on a console or computer; it becomes a complete mental model. And once learned, this mental model easily migrates to politics, institutions, and public life.
The vulnerability increases even more if we look at the age at which this training takes place. The prefrontal cortex, the region associated with impulse control, planning, evaluating consequences, and delaying gratification, matures late, often around the age of 25. Adolescence thus becomes a period when the brakes are still under construction, while the accelerator, i.e., the reward system, is already operating at full throttle. In this very window of psychological development, competitive games do not exercise the brakes, but the accelerator. They do so systematically, for thousands of hours, through frequent rewards, instant feedback, and punishment for any hesitation. The brain is shaped by the rules of the environment in which it lives, and this environment rewards impulse, not deliberation. The result is not just a gaming habit, but a discipline of reflexes, a learned preference for quick reaction over slow and careful judgment.
From here to toxicity, the road is short and, above all, predictable. The insults, harassment, and verbal aggression that have made online gaming communities notorious are not just an unfortunate side effect. The mechanism is encouraged by the very design of the game. When victory depends on the performance of each member, and failure instantly sticks to the one perceived as the weak link, a standard psychological dynamic emerges through the externalization of blame, combined with the overvaluation of one’s own contribution. “I played well, the others messed up.” Or “The team dragged me down.” A 2023 study published in Computers in Human Behavior rigorously described this very combination observed in gaming communities, with a prominent detail that should give us more food for thought: lower-ranked players tend to consistently overestimate their abilities relative to advanced players. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect in its unvarnished form, the cognitive distortion whereby those with low competence in a field lack the metacognitive resources necessary to accurately assess their own limitations. The less you understand, the easier it is to believe you are better than others.
In the multiplayer arena, this distortion is by no means a statistical accident. It is reactivated dozens or hundreds of times a day, confirmed after each defeat blamed on someone else, reinforced after each victory attributed exclusively to the self, until it settles into a character trait. A generation trained to believe that failure always comes from outside, and success is almost always a personal merit, inevitably ends up bringing the same reflex into institutions, administration, and politics. The question is no longer whether this widespread cognitive distortion produces a certain type of leader, but what kind of leader can emerge from an informal school of life such as gaming, where responsibility is automatically passed on and certainty always comes much faster than competence, which requires sustained effort.
From playful toxicity to political polarization
Transferring these patterns from the gaming arena to the political sphere does not require any metaphorical leap, but only a minimum of careful observation of how people’s reflexes are formed. The profile of the competitive-toxic player and the profile of the radical political partisan overlap surprisingly well, because both grow from the same matrix, a world reduced to just two camps and a constant need for victory and psychological dominance.
The first bridge is identity binaryism. For those who have been trained for years in a League of Legends-type environment, reality is seen in only two colors, two teams, and two truths that have no reason to meet in the middle. The center becomes suspect, nuance becomes a waste of time, and intermediate positions are treated as weaknesses or disguised betrayals. In the game, the division is explicit and purely mechanical. In politics, even if the colors change, the pattern remains the same. The opponent is no longer a fellow citizen with a different vision, but an enemy to be defeated, ridiculed, and, preferably, removed from the game altogether. Compromise no longer looks like a technique of governance, but like capitulation, and dialogue no longer suggests deliberation, but a tactical error.
The second aspect common to both profiles is the systematic externalization of blame, a mechanism that protects self-image but blocks learning. In the game, the reflexive explanation for failure sticks to the teammate perceived as the weak link, a poorly played role, someone else’s wrong decision, or cosmic bad luck. In politics, the same personal need for virtue becomes a never-ending story about traitors and constant sabotage. Changing the setting does not change the mechanics at all. External causal attribution saves pride in the short term, but in the long term it perpetuates an offended victim mentality that always demands culprits and almost never any personal course correction.
A very relevant element in this discussion is the discipline of aggression as a norm of communication. In competitive environments, verbal escalation is not a matter of temperament, it is an in y tool for regulating status. Whoever humiliates first gains the psychological initiative, whoever raises their voice dominates the conversation, and whoever gives in is immediately marked as weak. Translated into politics, this reflex produces a culture of constant confrontation, in which argument becomes a pretext and the real goal is to demoralize the opponent completely. Instead of convincing the public, the attempt is to silence the opponent. It is no longer a confrontation of ideas, but a duel in which what matters is who remains standing.
There is also a subtle but substantial change here, namely the shift from a group of peers, which is alive and tangible, to a simple, cold, and dead ranking. Competitive games organize your identity around a visible ladder, through rank, points, progress, and demotion. In a way, this is what some current global political systems are trying to implement. Over time, by integrating the central idea of survival, the mind ends up looking for the same structure in public life. Politics ends up being seen as a ladder that some climb and others fall from. Everything turns into a competition of image and points, who wins, who loses, who is ridiculed, and who has their moment of glory, all of this instead of being about institutions, rules, and real effects.
The final result is easy to predict and recognize. An electorate shaped by the logic of dueling tends to demand spectacle, thrive on conflict, and treat political life as a cowboy fight between rival factions, played out in the street. Inevitably, the scene will be populated by people with well-trained reflexes, divided into two camps, who inevitably seek the guilty parties outside, living in a state of permanent emergency and practicing a pleasure in humiliation that takes the place of a solution. In such a setting, polarization will no longer be a mere drift of democracy, but rather a way of functioning, learned, repeated, and reinforced until it becomes natural.
Zero-sum competition or the death of diplomacy
For what we have called the “LoL generation,” the deepest and most dangerous geopolitical consequence is not related to technology itself, but to the mental model it establishes over time: the win-lose paradigm, zero-sum competition, as an implicit way of understanding reality. In turn-based strategy games such as Colonization, Civilization, or even Panzer General, victory is not achieved by brute force alone. You can win economically, culturally, scientifically, through alliances, trade, patience, and positioning, and your opponent can become, if necessary, a temporary partner or tolerable neighbor, whom you leave alone while you pursue your plan. Such games train what theory calls non-zero-sum thinking, the ability to devise arrangements in which multiple parties can come out ahead simultaneously under different conditions.
In contrast, games such as LoL, Fortnite, and battle royale formats cut off all these possibilities from the outset. The logic is simple and ruthless and states, in short, that my victory means, by definition, your defeat. There is no mutual gain, no productive compromise, no room for negotiation, only the race to take down the other as quickly and completely as possible. When this pattern becomes the reflex of an entire generation, diplomacy will begin to seem difficult and almost incomprehensible. The art of negotiation, in which each side gives something up in order to gain something else and stabilize a relationship, ends up being automatically interpreted as weakness. An agreement with mutual concessions is interpreted as a disguised defeat, and compromise, instead of being a sign of strategic intelligence, is labeled as betrayal.
The traces of this can already be seen in contemporary political discourse, in the increasing difficulty of sustaining long-term international commitments. Old agreements are abandoned or emptied of content, trade treaties are renegotiated unilaterally, and alliances are called into question not on the basis of cold analysis, but on the basis of a vague feeling that “we are losing while they are winning.” Rhetoric such as “we are being cheated,” “others are exploiting us,” and “we must win more” reproduces, on a geopolitical scale, the same mental pattern of the player convinced that the system is rigged against him and that his opponent receives undeserved victories. This is no coincidence, because with maturity only the arena changes, while the cognitive architecture remains the same.
Surveillance packaged as entertainment
Beyond cognitive effects, today’s competitive multiplayer games have become, in practice, some of the most sophisticated behavioral profiling devices we have at our disposal. Social networks mainly collect what users say about themselves through posts, likes, and comments, i.e., a certain form of self-presentation. In contrast, online games collect on a large scale everything the user actually does, under pressure, in real time, with perceived stakes, where reflexes and choices come to the surface unmasked. The difference is similar to that between a carefully cosmetized autobiography and a clinical observation, between a public statement and involuntary body language.
Behavioral telemetry in gaming exceeds any other digital environment in granularity, because measurable micro-decisions are produced second by second. A 2023 review article by Jacob L. Kröger shows, based solely on publicly available patents and experimental studies, that gaming patterns allow inferences about biometric identity, age and gender, emotional states, skill level, interests, consumption habits, and personality traits, sometimes without the player even being aware of the signs they are leaving behind. Reaction speed, r choice sequences, behavior under stress, how one recovers from failure, risk tolerance, even the pace at which one seeks reward, can all be aggregated into a psychological portrait that is more accurate than any questionnaire completed more or less in a hurry.
The scope of this topic is huge and at the same time camouflaged. In mid-2023, China reported a record of approximately 668 million players, or about half of its entire population. Globally, the video game market has been estimated at approximately $200 billion annually, and projections indicate sustained growth in the coming years. Every minute of gameplay produces data that can be stored, correlated, and monetized, including through analytics and marketing ecosystems that fly well under the radar of the typical user. In this context, the Cambridge Analytica lesson remains useful only as a warning. Basically, if profiling based solely on declarative data from Facebook, which is broadly socially desirable data, could be pushed to psychographic and political microtargeting models, then behavioral data collected in real time, produced under stress and in full competition, from the arena of online gaming, provides the raw material for much more precise and harder to contest influence.
The decision-maker raised in the online arena
Extrapolating the cognitive patterns reinforced by today’s competitive games, a fairly clear picture emerges of the future decision-maker shaped by this ecosystem. The central trait is not intelligence in the classical sense, but reactivity, i.e., the reflex to respond immediately, not to deliberate. Such a profile makes decisions in fractions of a second, moves well in short crises, with visible opponents and simple objectives, just like the thirty-minute matches in League of Legends. On the other hand, when the problem requires years or decades of planning, administrative patience, and consistency, structural limitations come to the surface. Slow threats, precisely those that define the great geopolitical challenges of the century, are instinctively pushed to the margins and swept under the rug because they do not provide quick feedback, do not deliver “victory” at the end of the day, and do not produce immediate satisfaction.
Against this backdrop, tribalism takes hold, gradually eroding old-style diplomacy. Those who grow up in an environment where solidarity functions almost exclusively within the group, and “others” appear by definition as adversaries, end up having a low tolerance for ambiguity and a reduced capacity for strategic empathy, the ability to understand the other’s perspective not to approve it, but to anticipate it and, sometimes, to defuse it. Without strategic empathy, negotiation becomes a waste of time, and compromise automatically smacks of betrayal. Instead of diplomacy, what remains is direct confrontation, escalation, and an obsession with “not giving in,” even when calculated concession would bring long-term gain.
The same matrix also produces a focus on dominance rather than collaborative construction. Competitive games reward elimination rather than edification, and success looks like a string of victories achieved by defeating others. Translated into politics and governance, this reflex produces leaders who are good at campaigning, because elections look like a zero-sum competition, but very weak at administration, where success depends on coordination, continuity, functional compromises, and institutions that last longer than the electoral cycle. A leader trained to win the game tends to treat politics as a series of successive duels, not as a long-term endeavor, where results are only visible after years and are built together, including with people you don’t like.
Above all this hovers a suffocating dependence on external validation. Ranking systems, badges, leaderboards, and instant feedback instill a need for constant confirmation of value, and in politics this need translates into an obsession with polls, applause, and trends, i.e., short, easily measurable signals that are completely irrelevant to the real consequences. This gives rise to a new temptation, less noticed and commented on: governance as a permanent update, politics treated as an app that you adjust daily according to public reaction, with media hotfixes and changes of direction dictated by what works best today. In such a style, unpopular but necessary decisions become completely impossible, because they do not bring immediate validation, but only image costs.
When the need for validation shifts from the individual to the group to which they belong, collective narcissism emerges, with exaggerated emotional investment in the grandeur of one’s own camp, combined with a pathological hypersensitivity to criticism. The leader no longer asks only to be appreciated, but demands that the entire team, party, nation, or ideological camp be recognized as superior. In such a climate, doubt becomes an insult, nuance becomes suspicious, and legitimate criticism ends up being treated as aggression, which inevitably leads to punishment, symbolic purges, and endless internal wars.
The strategist who no longer has time to grow
The leader that what we now call the LoL generation will produce most rarely is, paradoxically, precisely the leader that the world needs most: the strategist with patience, depth, and tolerance for ambiguity. In the 20th century, the great breakthroughs were made by people who thought broadly and accepted reality as it is, mixed, contradictory, and very rarely “clean.” George Marshall understood that rebuilding Europe would take years, money, institutions, and a discipline of continuity, not bursts of enthusiasm. Willy Brandt bet on a policy of rapprochement between East and West that required strong nerves, calculated compromises, and the ability t ly endure short-term criticism for long-term strategic gain. Richard Nixon made the opening to China possible precisely because he understood an old rule of history: today’s adversary can become tomorrow’s partner if the architecture of interests changes.
This form of strategic intelligence has not disappeared, but the environment that nurtures it has been methodically eroded by digital moths. A teenager who could have become a Marshall-type decision-maker now lives in an ecosystem that trains him almost daily in the opposite direction, toward reaction instead of deliberation, immediate “victory” instead of slow accumulation, strong certainties instead of tolerable nuances. It is not a matter of laziness or superficiality, but of a cultural selection of reflexes, in which anything that does not produce a quick reward seems, simply because it is slow, completely uninteresting and useless.
Who profiles whom and why it matters
The geopolitical dimension becomes even clearer when you look at the infrastructure that hosts this mass training. Tencent, a publicly traded Chinese company, fully controls Riot Games, the producer of League of Legends, and has significant stakes in Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite. Currently, its control is also expanding into mobile phone ecosystems. Tencent took control of Supercell, the creator of Clash of Clans, in a major transaction that consolidated its global influence in gaming.
This is where the asymmetry that is worth noting comes in, because it is not just commercial. While much of the global consumption of competitive online gaming takes place on platforms where Chinese capital and corporate control have a significant share, authorities introduced tough restrictions for minors in China in 2021, limiting online gaming to just three hours per week. More specifically, the restriction is one hour per day only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (and public holidays), between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. The implicit message would be that the product in question is excellent for export but risky for daily consumption in the domestic market, especially for minors.
There is no need for conspiracy theories to arrive at a strategic conclusion. The logic of profit, combined with regulatory differences, can itself produce a large-scale cognitive modeling effect. A cultural space where entire generations are encouraged to practice quick reactions, tribalism, and short-term thinking, while other societies deliberately reduce their minors’ exposure to the same type of training. In geopolitics, such differences are never mere details. Over time, they translate into leadership styles, collective temperament, and ultimately advantage or vulnerability.
When innocent play becomes destiny
The fact that the world’s armed forces are already explicitly using gaming for recruitment confirms the basic premise of this analysis, that computer games shape specific cognitive skills. The armies of relevant nations are increasingly recruiting from gaming communities, precisely because they recognize a set of skills that are useful in the field: tactical sense, quick visualization, calm under pressure, superior reaction times. However, these are essentially the qualities of a soldier, not a general. They are tactical qualities, not strategic ones. The distinction between tactical and strategic is most clearly seen when you compare two types of success, one that wins the moment and one that wins the game. Tactics is the art of making the right micro-decisions under pressure, through quick reactions, reading the opponent’s intentions, and precise execution in a window of a few seconds. Strategy is another species altogether, ordering time, building resources, keeping options open, and sometimes accepting local losses for the ultimate advantage. The difference is clearly seen in the history of warfare, with countless cases where a perfectly executed momentary strike paved the way, by itself, to long-term defeat, as happened in 1941 at Pearl Harbor. Nowadays, a very good gamer can become an outstanding drone operator, but the difference between execution and vision cannot be overcome. A well-trained reflex does not automatically give birth to a Carl von Clausewitz, a Sun Tzu, or a George F. Kennan. Armies take from the “LoL generation” only the pawns or executors they need. The pressing question, rarely asked, is who will train and select the visionaries that today’s civilization lacks.
An anti-gaming indictment would be neither fair nor useful. Video games remain a legitimate form of cultural expression and, depending on genre and design, can train valuable cognitive skills. The real problem is not the game, but the monopoly of a single type of game on the imagination of an entire generation, especially when that type of game rewards almost exclusively speed, impulse, and immediate victory. Hence the direction of the solutions, which exist and are, to a large extent, within reach, by diversifying the gaming ecosystem, which involves including in education games that cultivate long-term planning, tolerance for ambiguity, and flexible, strategic thinking, along with metacognitive literacy that teaches young people not only what they play, but also how what they play shapes them over time.
If an emerging power limits its own minors to competitive games but exports the same product to rival populations, sovereign nations have the right and, perhaps, the duty to respond with transparency, not censorship. The most precious thing that competitive online gaming culture erodes, with silent consistency, is the space for reflection built around the ability to stop, think, and evaluate options without the pressure of the clock and without the hunger for immediate reward. This space is essential for democracy, diplomacy, and any form of government that is not reduced to a simple reflex reaction. Protecting it is not a matter of cultural taste, but is increasingly becoming a matter of national security.
There is also a subtle but serious irony: the word “game” refers both to a playful activity and to a strategic calculation of maximum complexity, and game theory has become, since 1945, one of the mathematical foundations of nuclear deterrence strategy and the entire modern security architecture. The game you choose, or the game that chooses you, is not just a biographical detail; it functions as an implicit statement about your cognitive architecture. The real question is not whether games are “good” or “bad,” but what kind of brain is produced by the dominant game of an era and what kind of world that mind will build. For now, the signs are troubling, but none of this is inevitable.