I approached Barclay’s Center to take in Saturday’s Overwatch League Grand Final match alongside a group of prototypical eSports fans: nerds in their late teens. One girl in this group was relaying to her friends the rumor that a new player-character would be announced at this, the conclusion of Overwatch League’s (OWL) wildly successful first season.
That’s when a 40-something mom turned around and confidently corrected the young woman: they wouldn’t be introducing a new character, but new “skins” for existing ones. My surprise doubled when one of the young men responded “Maybe they’ll have DJ Khaled make the announcement—We got a new skin! And another one! Another one! Another one!” That’s how I discovered that DJ Khaled was the warm-up act for that afternoon’s live video games, and that I officially I had no idea what I was in for.
The jumbotron showed live gameplay as well as all 12 players’ avatars; Sam Roos/ High Times
A quick primer for readers unfamiliar with Overwatch: the game is a first-person shooter (FPS) featuring two teams of six competing head-to-head. Each player chooses one of 28 characters, each with unique strengths and weaknesses, to compete in various types of games, including king-of-the-hill and capture the flag type contests. The style of the game is bright and cartoonish, a family-friendly anime aesthetic, but the strategy is intricate and the pace of play blistering. The game is as much a contest of quick-twitch muscles and hand-eye coordination as it is teamwork and game theory.
When I offered to cover this event for High Times, I thought there might be a story in the role marijuana has amongst Overwatch fans. Personally, I associate video games with getting baked on a couch for a couple hours of