This in-depth article by Mina Kimes is about so much more than Overwatch.
It took less than two seconds to change Kim Se-hyeon’s life. In June 2016, Kim, who plays under the gamer tag “Geguri,” was competing in an amateur Overwatch tournament from her parents’ house outside Seoul. Her team, UW Artisan, had come out firing. The announcers screamed Geguri’s name as she and her five teammates shot up their enemies on a map called Lijiang Tower, darting between skyscrapers and pagodas beneath a murky violet sky. After momentarily wiping out its opponents, Geguri’s team hung back, and the camera landed on her avatar, a brawny Russian woman named Zarya who wields a comically large gun. Then something strange happened: As Zarya spun around in a circle, scanning her allies, her movements appeared oddly crisp and robotic. Click. Click. Click.
It was a fleeting moment, and it would’ve gone unnoticed if not for what happened next. After the match, whispers started to surface online that Geguri, then just 16 years old, was cheating. She had already developed a reputation in South Korea for her impeccable shooting and win ratio, stats that placed her among the top Zarya players in the country. But the incident at Lijiang Tower aroused suspicions that Geguri’s ultraprecise aim was a little too precise. Several players on Dizziness, the team UW Artisan had defeated, took to the forums to accuse her of “aim botting,” or using hacks to sharpen her skills. One of them wrote: “If there is a problem with our sponsors and such, I may visit Geguri’s house with a knife in hand. I am not joking.”