"We’ve heard [from] our female employees and … even my daughter calls me out," he said. "We were looking at old Warcraft stuff on YouTube, a cinematic, and my daughter is like, ‘Why are they all in swimsuits?’ And I’m like ‘Ugh, I don’t know, honey.’
"I think we’re clearly in an age where gaming is for everybody," he continued. "We build games for everybody. We want everyone to come and play. Increasingly, people want to feel represented, from all walks of life, boys and girls, everybody. We feel indebted to do our best to honor that. There’s a lot of room for growth, but specifically with Overwatch, over the past year we’ve been very cognizant of … trying not to over-sexualize the female characters. I don’t know that we’ve over-sexualized the male characters. But it’s something that we’re very sensitive to."
-Chris Metzen
(quote via polygon.com)
I do believe Metzen’s sentiments are genuine here! And credit where credit is due, taken individually Overwatch’s female character designs are almost all super terrific! You can really tell they’re trying!
But once you look at the designs in aggregate, a sexist pattern still emerges.
- Female characters are allowed MUCH less variance in body type, all appearing very slender with hourglass figures. there are no stout, short, towering, muscular, or elderly women in the mix.
- Where male characters’ appearances may be strange, obscured, or unattractive, all female characters’ faces and bodies are fully visible and conventionally attractive
- Only one male character, Hanzo, could be interpreted as “eye candy” in any sense of the term, and even he is still given inventive proportions that deviate from conventional standards of male beauty (a stout upper body with short, thin legs)
I’m not here to be the never-satisfied feminist; it’s important to accept progress when we see it. I do think Overwatch does a better-than-average job with its female characters, and deserves a bit of credit for that! But the average was pretty crappy to begin with, and we shouldn’t be shy about asking for better.
at a glance, not that much about Overwatch’s character design has changed from, say, Starcraft. like, this is still definitely a step up from their other IPs where women are basically invisible or otherwise undermined by the plot (with a couple exceptions like Sarah Kerrigan, whose portrayal has its own issues), but yeah, we definitely shouldn’t stop asking for more just because Blizzard has started trying to position itself as the good guys.
yeah, i was finding it pretty funny when i saw a couple of people go ‘oh wow it looks like they’re doing a lot better this time around’ and all i could think was ‘lol did you actually look at them because i’m pretty sure at least half of them are more or less a palette swap if the body type is to be believed’
everyone knows that skintight catsuits are the best armor