#ip6

It’s late evening on a weekday and I decide to unwind by playing the team-based shooter Overwatch for a couple of hours. I start the game and wait for my (cis male) friend, with whom I always play together, to join me. Once we’re in a group, we go into Quick Play (the most popular game mode that consists of casual games, taking much less time and generally less effort than ranked competitive sessions), and it asks us to select roles we would like to play as. The available choices are: “Tank” (characters with significantly increased health and some way of shielding from or negating attacks, able to absorb more damage and protect other members of the team), “Damage” (various characters whose main goal is to attack members of the other team) and “Support” (a.k.a. “healers” – more fragile characters able to restore health to other members of the team). Once we join a game, we’ll be locked into a particular role for the duration of the game, and will only be able to choose characters of that particular category (one of the 8 tanks, one of the 17 damage dealers, or one of the 7 healers).

Without any contemplation, with a learned gesture, I choose “Damage” and “Support” and press “Ready.” My friend selects all three roles and presses “Ready” as well. We wait for a bit and are added to a game that’s about to start. I’m locked into the “Support” role, and my friend is locked into the “Tank.” I play as one of the four female characters available to me – the other three I like the designs and mechanics for, but I know I’m not very good with them, and I am intimidated by the possibility of being a burden on my team. We play a few games like that: always as a healer for me, and a tank for my friend. It’s not surprising for us, since every single evening of Overwatch playing goes like this. After a bit we get tired of these roles – we go into Role Select again and deselect the ones we’ve been playing as this entire time. I’m now queued as “Damage” only, and my friend as “Damage” or “Support”. After a significantly longer wait time we’re finally added to a game – I’m playing as a damage dealer, and my friend as a healer. We do this for a little while, until my friend gets tired of healing and switches to “Damage”-only as well.

As I went over this experience in my head, I realized more and more the very urgent need for complex feminist analysis of issues related to support characters in multiplayer games. There is a long-standing stereotype, in Overwatch as well as other team-based games, that female players play mostly as support characters and healers. It’s generally hard to test the accuracy of this statement without conducting massive community surveys and interviews, because games rarely if ever directly ask players to disclose their gender (though, of course, other players can make judgements based on indirect cues, such as someone’s timbre in voice chat).

Nevertheless, it’s widespread and supported by anecdotal evidence enough that I’ve discovered many attempts to explain this phenomenon online. For example, this insightful Reddit thread discusses five different factors that could play into women choosing support characters more often: gendered childplay practices that reward women for taking on caretaking roles, gendered marketing of particular games and characters, gendered character design (even in Overwatch, which offers a relatively diverse array of characters, Support is the only role dominated by female heroines), cultural norms that make women more likely to compromise and take on roles nobody else likes, and fear of stereotype reinforcement – when unsuccessful experiments with new characters and mechanics are taken as evidence of women having no talent for games, rather than simple inexperience.

On its own this stereotype would have been relatively benign, but it’s often combined with another, more insidious one: that healers are easier to play and require less “skill” from players, whatever this arbitrary concept means for the gaming community. Thus, the argument goes, players who tend to mainly choose support characters deserve less respect and are also the main reason anything in the game goes wrong. A (cuttingly sarcastic) recounting of such complaints can be found in this article, along with an extensive list of counterarguments, the main of them being that healers simply require mastering a different set of skills from damage dealers and tanks, such as teamwork, good communication and quick triaging (i.e. determining the priority of helping various team members in need).

Making such judgements about what constitutes “skilled” play and what doesn’t plays into what Mia Consalvo calls gaining a certain “gaming capital” – becoming a respected and celebrated member of the gaming community. Like with all kinds of cultural capital, many of the factors that play into this process can be invisible or completely intangible. For example, there are certain structural issues in Overwatch as a game that explicitly prioritize damage-dealers over other roles. The simplest way to see this is through the in-game system of awarding the title of “Play of the Game” to a certain episode masterfully done by a particular character. It’s extremely rare to see a healer rewarded in this way for impressive healing and effective triaging, or a tank – for effectively holding the line or disabling the enemy team, but it’s very typical to see damage-dealers rewarded for killing lots of enemies in quick succession. The skill that is held in highest regard by many players as a result is precise aiming. These conversations regarding challenge and skill are further fuelled by the in-game “difficulty” rating, which assigns one to three stars to every character based on how complex their skill-set is to pick up for a complete beginner. There is a lot of speculation regarding how this system translates into the level of challenge in mastering a particular hero, and as a result creates (frequently toxic) comparisons between players preferring differently tiered characters.

As one user on this Overwatch forum thread half-jokingly suggested, Mercy (the most famous healer character in Overwatch, who is assigned one star in the in-game difficulty rating) should have been given three “mental” stars in difficulty, not to designate her as a complex character or to suggest that she requires a high amount of “player skill,” but to signal the exceptional mental fortitude that is needed to be able to endure the toxic attitudes many players used to display towards those who preferred to play Mercy regularly. An idea along similar lines is voiced by the heroines of this Cecilia D’Anastasio’s piece: that playing support heroes in Overwatch requires large amounts of emotional labour, and often is done (by the interviewees and by other women) not because they particularly like playing as healers, but because nobody else is willing to step up to the task.

These systemic issues and stereotypes are long-standing (as Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell discuss in Gamer-hate and the “Problem” of Women: Feminism in Games, nothing is really new in the area of discriminating against and silencing female voices, including the particular “techniques” used in gaming communities), and I’ve been on the receiving end of some of these attitudes myself, with other players:

complaining in the team chat that the healer (me) was criminally unskilled, or deliberately ignored them, or both;

switching to a non-healing character in the middle of the game, leaving the team to quickly perish;

obnoxiously spamming the “I need healing” call-sign while being separated from the rest of the team, with no way for a healer to get to them without dying themselves;

and engaging in many other less and more disruptive behaviours.

The system of role queueing that I described in the beginning is relatively recent, and was added specifically to address some of these problems. Before explicit roles started being enforced, players were able to choose characters after their teams were already assembled, with the game pointing out that no healers would almost certainly guarantee a loss, but allowing such team composition nonetheless. The recent change allowed players to commit to certain roles from the start of the game, ensuring that those who are more willing to compromise their own desires for the benefit of the team didn’t have to pick support characters just because nobody else wanted to play them. It also both encouraged and forced more players into support roles (by having significantly shorter wait-times if you are willing to play tank or healer, as well as sometimes literally offering in-game rewards for choosing non-damage roles), hopefully broadening the perspectives of those who never tried these characters before due to various biases. 

And yet, after paying close attention to my own emotions during this observed play I realized that I play Overwatch very differently (and with less excitement) now, compared to before these changes were introduced. A lot of the thrill of playing healers and tanks for me before (and those were virtually the only characters I played before role selection was established) was in feeling useful and supportive of the team effort, utilizing a set of skills that didn’t rely on murder quite as much as on healing and protection. There was something powerful, almost to the level of power fantasy, in being able to (sometimes, perhaps, self-sacrificially) choose a character (so frequently a female one) that was essential for the team but that nobody else wanted to pick. Now, with the role-selection system in place it became patently obvious that prejudice against healers is still very deeply entrenched (as the game has to offer rewards to have enough players willing to even consider choosing them). At the same time, being locked into the role of a healer from the start feels like the expectation of “skill” and “good play” is now extended to these characters as well, where previously that was the prerogative of damage-dealers. If I experiment with a healer I’m unfamiliar with, I’m not helping my team by providing support, I’m letting them down by not taking my role seriously after explicitly stating I’m willing to take it on.

All of this is not to suggest that these changes are objectively bad. If anything, the pleasure of self-sacrifice (through choosing a character nobody else wants to play) is in itself very messy and discernibly gendered. Rather, it’s to contemplate how much untrodden ground there is still left to explore for game scholars willing to apply feminist critical perspectives.

References:

Meet the gamers who love playing healer, Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

The Power of Healers in Competitive Gaming, Jennifer Anderson

I Paid Women To Play Overwatch With Me, And It Was Fantastic, Cecilia D'Anastasio

Why women tend to main support or healers in multiplayer or team games -- Comprehensive deep dive, Ammers10

Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, Mia Consalvo

價格挺 OK 的？Sony Mobile 在台推出 Xperia 10 II，主打防水和娛樂，售價新台幣 11,490 元！

  Sony Mobile 致力於打造貼近消費者需求的智慧手機，繼 2019 年帶來全球首款 21:9 終極寬螢幕 Xperia 10 系列，今年再升級推出全新娛樂新機 Xperia 10 II！全新美型防水手機 Xperia 10 II，以親民價格帶來旗艦等級的 IP65 / IP68 防水防塵標準，不論是夏日戲水或偶有雨天，Xperia 10 II 讓使用者們擁有更棒的行動體驗！全新三鏡頭相機內建美食、肖像、夜間模式，色彩呈現再升級，完美捕捉每一刻青春活力。21:9 OLED 寬螢幕更為觀影、遊戲帶來終極娛樂體驗！Xperia 10 II 水你玩、不怕潮，讓今夏娛樂不設限！

  (more…)