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.

Sylvanas gets new armor

Sylvanas has some new armor on the Legion expansion website! Finally they decided to give her half decent clothing, and wooh. Look at how much cooler that made her! Such a simple thing, just put some armor on the ladies.

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?

Helpful Statistics to Shut Down R-jokes

Trigger warning: statistics about sexual assault.

Ever been in a LFR raid in World of Warcraft when some moron dropped a rape joke, and you wanted to say something clever but couldn’t come up with something good, and so stayed silent? I’ve got a tip. Use some quick statistics to educate them and the rest of the raid. You can even macro an answer, these jokes pop up often enough that it’s worth it.

First, we need to know how many women play World of Warcraft. In 2014 the Entertainment Software Association released statistics about gamers in their report Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry⁽¹⁾. The report said that 48% of gamers are women, however that are spread out over all different games and platforms. There’s actually nothing in the report that can help us guess how many of WoW players are women.

The WoW-Girl and the S.E.L.F.I.E

World of Warcraft recently implemented the S.E.L.F.I.E, a device with which you can snap photos of your character as if you were holding a camera. It reminded me how I used to look down on this particular kind of selfie. I actually took loads of selfies when I was a teen, but I was very careful to make it look like someone else took the photo, and that I was just looking my absolutely best while doing something else. As if there was no camera there, and I just happened to be in my best clothes with perfect hair and make up. Then arouse in society the selfie as it is today, where people don’t care if you know they took the photo themselves, they even hashtag it #selfie. I turned my nose up (figuratively) in disapproval.