I have chosen bell hooks to apply to Overwatch as I get to cover some real positives of this game I love, bell hooks believes that white, male, upper class people control the media industries and their values and beliefs are the ones that we see in the vast majority of media products. This means that people who are not white, male and upper class will not see their values in media products and means that whole groups of people and their values can be misrepresented or ignored.
I have chosen Overwatch as despite how people see it today will always be one of if not my favourite piece of media. I have played this game since they days of the beta in 2015. Overwatch is an award winning fps game released in 2016 which to me provides inspiring messages and characters that I am far to attached to.
I personally believe that hooks would see overwatch in a positive way as I will rant about that later. However if we had to apply this theory, I personally believe the part she would see flaw in is the company producing it. As I'm sure we all know, Blizzard Entertainment is a scummy company purely due to big corpa in this case Bobby Kotick. Who perfectly lines up will bell hooks' idea of white men owning the show. However, it is said that the Overwatch team had almost no involvement with the Blizzard Scandal so if bell saw this she may look to wider examples from blizzard notably the HearthStone team etc.
Now, onto my rant of how
good Overwatch is in representation. hooks would look and see the wide range of not just ethnicity but the amount of strong women characters. To start, I will talk about my main in the game, Sombra a latina woman from mexico. One main point about representation as a whole in Overwatch is the languages spoken, most heroes have a mix between English and their native language, Sombra of course is no different this is one great detail for most heroes. One part of representing groups is to make their culture aparent without making the whole character a stereotype, the way Overwatch goes about this is through hero skins. Sombra has two skins based off of Dia De Los Muertos which also happens to be the name of a gang she joined in her lore.
If bell hooks were to look at this today, she would most likely look to the latest hero as that only makes sense. She would love her, the latest hero as of writing is Illari. llari is Peruvian. She is the second South American character in Overwatch after Lucio from Brazil. Piero Herrera, the senior game designer at Blizzard Entertainment, said, “This character is really important to me because I’m half Peruvian, half Brazilian. We really wanted a second South American character, so everything pushed to cast her. The key moment was thinking about representing different people with this character.” Blizzard Entertainment designed Illari to accurately represent Peruvian culture. Illari’s costumes, including her Llama Pajamas skin, accentuate her Peruvian heritage. Further, the colors of her costumes are written in Quechua, an indigenous language spoken in the southern and central highland areas of Peru. Joshi Zang, the game’s Narrative Designer, detailed Illari’s design process: “We decided to take the best parts of this culture and really give it its true importance. We talk and consult with many Peruvian women about what is very important to them in representation. We also talk a lot with cultural researchers about how people live in the mountains, how they live off the land, and how they return gratitude to nature.”
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