How Tanking in Overwatch Has Helped Me Love My Giant Body

Way back in 2016, Overwatch entered the gaming scene as a delightful, but devilishly competitive hero shooter. The rules were simple: on each map, two teams of tank/damage/healer characters would fight over objectives such as control points or payloads that must be protected as they move from one location to another.

Since then, it’s exploded into a multimedia powerhouse and professional esports league that I’ve gone on two separate trips to see live. It’s also faced its fair share of criticism, and spawned much more than its fair share of thirst.

We don’t have time to dive into every particular of why I personally love Overwatch enough to spend over 2000 hours getting good but not great at it. So instead, I want to hyper-focus on how the mechanics and teamwork of playing tank in Overwatch have given me a new appreciation for my real life largeness and helped me better cope with my mental health.

I know that’s a lot to unpack, and believe me, we will. First things first though. Before we can talk about why Overwatch tanking now holds such a special place in my heart, we need to talk about what exactly tanking is.

Tanks are a team’s Big Bois, Beefy Broads, Large Lads and In Your Face Folks. The core tenant of tanking is: Hold the line. In MMOs, tanks are the ones who pull mobs of enemies and keep bosses from targeting anyone else. In hero shooters, they use their superior health pools and zoning abilities to force opponents away from objectives. As a tank, your job is to keep enemies focused on you long enough for damage players to slip behind the opposing tanks and go about their grisly work.

That’s not to say playing tank isn’t exciting! It’s just… a different flavor of excitement. To force a sports metaphor, tanks are like the linemen on a football team. They’re rarely featured in the highlight reel, but none of the magic happens if they don’t do their part.

In other words, they represent exactly what people think about when they look at me — and I hated it.

To understand why, allow me to take you on a quick A Christmas Carol-style journey. Look, that’s me as the tallest kid in my Kindergarten class. There’s me towering over everyone else on my baseball team, me as the tallest and biggest on my football team after I put on weight. The tallest person any of my girlfriends have dated? Yup, that’s me too. Here’s a mashup of the literally hundreds of times well-meaning grandmothers have told me, “You’re taller than my grandson! You must play a lot of basketball.”

My size has always been the first, inescapable thing people notice about me. Like a pack animal, or a circus elephant forced out onto a platform.

For that exact reason, it’s also at the core of my various mental health struggles. I’ll spare most of the dysmorphic details, but I’ve always felt uncomfortable and out of place underneath my own skin. More like the pilot of a thicc, meaty mech rather than a single person. My freshman year of college, I developed an eating disorder and finally lost all the weight I thought was the source of my unhappiness. Surprise: it wasn’t, and since then I’ve watched the bones in my face shift and move under my skin whenever I look in the mirror for too long.

Even when I played video games, my distaste for feeling large followed me. I couldn’t imagine choosing my own body in real life, so I actively avoided characters in games who reminded me of how much I stand out.

But that’s the point of playing video games right? Living a fantasy, experiencing the world in a different way, as a different person, than you really are? There’s nothing wrong with that mindset, but looking back, I was clearly avoiding my own discomfort rather than trying to appreciate new experiences.

Yes, video games are inherently escapism, but there’s a difference between taking a break from reality and actively hiding from who you are behind a digital curtain.

Then, despite me explaining how much I didn’t want to play yet another shooter, my cousin bought me Overwatch for my birthday. Immediately, and begrudgingly, I fell head over heels in love, always choosing the small, spritely glass cannons I gravitated to in every game. Heroes like Junkrat and Pharah, McCree and Tracer — thriving on the risk/reward of my trigger finger, dipping behind the safety of my tanks whenever I overextended.

I appreciated the tank heroes for the benefits they provided, but I didn’t like any of them. Why would I? They were all so hefty, massive, standing out the same way I do in every group picture and family portrait. But as these role-based games always go, eventually I had to play tank. Too few of my friends could, and if there’s one thing that drives my decisions more than my body dysmorphia, it’s the over-competitive need to win.

At first, tanking made me feel physically uncomfortable. Those without severe self-image issues may scoff that a mere video game could cause that much of a reaction, but it’s true. Controlling Roadhog, or Reinhardt, or (fittingly) D. Va gave me the same sense of piloting a meat mech that I tried so hard to escape from. But slowly, game by game, win by win, that perception began to change.

However much I detested taking up space in real life, in Overwatch everywhere I occupied was a benefit to my team. Rather than finding any way I could to attack, I focused on protecting my squishier allies, drawing attention, staying on the objective regardless of the mayhem around me.

In many ways, learning those tenets of proper tanking has helped me apply similar strategies to improving my mental health. It’s not about making risky, big-splash moves. It’s about positioning yourself for success, thinking ahead to protect your vulnerabilities, and not allowing yourself to be cut off from your support system.

Quality tanking is all about confidence, and before I consciously registered what was happening, that confidence in Overwatch was bleeding out into other aspects of my life. Rather than being an embarrassment, I’ve found my Men’s XXL hoodies are perfect for helping my female friends and dates feel cozy when we hang out. Instead of staying quiet during work meetings, I’ve realized that speaking up and taking ownership of projects impressed my boss and led to me relying less on others to get things done. I’ve even accepted that, despite me always feeling awkward as the largest person in the room, the people around me often see it as a benefit the same way I did when I primarily played damage heroes.

If all that sounds simple, it’s because it honestly is simple. None of this stuff is experimental or groundbreaking. But when you spend literally every day of your life telling yourself there’s something wrong with you that you can never fix, it’s changing those simple, seemingly-insignificant thoughts and actions that really matters. You can’t quickscope your inner demons, but you can push them back, inch by inch, keeping your shield up until you’re the one in control again.

For instance, when I worked at a movie theater, my coworker offered to teach me the waltz before immediately giggling and saying I looked like Frankenstein’s monster learning to walk. That self-perception wound had been festering for years, and I thought about it at least once a week.

Then I unlocked Reinhardt’s dance emote, where he waltzes with his hammer and tenderly dips her, his armor plates clacking and arms waving ponderously. It immediately reminded me of that girl, of Frankenstein’s monster… and then I performed that ridiculous hammer waltz on top of the payload as it coasted the last few meters to victory, flexing in the faces of my enemies as they poured back out of their spawn room, helpless to stop me.

I’m not claiming Overwatch is a replacement for therapy or anything. At least for now, that’s still one of the few services Blizzard hasn’t slapped their branding on. But still, that moment of waltzing catharsis did more for my self-esteem than I can express.

Playing tank isn’t for everyone. It can grind you down and wear on your nerves (especially when your so-called friend is halfway across the map healing Genji while you’re dying on the point). But at least for me, it’s provided a space where I can be huge, be loud, take up space, and feel unapologetically good about it.

After all, if I can love all those things about some fictional character created by a stranger in Irvine, California — why can’t I love them about myself too?