sharon and yunhee's great adventure

The girls with Micah from Australia

First, an admission: I don't understand Overwatch. To me it's a bunch of blinky lights on a computer screen. But Sharon and her friend, Yunhee, love it. I'm not sure how long they've been playing it -- at some point they graduated from Minecraft. At this point they're on teams -- Sharon's the captain of her team, which means that she has to schedule practices and scrimmages (against other teams). And she's had to deal with unpleasant tasks like recommending to the coach that someone be removed from the team.

Yeah, video games are team activities with positions and everything. Sharon plays "off-tank." Other positions include "DPS," "healer" and "main tank." As with baseball or football, the different positions do different things. And they play their games, each player in his or her (but usually his) own locations. This is nothing like the videogames -- Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Galaxian -- that were around when I was younger and had to pay a quarter for every game. And it's all possible because of the internet.

And somehow this is getting to be a big time sport. It still has the fan friendliness of minor league baseball, but it's getting lots of coverage in the media.

Anyway, Sharon and Yunhee have been in tournaments at Microsoft's flagship store in Manhattan (and won some money at it). This past summer they were at a videogame camp in Missouri. But this past weekend they were in California for BlizzCon, which apparently has a heavy emphasis on Overwatch. And that was after spending the weekend before at TwitchCon.

With members of the San Francisco Shock
Note the girls are wearing jerseys for the New York Excelsior

At Twitchcon they were in computer-building contests (Sharon's team would have won if not for the fact that one of her teammates broke one of the parts), and got tours of Berkeley's e-sports* complex, and met with the coach and several players on the school's Overwatch team.

I don't quite know how it works, but somehow they became some kind of minor celebrities. Two cute teenage girls who are good at the game, and have the support and encouragement of their moms -- Blair was there as were Yunhee's parents. That attracted attention. By the time TwitchCon was over, they had been contacted by all sorts of big shots from the Overwatch world. They all wanted meet these two girl gamers. At BlizzCon the girls met players, coaches, general managers and owners, big-time streamers. And, of course, the President of Blizzard Entertainment. They were hobnobbing with the big shots, and have already gotten invitations to get the full VIP treatment next year.

computer-building contest

Funny thing -- maybe I shouldn't be thinking along these lines, but if we were still working with a certain red-shirted charity, we would have been giving them lots of great exposure. But, well, that's the way the game goes.

Anyway,  as a father I'm torn about where I hope this goes. Could Sharon turn pro? Could she parlay her abilities into a scholarship? I guess we'll see...

One other thing -- and this was bad for my diet -- the girls brought back sample boxes of the soon-to-be-released Lucio-Oh's cereal (from Kellogg's). It's sort of like Froot Loops or Apple Jack's, only vanilla-flavored.

*Yeah, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around "e-sports" as a concept being treated as a sport, not to mention the fact that major high-status schools offer scholarships in it.