“Sexuality does not belong to the game” : Discourses in Overwatch Community and the Privilege of Belonging

Abstract

Players can experience a sense of belonging to videogames and the transmedial worlds surrounding them. There nevertheless exist ongoing negotiations over who has the right to belong to these spaces. Multiple works addressing related issues have highlighted that white heterosexual men still maintain the position of power in the majority of game communities (e.g., Consalvo, 2012; Paul, 2018). This position can translate into an ease of belonging while others can find themselves struggling for the right to belong.

We examine the transmedial world of Overwatch, an online game, as a place of belonging and non-belonging. Since the game’s launch, two characters have been revealed as queer. In contrast, a third character is considered a gay icon by fans, even though there is no official narrative supporting this. We analyze discussions around these cases using rhetoric-performative discourse analysis (Palonen & Saresma, 2017), an approach originally developed for research of political populism. In addition to similar affective and persuasive rhetoric in both contexts, politics have become an inherent part of online and fan communities (Dean, 2017), making this approach even more apt.

Our analysis makes visible how belonging and non-belonging are constructed in Overwatch communities in relation to gender, sexuality, their intersections and also to identities such as “player” and “fan.” We take into account ongoing design choices in the game’s development and analyze how the complex structures of production and reception interact with these discourses. Discussions analyzed here expand beyond Overwatch, touching upon highly politicized issues of gender and sexuality in games, the right to be represented and the current political climate in Western countries, and reenact divisions present more broadly in media discussions. Our findings also show how characters function as a nexus for these political debates and as limits and horizons for belonging.