Overwatch, Sigma, And Over-Explaining Character Design

Overwatch’s new character Sigma caught some flack for his bare feet. The explanation offered for those bare feet missed the mark for a lot of people. Sometimes it is just better to leave the mystery alone.

Overwatch’s latest character, Sigma, is all about math. The clue is in the name, sigma meaning a mathematical sum. He is also a bit of looney, and we get this clue from his bare feet. When people first set eyes on the character they saw his big bald head, no doubt from his vast intelligence burning away the follicles from the inside. Then we took in his immense and powerful looking armor, small components of it rotating around in the air as befits a man who has cracked gravity open like an overripe melon and feasted on the juicy flesh within.

Finally, we saw his feet – all ten little piggies on display for the whole world to see. People thought it was odd, as did I. This intellectual titan had left the house for a bit of evil doing and forgotten to put his clogs on. What a wally. It swiftly became a mildly derided part of the character’s design, and as often happens, someone decided they needed to make a defense of the decision for Sigma to be floating around with his feet hanging out.

Qiu Fang, the concept artist who worked on Sigma’s design, posted some early concepts to ArtStation, along with the following explanation for the bare feet.

“We decided to keep the feet bare to sell the ‘asylum’ look a bit more; in many institutions, patients are not allowed to have shoes because they might cause harm with the laces. While Sigma isn’t necessarily in danger of that, we felt that having no shoes helped draw that connection.”

Now, let us consider for a moment that people who end up in mental care facilities no longer tend to go barefoot. While it is indeed true that people who are suffering from suicidal ideation will not be permitted to have shoelaces, they can have footwear that doesn’t have laces. To use this as a source of connection between Sigma, who has a mental illness as part of his canon because the vast secrets of gravity cracked his mind like an egg. This means you are taking your inspiration from the image of the mentally ill that was foisted upon them by the people who were supposed to care for them.

In most countries around the world, our professional understanding of mental health problems has come a long way. People no longer tend to be shunted away from society and hidden like an embarrassing secret. In the past, asylums were effective prisons for people who were broken in ways that we were unable to repair. This is, perhaps, a step up from the days when the mentally ill would be accused of witchcraft, possession, or sorcery.

Either way, those early asylums were cruel places. The ill and sick people who needed care were often left in appalling conditions, barely seen as human by the staff who looked after them. In many countries, doctors had free reign to try whatever treatment entered their mind. This is the kind of atmosphere and ignorance that gave us the lobotomy, a procedure which falls somewhere between the borders of surgery and butchery.

These days, a range of therapies, techniques, and medications have been developed to help with all kinds of mental health problems. While there are people who suffer in ways that we cannot yet help, for the most part, those people are given something to wear on their feet. We have moved on from a lot of the darker impacts of our historical lack of understanding of mental health, but the thing that remains is a stigma.

Images like bare feet don’t bring accurate portrayals and connections with mental health; they lean into old tropes and stereotypes. It is difficult enough to try to remind the world that people who deal with mental health troubles can be perfectly normal, functional, and productive members of society. I don’t even care that the guy is some “mad scientist,” I find the excuse for his bare feet to be so pointlessly reductive and ill-informed that it undercuts the rest of the character design. If this were the thinking and inspiration behind those bare feet, I would prefer not to know what inspired the cool parts of the character, in case it undermines them completely.

The hilarious part of the story is there is no reason to explain why his feet are bare. In the game with a hamster in a death ball, and a floating robot, and a talking gorilla, a guy with no shoes on isn’t the weirdest thing. You don’t need to present a “logical” reason for him to have bare feet. Especially when that logic can be undercut by the fact that he could put shoes on when he left the asylum, which is, I assume when he also put that big suit of armor on.

Now we don’t just have a character with daft feet; we have a daft reason for those feet as well. Sometimes elements of a character’s design won’t land well. It happens, even in a design-by-committee world. Nobody at the table has the gumption to say “I have to be honest, the bare feet are stupid,” and that is fine. It happens.

But when it does happen, just let it roll. Let the internet have fun. Let it make its memes and its funny tweets, and then we can all move on. It won’t be the end of the world, but it might just save us all from further embarrassment. Quite simply, we don’t need every aspect of a game or a character to be explained with some real world source of inspiration. And not every aspect of a character’s design needs to be met with applause. Some stuff can remain a mystery, and some stuff can just be bad. And that’s okay.