To the University of Oklahoma, she’s classified as a Film and Media Studies major. To the Esports community, she’s much more than that.
Callie began playing Overwatch since it was first released in 2016 and is a Top 100 Mercy. She’s spent countless hours working her way up the ranks, and even more time to defend her rank.
She says her favorite aspects of the game are its unique artistic styling and the widely diverse heroes you can choose to play from. She regularly plays competitive mode because unlike other popular PC MMOs, like League of Legends, Overwatch has a built-in voice chat system in which players often use in higher ranking competitive games.
“It’s a great feeling to win a game due to teamwork aided by the voice chat system. It’s also an amazing way to meet new friends,” she says about the feature.
Every high ranked Overwatch player has a main, and Callie is no different, hers is the support hero, Mercy. Mercy is a healer, restoring health and reviving fallen allies. Callie enjoys playing Mercy because of her kit. “Her ability to fly and easily kite enemies as well as the satisfying micromanagement of her team’s health has always been extremely fun for me. Every hero has a play style and her light-footed rarely grounded gameplay is how I have grown to love playing Overwatch,” she states. “Unlike other heroes in the game, Mercy isn’t one that can easily be practiced in the training grounds. Most of my gameplay strategy is learned directly from playing competitive and gaining the experience head-on.”
As for her future goals in the game? She hopes to manage a stable position in the Top 500 players in North America. She also doesn’t want to limit herself to just Mercy, as she is one out of twenty-six playable heroes. “I’m hoping to sometime finish leveling my smurf and see how I compare to other DPS players rather than support.”
Like many people in the Esports community, gaming means much more to Callie than shooting bad guys and capturing objectives, “Gaming to me is being able to dive into another world and forget about reality for a moment, my favorite part about gaming is the community building within MMO games. Social gaming can be a great way to make online friends. I do enjoy doing art such as painting and sculpting but video games have held a special place in my heart since I was a young child and so I will always come back to them.”
Callie also streams as Kitren_ on Twitch, mainly focusing on Overwatch but occasionally dipping her toes into other games. For her streaming schedule and more information about her streams check out her Twitch page below:
