Overwatch Represenation Isn’t About What I Thought it Would Be

When Overwatch was announced I had one of my Shedding a Tear Over Representation-moments. I took to social media, venting my joy over seeing a woman leading a Blizzard franchise, along with other women, some of them brown, many in practical clothing, one as old as 34. In the same breath I voiced frustration over how all of them came in one, slim body type, how two thirds of the support characters were women (the third an androgynous robot), how the sexy woman was the evil one and how the Japanese men just had to be samurai and ninja. My concerns were however minor in comparison to my blissful joy over the Overwatch roster.

Funcom Nailed Representation In The Secret World

The Secret World was love at first sight for me when I bought it in 2013. This buy-once-and-play MMORPG draws heavily on the works of H.P. Lovecraft and folklore from different cultures, has teamwork across factions and a welcoming, helpful gaming community. Storytelling and puzzle solving in The Secret World is fascinating, engaging and feels surprisingly fresh while still being a game based around combat. But the thing that made me fall in love with the game at the title screen was representation. Not just at the title screen, but directly when you launch the patcher.

The Secret World game launcher

Small update

Hey, checking in so you know I’m alive. I’m having a tumultuous life in the meat world right now, so I haven’t had time for the blog. Doesn’t mean I haven’t consumed geek things of course.

I’ve watched and fallen in love with a full season of Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun, an absolute adorable anime about a high school student in love with a shoujo manga artist. I laughed out loud in every episode, the jokes are well timed. Either the show is extremely gender queer friendly or blatantly homophobic. It’s hard to tell with the Japanese culture that are so far from my own world view.

An Hour of Guild Wars 2 Made Me Face My Own Racist Bias

I’m a person with a lot of privilege. I’m white, straight, cis-gendered, young, thin, and not poor, to name some of the big ones. I am spending a considerable amount of time informing myself, trying to understand my privileges and change my biased behaviour towards less privileged groups. One thing I have dabbled with from time to time is to play darker skinned characters in video games, but rarely, and mostly in World of Warcraft. I have made few-to-none observations that has helped me understand white privilege better, but I didn’t really expect to either. The thing that annoyed me with WoW was that there were so few options of darker skin for humans, and that the darkest I could choose felt light brown to me.

Vision Impaired by Sexy Haircut

Morrigan in Dragon Age Inquisition promotion

Have you noticed that one indicator of sexiness in women is that they have hair in their eyes? No? Neither had I, until I started to get more and more annoyed with seldom finding a haircut I liked in video games. When I stopped to ponder why they all felt awkward, the pattern emerged in stark clarity before me. I call it the Morrigan Syndrome, and Bioware are high profile offenders. Morrigan had a disturbing amount of hair in her eyes in Dragon Age, and amazingly, it grew out to make her completely blind on one eye in Dragon Age Inquisition. I love Morrigan. She’s sensible and practical. Why would she wear her hair like that?