The Women of Overwatch

With yesterday’s addition of Brigitte Lindholm, Overwatch now has twenty-seven heroes in their roster. Thirteen of those are women, albeit one of those thirteen is actually a robot. This is quite a lot, especially for a video game where men make up most of the target audience. Most games have, if any, one or two women in a cast of men, and usually the game’s protagonist is a man, too. An example for this would be Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series, where men always outnumber women.

For Overwatch, this seems to be a problem of the past. Upon release date the game had nine female characters, and four of the five characters that were added are women. However, with this wide variety of cast, another problem occurs: body shapes.

As Laura Mulvey mentions in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded or strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Women displayed as sexual objects is the leit-motiff of erotic spectable: from pin-ups to striptease, from Zeigfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire.”

In Overwatch, the large number of heroes to choose from means there is a lot of room for diversity. People of a variety of races and nationalities can find themselves represented by the characters in the game. But the bodies of the female characters are not as diverse as those of the men. Eleven of the thirteen women have a thin waist and attractive facial features. Only two women break the mold: Zarya, a muscular woman with short, pink hair, and Mei, a bigger boned woman with a chubby face. Supposedly they were created after initial complaints about the sameness of the already-existing women’s body shapes.

Overwatch clearly only has this problem with its female characters, as the number of male characters vary in both size, shape, and attractiveness. From Torbjörn, a short man with a prosthetic arm who, in my opinion, looks a bit like a dwarf, to Doomfist, who’s tall, dark, and muscular. No two men look the same, not even brothers Genji and Hanzo, but for the female characters it’s very much like they just used the same mold over and over again. They play the traditional role Mulvey mentioned in the earlier quote, playing into male desire of an attractive woman to play as or with.

In conclusion, the male gaze in Overwatch, despite being a first-person shooter game, is clear and abundant. The women are purposefully made attractive, whereas this is unnecessary for men because the audience doesn’t need to be attracted to them. Or, in the words of John Berger: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”