Overwatch

Start with the gorilla in the glasses.

Winston, one of the faces Overwatch chose for its launch in 2016, is a genetically engineered gorilla. He was raised on a lunar research colony by a human scientist whose surname he took as his own, and he grew up to build the time-anchoring device that keeps his friend Tracer from dissolving out of the present. He loves peanut butter. He is anxious and bookish. He is the one who sends out the recall signal that sets the game's whole mythology in motion.

For anyone raised on twentieth-century natural history, this is a quietly radical image. The gorilla was the great specimen of the museum diorama: posed, stuffed, gazed at, made to stand for a "nature" that white men in pith helmets went out to collect and explain. Overwatch takes that figure and hands it the lab coat. It also skips the usual gotcha in which the uplifted animal turns out to be monstrous or tragic, and declines to make him a lesson about the hubris of science. Winston is simply the smartest, kindest person in the room, and his intelligence is entangled with the humans who made him and the humans he now holds together. He is kin, made across species, by technology, inside a story.

That is the key to the whole game. Underneath its glossy Pixar-adjacent optimism and its relentless toy-box energy, Overwatch is one of the most thoroughgoing cyborg fables in mainstream popular culture. It's worth reading as one, both for what it gets gloriously right and for the trouble it can't quite stay with.

Run down the original cast and count the bodies that are whole, unaugmented, and purely human. It's a short list, and even those characters are mostly wearing rocket-powered armor or carrying guns that fire hard light.

Tracer exists in the present only because a machine strapped to her chest pins her there. Genji was cut down by his own brother and rebuilt by Mercy, whose nanotechnology medicine blurs the line between healing and manufacture. He hated what he had become until an omnic monk, Zenyatta, taught him to live in the body he had. Reaper's flesh is perpetually coming apart and pulling itself back together. Widowmaker's heart was slowed and her selfhood rewritten by a terrorist organization, so she is a person reprogrammed into a weapon. Roadhog breathes through a mask that filters the poisoned air of an irradiated Australia. D.Va is a professional gamer drafted into piloting a mech against a giant omnic threat, because her reflexes were the military resource her government needed. Her war is literally streamed.

The cyborg, as the critical tradition I'm drawing on understands it, is less a sci-fi gadget than a condition. It describes the fact that the boundaries we treat as natural were always leaky: between human and animal, organism and machine, physical and informational. The cyborg emerged from military research and corporate laboratories, from Cold War cybernetics and the integrated circuit. The crucial move was to insist that it need not stay loyal to those parents. Illegitimate offspring, the line goes, are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.

Overwatch's heroes are almost all unfaithful children in exactly this sense. Genji was rebuilt as an asset for a covert strike team and ends up a seeker of peace. Bastion, the subject of one of the studio's finest animated shorts, is a decommissioned war machine with targeting software for a mind. When it wakes up overgrown with moss, it befriends a small yellow bird and spends its days among trees rather than resuming its programming. That bird, Ganymede, is a perfect companion species in the fullest sense. It doesn't redeem the machine or civilize it. The relationship changes what both of them are. The war machine learns to be gentle with something small enough to crush. When its old code reasserts itself and it starts firing, the bird is what brings it back.

The game has a slogan for its heroes, sometimes heard as Mercy's resurrection callout: Heroes never die! Read through this lens, the truer slogan might be: heroes are never only one thing.

What makes Overwatch more than a well-designed character gallery is that its mechanics insist on this cyborg ethic as well as depicting it.

A hero shooter, as Overwatch more or less invented the genre for a mass audience, is built around incompleteness. Every character is a specialist with glaring gaps. Reinhardt projects a barrier but can't touch anything at range. Mercy keeps others alive and can barely defend herself. Widowmaker can delete a target from across the map and falls apart the moment someone closes the distance. Lúcio's music speeds his teammates up and heals them, but on his own he's a skater with a sound cannon. The game's deepest pleasure comes from the click of combination: a Zarya graviton surge pulling enemies into a knot, followed by a Hanzo dragon arrow tearing through the cluster. Neither ability is complete without the other.

This is sympoiesis, making-with, rendered as play. The fantasy of the self-made hero, the lone sharpshooter in the long tradition of military shooters, is structurally impossible here. You can try it, and your team will tell you exactly what they think of you in chat. Victory is collective in a way that isn't sentimental. It is a matter of literal mechanical dependency, of bodies and abilities that only make sense together.

Even the much-mocked feature of switching heroes mid-match carries this logic. Your identity isn't fixed by a character-select screen and carried to the grave. You become what the situation needs, so you are a different body in the second fight than the first. Overwatch asks you to hold your selfhood lightly and inhabit, with real attention, whatever body the team requires. In a medium that spent decades selling the fantasy of a sovereign avatar, that's a significant reorientation.

There's a fascinating tension buried in the title. "Overwatch" is surveillance vocabulary: the military position from which a sniper covers the squad, the elevated vantage that sees everything. The fictional organization is a UN-flavored global peacekeeping force, and its name promises the view from above that guarantees order.

The game, however, never gives you that view. You are always in a body, always seeing from somewhere, always partial. You see a corner, a doorway, the back of a teammate's head. The feminist critique of objectivity names the "god trick": the claim to see everything from nowhere, an all-seeing, disembodied gaze that pretends to be unconditioned by any particular position. Against it stands situated knowledge, which is partial, accountable, and located, and which is more objective precisely because it knows where it stands.

Overwatch is a machine for producing situated knowledge. Its signature feature is the killcam: after you die, you watch the last few seconds from your killer's eyes. It's a small, humbling ritual repeated thousands of times. You thought you were hidden, and here is your exposed silhouette from someone else's position. You thought the fight was going one way, and here it is from the other side. Every death is a lesson in the partiality of your own perspective.

The game does let players briefly taste the god trick, and it frames it carefully. Widowmaker's ultimate, Infra-Sight, reveals every enemy through walls to her whole team. It's a temporary, exhilarating omniscience, and it's telling that this power belongs to the sniper whose humanity was surgically removed, the one character literally reprogrammed into an instrument of the watching gaze. Total vision is legible as a weapon. It is borrowed, temporary, and shared, and then it ends, and you're back to looking around corners like everyone else.

Overwatch's world is famously sunny, a bright, multinational, after-the-war future of Dorado's festival lanterns, Numbani's gleaming towers, and Hanamura's cherry blossoms. Look a little closer, though, and nearly every location is a place picking up the pieces.

The Omnic Crisis, a war between humanity and the automated factories that started building robots on their own, haunts every map. Junkertown sits in an Australian outback poisoned by the destruction of an omnic factory, home to scavengers who make a life out of scrap and radiation. Mei is a climatologist who survived a catastrophe at an Antarctic research station by sleeping, cryogenically frozen, for nearly a decade. She woke to find her colleagues dead and the world changed, and she went back to work on the climate anyway. King's Row stages the friction of a city where omnics live underground, second-class beneath the streets of London. Numbani is the counterexample, a city of genuine human and omnic coexistence, and the game treats it as an achievement rather than a given.

This is a world after the end of the world. Its best stories aren't about restoring a lost order. They are about what you build in the damage. Staying with the trouble means refusing both techno-salvation and apocalyptic despair and choosing instead to stay present, entangled, and responsive in damaged places. Mei's cheerful determination, the Junkers' feral improvisation, and Bastion's mossy forest are all, in their way, figures of that refusal.

None of this lets the game off easy, and to its credit, it gives a critic plenty of handholds.

The first is its central nostalgia. The main plot is about getting the band back together. Overwatch, the institution, was disbanded after scandal and corruption, and the story wants it back. Underneath its bright pluralism sits a longing for a benevolent global security apparatus, a militarized peacekeeping force that will set things right. That is precisely the salvation narrative the cyborg tradition distrusts. The cyborg doesn't need a better watchtower; it questions whether watchtowers are the answer at all. Overwatch's lore keeps reaching for the restoration of the old order, even as its gameplay quietly dissolves faction entirely. Talon assassins and Overwatch veterans fight side by side in any random match, and the old allegiances mean nothing on the payload. The game's mechanics are more radical than its mythology, which is a common condition of cyborgs and their parents.

The second is the omnics. The game borrows heavily from the vocabulary of civil rights and racial oppression to describe the robots' plight: anti-omnic hate groups, underground segregation, debates over omnic personhood. Yet at launch, only two of its twenty-one heroes were omnics, and the story of their liberation was mostly told by and through the humans around them. A cyborg reading wants to know whose story is doing the telling. It matters what stories we use to tell other stories, and an allegory of oppression that doesn't let the oppressed speak becomes a kind of costume.

The third is the most obvious: Overwatch is itself an illegitimate offspring of a very particular capitalism. Its gorgeous, inclusive cast lived inside a loot-box economy designed to monetize the desire to dress those bodies in new skins. The inclusion was real and meaningful. Tracer's casual lesbianism and Symmetra's autism were delivered as matter-of-fact parts of who they are, not as Very Special Episodes. But the inclusion was also brand architecture, the informatics of domination wearing a friendly face. It's hard to ignore that in 2021, the company behind these inclusive heroes was sued by California regulators over workplace harassment and discrimination. The fable outran its makers, which is exactly what fables, and cyborgs, are supposed to do.

There is a final, almost too-perfect turn. In October 2022, the original Overwatch was shut down and replaced by its sequel. The 2016 game, as a playable thing, no longer exists. Its servers went dark, its body was decommissioned, and something new was installed in its place, wearing many of the same faces and carrying many of the same memories, but changed.

You could read this cynically, as product cycling, and you wouldn't be wrong. But there's something fitting about a cyborg fable that ended up as a cyborg itself. Overwatch was never a fixed, sovereign object. It was a living assemblage of code, players, patches, lore drops, fan art, competitive scenes, community arguments, and the millions of small acts of cooperation that happened inside it. That assemblage survived the shutdown of its original body, much as Genji survived the destruction of his.

What Overwatch got right, gloriously and against the grain of its own militarized title, was that the future worth playing in belongs to beings who are never whole on their own. They are leaky, mixed, rebuilt, and kin to people they were never supposed to love: a gorilla who builds time machines for his friends, a war machine who follows a bird into the woods, and six strangers in a lobby who have to figure out how to be one body for ten minutes. The world could always use more heroes, as the game used to say. On its own best evidence, the world could use more kin.