Diversity and Overwatch
I am looking forward to Overwatch. Re-auth’d my BattleNet account to sign up for the beta. its has a lot of good things going for it right now. A diverse cast of characters! An intentional move away from the idea of winners are winners, because headcounts! Teamwork vs personal achievement! I am all about this. It’s a really good thing, and a great step in the right direction.
To paraphrase Anita Sarkeesian, we can still enjoy and appreciate media while discussing it’s problematic elements.
I can appreciate that they took a GI Joe or the X-Men angle to to conflict in the cinematic trailer: lots of shooting, lots of dodging, lots of throws and non-vital blows. lots of physical activity without physical harm. This speaks to creators who want to engage younger players. I think they took a very Pixar-like approach for this reason. So in that respect, I can applaud that the really wanted to create some diversity in the characters and their goals. They’re instilling a framework within a fictional world that is a intended to be a somewhat representative of the actual world that we currently live in, albeit highly fictionalized and sensational.
It also very much comes across to me as “We’re trying to speak to a global market.“ We want to relate to the greatest number of people possible by throwing symbolic elements in game of different cultures that may not be as well-represented in other arenas of typical western modernized game culture. It seems like they’re wanting to set the groundwork for diversity as the new normal in games. As it should be.
As a game, it’s also evocative of a few classic entertainment pieces like Street Fighter 2: People coming together from different walks of life to fight together against an enemy, be it a named for or an intangible movement, for the greater good of the world.
Much like Street Fighter 2, you see a lot of symbolism or stereotypes that are intended to allow the viewer to recognize that this is happening in their world, that this fantasy fight is somehow connected to them in a relateable way. Iconic (if stylized) areas in Overwatch like The Temple of Anubis or the Jesus of Rio De Janeiro to more generic seeming locations like the cherry blossom gardens in Japan or Arabian street markets. These areas are reminiscent to me of the Reclining Buddha or the Vegas Strip in Street Fighter 2.
That being said, I’m slightly troubled by the cultural tropes and stereotypical nature of some of the characters. Pharah (Clearly derived from the word Pharoh) with a wadjit painted over her right eye. Or more overt examples, like Hanzo the assassin named after…Hanzo the samurai, looking and acting like Miyamoto Musashi with a nearly comical facial expression that seems like it was directly pulled from a Kuniyoshi woodblock print. And that’s just a few characters. I could go on.
Street Fighter 2 originated more than a few decades ago, and I think that recalling to that international pride like this is the superhero olympics comes across as a little weird. Not all the characters do it, and not in their entirety. To their credit, the Overwatch team seems to have put some effort into giving their characters depth beyond just the tropes of their nationalities and backstories. It also seems intentionally over the top, though. Maybe to give it a campy, sensationalist feel, so it’s entirely possible that it’s a tongue-in-cheek attempt to parody the stereotypes of each culture in older games like SF2, and I’m reading a little too much into it.
The more thought I’ve given Overwatch, (and I’ve given it a lot of thought, you might call me obsessed. I really do want to play this game) the more that I’m bothered by the representation of female bodies vs male bodies.
There is more diversity in body types and ages between the male characters than the female ones. The women, for the most part, are still designed to be titillating rather than powerful or functional. Slim in all the right places, sway-backed, curvaceous ass angled outward. Ridiculously revealing clothing, even more ridiculous high heels, hips-tilted-to-the-camera with the exception of Pharah or Tracer when she’s engaged in a battle-ready stance.
With the only two darker-skinned characters being female, and one depicted in a highly sexualized way, it doesn’t read so much as a diverse representation so much as it reads as providing a few titillating examples of the Exotic Beauty. This particular aspect was what I was was getting at when I referenced the possibility of cultural appropriation in Overwatch.
Gorillas and blue-tinged half-zombified brainwash-tropes, by the way, don’t count as racial representations so much as outliers.