Have You Played... Overwatch?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

Overwatch is fun just to think about, which is handy because I spend more time thinking about it than I do playing it.

I like class-based shooters, and Team Fortress 2 hit at a time of my life when I had a lot of time to play multiplayer games and a lot of friends to play them with. Overwatch landed in a different time of my life. I play it sometimes, and I enjoy it. I like its classes, its focus on team cohesion, its upbeat art style.

But really what I enjoy most is everything that goes on around the game, whether it's critical essays picking apart a particular class design or an onslaught of fan art following the reveal of some new character skins. I don't particularly enjoy Blizzard's contributions to this ecosystem via comics and animated shorts, but there's lots of other people producing work that's expressive of the fun they're having. Fun playing, fun thinking, fun making.

I know there are issues within the Overwatch community, including with toxicity (because I've read great essays about it and listened to fascinating podcasts about it), but looking in from a position of remove, Overwatch's community is unusually fruitful and that's a joy.