hannie kwak

I love spending the majority of my free time playing video games. I did not indulge in gaming until about middle school when a friend asked me to download Discord, a new voice chatting app for gamers. From there I’ve met my best friends of five years who encouraged me to start playing PC games with them.
The first video game I played was League of Legends. I was horrible at it, but I enjoyed spending my time calling and gaming with my friends Whenever holidays rolled around, my friends typically bought me champion skins, a $10-15 gift that changed the appearance of the League characters and their abilities. My parents would have called it a waste of money, but I was mesmerized by the hues and graphics that made the characters look mythical.
Two years ago, a new video game came out called Valorant. It was my first ever first-person shooter game, and I was tremendously bad at it. My extremely low skill level bubbled up many shared laughs. Although I was horrible at the game, I still greatly enjoyed the time that I spent with my friends.
I started spending my own money on Valorant gun skins that had pretty cool VFX. I was enticed by the idea of designing my own gun and champion skins. I started dreaming of the idea of becoming a videogame designer. I wanted to design my own creations that others would be mesmerized over. When college applications rolled around, I decided to take a leap of faith, not knowing how to code at all, to become a computer science major with a design minor to hopefully one day design my own flashy skins. After playing for about a year, I started taking the game more competitively. My skill level dramatically increased, jumping from Iron (the lowest rank) to diamond, which placed me in the top 6.5% of players in the world. I started posting my Valorant clips online to Tiktok, a video social media app. My videos started going viral, with one of my videos getting 641K views. I decided to take another leap of faith and try out for the UGA Esports Valorant team. To my greatest surprise, I was accepted as a member of the JV team. Not only has gaming brought me my best friends, but it has also brought me my future career, connections from my videos getting a good amount of views, and a community in college. I am ecstatic to compete in tournaments, and maybe one day become a famous streamer or the next female pro Valorant player. I will never stop dreaming because my dreams have slowly started becoming reality.
Signing off,
UGA RED ahanai. :)