She had to tape the introduction several times because she was so anxious, and she wore a white mask to hide her face. Geguri accepted, but when she arrived at his studio, Kim says, it was clear that the high school girl "wasn't mentally ready" to face the public. As the online abuse mounted, Kim invited Geguri to stage a demonstration to clear her name. "Everyone was attacking her brutally," says Kim Young-il, one of the announcers, called casters, who broadcast the tournament. She was a unicorn, and people didn't believe she was real. The scandal swirling around Geguri felt like a tipping point. In Seoul, where corporate-sponsored teams live in gaming houses and play in front of packed arenas, the top players are all men.
#Korean lol icons professional
While female gamers don't have the same physical disadvantages against males as, say, female basketball players, very few have thrived on a professional level. The lurid attacks on Geguri were perfectly calibrated to capture fans' attention - and to provoke debate about the glaring void of women in esports. Overwatch, which was released in May 2016 and now boasts more than 30 million registered players, had already cultivated a huge following in Korea. But in the meantime, the story exploded online. Geguri's coach contacted Blizzard, the company that makes Overwatch, hoping to clarify what had happened. 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. 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. But the incident at Lijiang Tower aroused suspicions that Geguri's ultraprecise aim was a little too precise. 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. After the match, whispers started to surface online that Geguri, then just 16 years old, was cheating. It was a fleeting moment, and it would've gone unnoticed if not for what happened next. Then something strange happened: As Zarya spun around in a circle, scanning her allies, her movements appeared oddly crisp and robotic.
![korean lol icons korean lol icons](https://joeyilluzzi.github.io/images/champions.png)
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. 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. Her team, UW Artisan, had come out firing. In June 2016, Kim, who plays under the gamer tag "Geguri," was competing in an amateur Overwatch tournament from her parents' house outside Seoul.
![korean lol icons korean lol icons](https://icon-library.com/images/lol-free-icon/lol-free-icon-6.jpg)
It took less than two seconds to change Kim Se-hyeon's life. This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Oct.