The Pro Strats of Healsluts: Overwatch, Sexuality, and Perverting the Mechanics of Play

Collaborating with Dr. Jordan Youngblood, this article explores the healslut community in popular team-based FPS Overwatch and the various techniques players deploy to build and sustain this community through repurpose the game’s mechanics, spaces, and systems. I was particularly interested in the ways that the “designed” elements of a game like Overwatch (for example, specific emotes or attack animations) could have their intended functional and expressive content “hacked” by players to serve a significantly different purpose. In effect, healsluts are creating a new language out of the lexicon provided by the designers (i.e. spaces, mechanics, symbols, actions, etc.), one that they understand how to read and respond to in ways that challenge developer/designer-centered theories of video game narratives and their meanings. Moreover, understanding and interpreting healslut languages requires that we also read player bodies, and how their bodies are interfacing with these texts in deeply intimate ways (something often missing in game studies).

These communities show that what a game says is negotiated, and sometimes even completely co-opted, by players as they become literate in a game’s lexicon. Players can use these lexicons to contest and challenge the vision and intent of a game’s designers. Specifically, while Blizzard Entertainment has C&D’d fan-made erotic content around Overwatch, erasing a key component of its characters’ gender expression and sexualities, players have invented ways to re-introduce this back into the game. While the healslut community is fascinating unto itself, I hope this article ultimately challenges game studies to consider whether theories and ideas about video game narratives and literacy are built on a reading of games as static or played objects.