This strange and awful time

… was the happiest of my life.

The night before the Overwatch League 2023 Grand Finals, I ate a truly irresponsible amount of hot pot for dinner and then immediately got sad.

Maybe the enormity of the moment really hit me then; I was out to dinner with a group of people I quite liked but whom I also only ever saw because of the Overwatch League. And we were all aware that the time was rapidly ticking down, which meant that this might really be one of the last nights. Or maybe I was just feeling the early effects of indigestion.

Afterwards, we went to a bar adorned with string lights. Something about that made it feel like we were already living in a hazy memory. Standing on the sidewalk outside, I asked Roston, the General Manager of Seoul Infernal (formerly the Philadelphia Fusion), how he felt about the Overwatch League potentially coming to an end. I don’t remember exactly what he said (sorry, Roston) but one thing stayed stuck in my mind.

“I’ve loved it the whole time,” he told me.

Yeah, I thought. Me too.

Humans run on a seven-year cycle. At least, that’s what a cursory look at the Google search results tells me. I don’t know how much scientific basis this claim has, but it’s true that if today I were to turn around to look back at myself from seven years ago, I wouldn’t know the person looking back at me.

Of course, I was a kid seven years ago. I was a kid when I first picked up Overwatch (16), I was a kid when I started watching Overwatch esports (17), and I was a kid when I started writing about it (18). That’s why looking back on my old writing always makes me cringe — it’s not very good at all — but it also makes me smile. I didn’t know a thing back then except that I loved something very dearly, and sometimes that’s all it takes to change your life.

I looked at a young player over playoffs weekend and remembered that the first time I saw him was six years ago. How much he’s grown since then, I thought to myself. How much I have, too.

Often it occurs to me that all the good things in my life right now can be traced back to Overwatch.

A few of the connections are a little tenuous — friends of friends and so forth — but if I hadn’t picked that game up in 2016 then today I wouldn’t have my job, my cat, or my apartment. When playoffs came to Toronto I was reminded of how many lives have touched mine, how many hundreds of people have become such steady presences in my life that I now take them for granted.

Things always look more beautiful in hindsight. Time has a way of smoothing over the cracks. Can you ever picture someone clearly if you love them? No, but does it matter? I used to think I had to justify or explain my love for competitive Overwatch, but now I realize that I don’t have to at all. It changed my whole life. There’s nothing else to say.

The thing I find difficult to explain to people outside of esports is how all-consuming it can be. Esports is its own little world, a place where you build a home that’s all your own, and it feels like maybe that’s enough for the rest of your life.

It never is, of course; the world is more than just one thing. But for better or worse, Overwatch was it for a lot of people — their livelihood, their community, the thing they couldn’t imagine living without. I talked to a lot of people over playoffs weekend who all told me different things about how they came to be there, but the one thing everyone had in common was that they loved the togetherness that Overwatch is built on — both the game and the esport.

So it’s not just a league that we’re losing. It’s this world, this life, that we made together. And like it or not, we all needed each other to remind ourselves that we weren’t alone. Now, as we stand here at its endpoint, I don’t think there’s any point in wishing things had gone differently. This is how things are, this is how things were, and we loved it just the same.

Look, the Overwatch League was never perfect. It was a flawed dream from the start; we kinda knew it then, and we certainly know it now. But the important thing is that we dreamed it together. Nothing in the world has ever made me feel the way Overwatch made me feel. I don’t know if anything ever will.

I think that’s true for everyone who’s still here. The reality is that the Overwatch League never mattered that much; it was merely a conduit for competition and camaraderie. And love.

To be loved is to be changed. So many people loved Overwatch so much that by the end, the league had become something much greater than the sum of its parts. Isn’t it nice to look out at a crowd of people and know that you’re all there because you decided to love the same thing? Isn’t it nice to know that that will never go away?

This strange and awful time

The Last