Flying Home

When I heard that the 2019 Overwatch League grand finals were going to be held in Philadelphia, I knew immediately that I had to go. I’d been covering the league from its home at the Blizzard Arena for a while up to then, but this was grand finals — Overwatch’s biggest event of the year. The rest of the season sped by, and before I knew it, it was the end of September. I found myself sitting at the gate, loading up Fire Emblem: Three Houses on my Switch and getting ready to fly to Philadelphia for a grand total of 40 hours before flying back.

I wasn’t the only one — not by a long shot. Fire Emblem took a backseat as I kept getting distracted by the people around me: two guys discussing the finals matchup animatedly, a woman wearing Tracer’s jacket, an older man in an Overwatch League T-shirt. I looked around and I realized that I was surrounded by people who were boarding this flight for the grand finals. All these people, heading to Philadelphia for the weekend just to see the culmination of this long, crazy, tumultuous season with their own eyes. And I was one of them.

I didn’t really clock it then, but how strange and surreal is it that thousands of people were descending on Philadelphia at the same time, just for this? All over the city there were Overwatch fans, walking down the streets in groups, meeting up with online friends for the first time, finding ways to pass the time before the main event started the next day. It was weird, and it was embarrassing, and it was wonderful. We were all there for the same reason. We were all there to be a part of something.

This piece is what I like to think of as my yearly check-in. In April 2017, I watched the Overwatch match that would get me interested in Esports (APEX Season 2 finals, of course). I didn’t know it at the time — how could I — but that one game would completely change the course of my life. I wrote a similar piece last year, a reflection on the two years I had spent in this community.

Now another one has passed, and of the three, I have to say that this one has been the best so far. 2019 was the year I met some of the coolest people in the industry. It was the year I got to write in-depth profiles on the league’s players, and film a handshake between Super and Bumper. I was there to witness the triumphs and defeats of the league, week after week. I watched the Valiant’s sheer elation as they snuffed out the Titans’ winstreak, leaping into each other’s arms and screaming as though they’d won the season. I watched the Dragons collapse into one another as they held off a reverse sweep from the Shock, confetti raining down on their heads and faces turned to the sky. I watched as teams lost where they should have won, won where they should have lost. I watched.

Now, I’m not a passive person by nature. I’m not used to consuming without creating, without giving as much as I take. I like to make my voice heard in the communities I frequent. It’s a way for me to set down markers, to have something tangible and real that I can look back on after I’ve moved on from someplace, to remind myself and everyone else that hey, I was here.

Most of being an Esports fan is just watching, which drives people nuts. To compensate for that, we like to believe that we as members of the audience can impact things, that we can change the outcome just by wanting it hard enough. That’s why we assign meaning to our viewership, look for patterns in our choices — “this team always loses when I watch their games”, or “this team always wins when I predict they’ll lose”. We want to believe so badly that Esports can be something more than what it is, something predictable, something we have even a modicum of control over.

We don’t. Of course we don’t. Nobody can predict how things are going to go, not even the players themselves. Esports isn’t randomness, but it’s certainly not predetermined, either. So, instead of trying to control it, we — the people in the audience — create stories. We take the things that happen and mold them into something recognizable, narrative patterns that we can take comfort in because we understand them. This team is the underdog. This team wants revenge. This player has a grudge against the team that traded them away. This player is determined to prove themselves after a poor showing last season.

We construct our own narratives based on what we know and we hope that reality will fall into place around them to make them true. (This is basically what Esports writing is, by the way. Like, Esports writing is literally all just this.) Sometimes it happens, and those stories do come true, and you think that maybe you understand this scene now, just a little bit. Other times, the Hunters beat the Shock, and things go back to not making any goddamn sense.

Look, I’ll just say it. This has been a rough year for — well, everyone, so far. The world is on fire and everything is awful. Which, weirdly, makes Esports seem… less awful, in comparison?

There are so many things I could say about Esports. Like, if Esports was a person (oh god I don’t even want to imagine what kind of person they’d be), and they were sitting in front of me, and I had to say something about them, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Our relationship status on Facebook would be It’s complicated. We’d probably be doing this in couples counseling.

The more I think about it, though, there’s only one thing I can say after everything I’ve done and seen this last year, and these last three years. So, to Esports, without any of the irony or disillusionment: thank you. Thank you for being there at my side these past few years to watch me grow and improve. Thank you for making me laugh, cry, scream, cheer, and curse God himself. Thank you for changing my life. Thank you for making me feel like a part of something.

I don’t really know where this thing we call Esports is going to go next year, whether there will even be anything notable to look back on or forward to when next April rolls around. But for now, at least, I’m happy with where I am. And sometimes it’s good enough to know that in the years to come I’ll be able to look back and know that — in the wise words oft-uttered by the immortal Twitch chat — I was here. PogChamp.

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