“I need healing!”

“I need healing!”

“I need healing!”

Any Mercy main knows the bleating of a slightly-injured Genji when they hear it.

In many games that involve teams of players trying to win fights with another team such as Overwatch or Apex Legends, it’s a common archetype to divide the characters you can play into three general classes. First, there are DPS (damage-per-second) mains. These are the characters you imagine when you think about video games…the flashy, damage-dealing, kill-collecting superstars. For maybe the first thirty years of video game history, you controlled a DPS main. Pac-man is a DPS main. Every spaceship in every sh’mup is a DPS.

Tanks are big, beefy characters of substance. A tank’s job is to absorb damage (either in a shield, some sort of energy force, or their own bodies) and take space. If your team needs to move straight ahead, it’s probably the tank that’s leading the charge. Tanks attract attention. If you don’t deal with a tank, they’ll run you over.

Finally (and it’s no accident that this group comes in third), there are support mains. Support mains started out their gaming lives as “healers”, because their primary job is to restore the health of other players on the team and keep them alive. As games became more complex, the jobs of a support main began to diversity to the point where I do not know of a character whose sole job is to heal. Supports now not only need to heal, but they have other abilities that revolve around keeping the team functioning, whether increasing the strength of the team’s damage output or mobility, marking enemies that need to be killed, negating the abilities of the other team, or even getting a few kills on their own.

For as long as I’ve had the option of choosing one of these three classes, I ‘ve been a support main. When I started playing Overwatch, I was instantly drawn to Mercy. Mercy is the consummate support character. She has fantastic mobility that keeps her one step away from those trying to kill her, she does very little damage with her pistol (which is why getting Mercy kills is incredibly satisfying), and she both heals her team and increases their damage output with her Caduceus staff. I was drawn to play her from the moment I knew about Overwatch. Even though I have learned how to play other heroes for certain situations, I will always be a Mercy main at heart.

As time passed and as I branched out into other games and pursuits, I noticed there as well that I was drawn to the support role. For example, when I started playing Genshin Impact (an adventure/gacha game similar to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) I immediately became a Sucrose main. Sucrose, while not a strict healer, depends almost entirely on the abilities of other characters to thrive. In still other games, I feel a strange compulsion to select characters that are less popular and to try to make them function when everyone else has given up on using them. I even began to notice a similar tendency in real life. In the streaming world, I have had much more ease in hyping up and encouraging other content creators before doing the same for myself. I have wondered more than once if being the front person as a streamer is less beneficial for me than being a mod (read: moderator or assistant) for someone else. Finally, I recently started working as a weightlifting coach, which meant that less of my time was going to be focused on my own training and competition and more time would go to making others better athletes.

After considering all of these things in total and sharing my ideas over time with others who enthusiastically agreed that they saw the same in their own lives, I am fully convinced that there is such a thing as an IRL Support Main…and I’m one of them. As I embraced this role in life rather than ignored it, more of my own though processes and decisions made sense to me. But being an IRL Support Main has its downsides. And as I’ve considered it more, I found that many of the pitfalls of the IRL support life also pop up in the virtual world, where certain criticisms and stereotypes associated with being a support main in games remain. Rather than leaving these so-called insults where they are, maybe by examining and reclaiming them we can provide more stability and understanding to the lives that we support mains lead.

Example #1: “Healbot”

Being called a “healbot” is considered to be an insult in the world of support mains. It implies that there is no brain behind the player…no creativity, no strategy, no ability apart from holding down the big red button that says “heal”. And since many players only see the result of a support main’s work as their hit points increasing (since much of the work is done either in the background or behind the front line), it’s hard to refute to someone who refuses to look behind them. Similarly, IRL Support Mains never get the recognition of those who actually stand in front of the cameras…yet their work apart from the glare of the spotlight is still needed. While it is normal to focus attention on the field of play, there are hundreds surrounding that field that allow it to remain playable. There was no better example of that in the world of sports recently than those who assisted in saving the life of Demar Hamlin of the Buffalo Bills after he suffered acute cardiac arrest in the middle of an NFL game. Similarly, one of the unsung parts of the 2020 COVID experience was the appreciation of those “essential employees” who kept much of society moving along while the majority of the population hunkered down at home (whether by choice or no). The work isn’t worthless because certain people don’t notice it. In fact, obliviousness is the fault of the oblivious ones and not the value of the object in the blind spot itself.

Example #2: “Boosted”

Being “boosted” means latching yourself to one of the tanks or DPS who are more highly-skilled than you are and playing all of your games with that person. You heal only them, you assist only them, and you use their successes to propel you to a higher rank than you could ever achieve on your own.  Mercy mains are so often accused of being boosted that I might as well have written “boosted Mercy main” as the heading. While this is a common experience in the Mercy life, all supports will be accused of being boosted eventually. After all, they can’t really win games alone because they don’t do enough damage. For IRL Support Mains, this criticism is also common. There are numerous examples of overzealous parents or conniving coaches who latch on to a real talent and sell themselves like they are the actual “mastermind” of every success. But those sorts of people aren’t actual support mains…they’re grifters who actually want to be leading the parade rather than simply in it. An IRL Support is happy to be in the parade or even cleaning up before and after. They simply want everyone at the parade to enjoy themselves. If you’ve ever watched a party or event that you prepared for others come off without a hitch and found satisfaction from the work even if you aren’t given equal credit for your effort, then you understand. Instead of downplaying the value of that pride, embrace it.

Example #3: “Girl gamer”

No list of support main insults would be valid without this one. The stereotype of support mains is that they’re almost always women. As an aside, this can lead to some pretty hilarious reactions to my particular play on Overwatch. There has been more than one time where someone in voice chat has yelled about all of these “girl gamers” playing support…until I turned on my microphone. I’ve also been propositioned by other players who clearly thought I was a girl more than once. I’ve even had people at my gym ask my why I have those stickers of Mercy and Sucrose on the back window of my car (as a 102kg Olympic weightlifter). Support mains are secondary…passive…non-essential…in other words, the typical female gamer tropes by those who don’t know any better. It would be ridiculous for me to pretend that this wasn’t an issue when nearly every Twitch streamer from whom I’ve learned support techniques and therefore became a better player (shoutout to QueenBia, Emiliath, Tilly, BreadedCargo, Mushu, and the list could go on and on) is a woman. While I’m not qualified to write about the difficulties of their experience in the digital world, the stereotypes remain despite their success and I can empathize with their struggles. IRL, however, it’s been clear that many career paths that could be rightly called “support” have been dominated by women. Nurses, dental hygienists, social workers, administrative assistants, paralegals…all of these fields are at least 85% female even after other seismic shifts in other occupational demographics and involve some sort of role where you are supporting other people in their pursuits. These fields are not only admirable, they are models for the sort of care and compassion that allow support mains to excel. I take them as an example to follow rather than a stereotype to be scorned.

These stereotypes about support mains do exist. But not everything is negative. I’m convinced that many of the traits that make a good support main in a digital space also exist as positive traits in real life.  For instance, IRL Support Mains want things to improve. They want the current state of the world to be better than it is, and they’re willing to put their time and talents towards improving the world rather than simply complaining about it or making things even worse. Support mains think that giving to others is an objective good deed. We’ve been trained to look at the scoreboard at the end of a game and smile when we find out we only got two kills in a fifteen-minute game but kept our teammates from dying over 30 times. We celebrate when one of our DPS pop off in a Play of the Game even if we’re the only ones who notice that we set up the game state that allow it. This is absolutely a trait I’ve seen in my coaching career. There are times when an athlete I’m coaching fixes a flaw in their movement or makes a new personal record, and I’m happier for them than when I achieve one of those things for myself.

IRL Support Mains also tend to be incredibly intuitive judges of character. In Overwatch, it doesn’t help the team to boost a player’s damage if they aren’t hitting any of their shots. You have to choose who to support and when. You have to save your ultimate ability for the critical time in a fight and use it to turn the tide. In real life, we are drawn to people who want to improve. I love to help people who are proven to be coachable…those who receive advice from others and use it to make themselves exponentially better. I will give the world to someone who is coachable and is driven to get better. This ability to identify talent and desire finds those “diamonds in the rough” and takes away the rough, leaving pure diamonds in their wake. This is probably one of the reasons that I’ve recently shifted my streaming focus to the field of coworking. Not only do I have things that need to get done, but I get to spend my streaming time encouraging others to get their work done. Coworking streaming, in fact, might be one of the ultimate online examples of IRL Support Main work.

I am proud to be a support main, both in gaming and in real life. Identifying and leaning into my gaming preference has made me a more effective human being in the rest of the world. I don’t sweat others taking advantage of me or not wanting my help because there will always be others who come after who actually need it. While I still wonder sometimes if my encouragement and support of other streamers and makers in the world is seen as a weakness or a covert desire for something else, I ultimately decided that being an encourager doesn’t cost me anything, helps others,  and provides me with happiness apart from the views that detractors would hurl towards my cheering. I’d rather be a force for encouragement and IRL Support in the world more than I’d rather not give it out of fear and have other people miss out on it. If you’re living the IRL Support Main lifestyle, I’d encourage you to do the same. Grab your own Caduceus staff, get into the IRL fight, and start finding those DPS mains to charge up.