Overwatch — Blizzard’s Team based FPS is making strides for Girl Gamers and Diversity
“I think we’re clear we’re in an age where gaming is for everybody. We build games for everybody. We want everybody to come and play. Increasingly people want to feel represented from all walks of life, everywhere in the world. Boys and girls — everybody. We feel indebted to do our best to honor that.” ~Chris Metzen, Blizzard
While gender diversity in video gaming as a whole is becoming more inclusive (featuring more female protagonists and better developed female nonplayer characters) the first-person-shooter genre has lagged sadly behind. Until recently, playing a class-based FPS meant choosing from the few female characters available (and being relegated to a role you might not love to play) or picking from a group of guys.
What makes Overwatch special? For starters, over 40% of the playable characters are women (almost 50% if you take out the non-human characters). And out of the nine playable female characters there are at least two of every class. In a tanky, lead the charge kind of mood? Choose Zarya or D.Va. Feel like wracking up mad damage and being super annoying to the opposing team? Try Tracer.
Overwatch doesn’t just sit firmly as one of the front runners in character diversity solely because it features women characters, it also features women of color. Five out of the nine women characters are not Caucasian — represented as characters from China, South Korea, India, and Egypt. In total, half of the characters of the Overwatch are persons of color — making it the most racially diverse game produced by a major publisher.
Additionally, Overwatch recognizes that women over 30 are a viable, growing part of the community and mirrors this by having five characters firmly in that age group. To boot, while mature women and/or mother characters in video games are usually relegated to the sidelines at best (if not killed off early as part of another character’s story arc), Overwatch’s latest addition is 60 years old, a founder of the team in story canon, and the mother of another playable character.
Overwatch is embracing alternate body types and styles as well. Not all the characters are impossibly shaped hourglass women (though there are a couple) — body types range from slender to muscular to athletic to pleasantly plump. There are characters with glasses, with scars, tattoos, short hair styles, and prosthetic limbs.
Blizzard has been rolling out additional content via comics and videos for Overwatch, giving us insight into some of the interesting backstories of these characters. Mei-Ling Zhou is a climatologist. Symmetra is non-neurotypical (one of only 9 recognized characters with autism in the entirety of video gaming.) D. Va is a former professional video gamer (specifically a Starcraft player, in a little meta-twist by Blizzard).
And as the best indicator that inclusivity sells, people are buying it. Overwatch is one of the best selling games of this year (number one in May, despite being released the last week of the month) and has replaced League of Legends as the most played game in South Korea.
Is Overwatch the best the community could do insofar as diversity? There are still a few noticeable flaws — a few female characters sport skin tight catsuits, some have alternate skins that could be construed as culturally insensitive, there still aren’t quite enough women, a few too many of the male characters are represented by square jaws and broad chests, and there could be a few more characters outside the Euro-Caucasian spectrum. But is Overwatch one of the best games out currently that represents a larger and more diverse spectrum of real live actual humans? No argument. Blizzard’s successfully pushed the boundaries of video game character models and story telling, setting us further down the path of representation for anyone and everyone who plays.
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