Overwatch's Symmetra is autistic now.

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Well, I certainly feel represented by the futuristic indian cyborg supermodel and her magitech portal gun. [/sarcasm]

Just like with Tracer being gay, this just feels like a cheap way to score points with minimal effort. I'm all for characters, both autistic and otherwhise, but can we please have good characters through strong characterization, not by label-hoarding?


your thoughts?

I thought the same thing. I remember reading an article where Blizzard said they didn't need to tell a story with their heroes, but someone in the comments remarked that we didn't need to know all of their sexual preferences either. I'm all for in depth characters, but what really bothers me is that Blizzard could have told an amazing story with them. In an era where all the popular shooters are dark, gritty, and mature, I'd kill for a shooter with a lighthearted story like Overwatch.

Yeah, I felt it was a cheap gimmick on part of the devs.

It's like they threw it out there that she just happens to be autistic.

" Hey, look at us waving the autism flag! "

I remember when I heard about this, I felt slightly annoyed that they made a character obsessed with order and symmetry the autistic one. Not all of us are like that, I for one am disorganized as hell!

Not only that, but when I was younger, I HATED following rules, and I actually had a pretty rebellious streak for an aspie. Ironically, when I was a teenager, this meant getting into less trouble than other teens, because drinking underage and all that stuff became the "norm".

I still commend them for including an autistic character that isn't "ret*d" (no offense to anyone), but at the same time, they're still going by a stereotype.

If any game portrayed autism well it's Watch Dogs 2.

For anyone that hasn't played WD2, Josh is a member of Dedsec ( your group ).

His peers allow him to be himself, and don't give him a hard time for being autistic. In fact, they support and respect him.

Ubisoft portrays Josh's autistic traits in a respectful way. He's incredible with coding and hacking, but doesn't quite get jokes sometimes. ( for example )

The fact that Josh is alllowed to be himself in a positive environment says a lot about Ubisoft's understanding of, in this case, high functioning autism.

I don't mind. Not every character needs to be a representative. Sometimes characters are just characters that aren't all white, male, heterosexual neurotypicals.

Overwatch is not a story-centric game so it's not really able to represent autism the way a novel or other media could.

Yet another box ticked on the diversity checklist.

I've been wanting to try Overwatch (Tracer is soooo pretty!) but I just don't want to if it's bloody and gory. :/

I don't play Overwatch but I don't think it has blood and gore.

I just watched some gameplay, it definitely does not have any of that. Just cartoon violence.

It reminds me of an argument I got into on WattPad where they said that more books need diverse casts. Not "would benefit from" a diverse cast, "needs" a diverse cast. As in, the quality of a book goes down if it doesn't have (at least) one black character, one gay character, etc. Same issue here. People think something's quality automatically goes up if it doesn't feature straight, white men. They don't seem to realize that a good story (or game) is made because it tells a GOOD STORY (or IS A GOOD GAME).

sorry, this is something that bugs me

You hit the nail on the head. Just because it has a diverse cast, it won't matter if it doesn't add anything meaningful to the game / story.

Exactly. I'm all for more diverse casts, but the first priority should always be to tell a good story (or make a good game). Take that priority away, and the entire project will collapse then and there. At best you'll have a book (or game) filled with token characters-- like Overwatch. Luckily, Overwatch's first priority was to make a good game. It wasn't until AFTER the game was out that they decided they needed to throw in shallow, pointless "diverse" heroes.

In fact, in my experience, most things become WORSE when you throw diverse characters in for the sake of being diverse. I read a lot of webcomics, and it seems like every single one of them has the same exact token gay character. You know, the really tall guy who is always cheerful, is a friend to everyone, and is practically a walking talking rainbow? Always the same, every freaking time. And I always have to ask, why are you here? Why is your sexuality suddenly just as big a deal as the main cast saving the world? What does this add to the story besides 'HEY LOOK AT MY GAY CHARACTER!"?

There are plenty of ways in which characters can be diverse, and frankly, what colour they are, what their genital makeup is and who they prefer to rub said genitals on is the cheapest and easiest way. And the most boring. Give me flawed characters with opinions, motivations, goals, adversity, baggage and backstories. And then have them clash. It'll be far more interesting, and it'd still be interesting if they were all superficially identical but internally distinct. Other way around, not so much.



I seem to remember an extremely short-lived cartoon that made a big deal of having a trans main character voiced by a tran voice actor. This managed to wind up being the characters only personality trait. The cast was a spectacularly diverse array of tokenism, and somehow the one straight, white guy was still the most interesting and funny because he was basically a psychopath.

The fact that her name is Symmetra and has all this organizational crap kinda ticked me off. I feel like someone cracked an autism joke or something while they were creating her, and they all immediately had light bulbs go off about how good that would be for their PR to say she is autistic. Like, what could be better than minimal effort where everyone will just eat the stuff you say right up? I can't think of anything else!

tbh i dont feel like they are "this now" if you know what i mean, i think its just a reveal. for example symmetra always seemed like that, and her behavior has not changed. just as tracer is allowed to be revealed as gay. thats like saying that, as i admit to you that im gay (i really actually am) that means i just became gay, i wasnt before. i only disagree with it if it changes the personality/behavior of a character. when in both cases here, it has not at all

They key difference being that people in real life have internal lives and exist independent of what people know about them. Fictional characters do not. Assuming you had figured that out about yourself, you would still be gay whether anyone else knew about it or not. Not so for a fictional character. But just throwing out random tidbits about a character does not make them more interesting unless it influences how they interact with their environment and vice versa.

Imagine if I said that the left paddle in Pong is actually a segment of an ancient magical birchtree that grants immortality to whomever might pull a sword out of it, the right padddle is a bar of nanotech hypersteel from the future that somehow gained sentience and the ball is actually a square dragon's egg that will hatch in 200 years as foretold by prophecy. Would watching a game of Pong suddenly be more interesting?