Hindi leader finds Overwatch’s Devi skin denigrating

Rajan Zed, president of the US-based Universal Society of Hinduism, asked the developers Blizzard to remove Symmetra’s Devi skin from Overwatch as it trivialise Hinduism’s goddesses. A skin is an item in the game Overwatch that changes an existing character’s look to an alternate one, usually with matching themes.

This isn’t a first for both parties as Blizzard faced a controversy around a victory pose being “sexist,” while Zed has urged other developers before to drop Hindi-based game aspects and characters from game titles.

According to Rajan Zed’s website:

“Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, said that in a video game set-up, the player controlled the movements of Devi, while in reality the devotees put the destinies of themselves in the hands of their goddesses. Moreover, Devi and its movements depicted in Overwatch did not match with characterization of the goddesses in the scriptures, Rajan Zed noted.”

Game developers tend to only loosely base characters and concepts to the real life counter parts, as do most Overwatch characters and their respective skins. This gives the game creator’s the artistic freedom without being pinned down for using certain ideas for commercial benefit. Copying a character from a different platform, from an active religion in this case, precisely is usually a bad idea.

However, Rajan Zed’s following statement seems to encourage just that.

“Hindus welcomed entertainment industry to immerse in Hinduism but taking it seriously and respectfully and not for refashioning Hinduism scriptures, symbols, concepts and deities for mercantile greed. He or other Hindu scholars would gladly provide genuine entertainment industry seekers the resources they needed for their study and research regarding Hinduism, oldest and third largest religion of the world with about one billion adherents and a rich philosophical thought, Rajan Zed stressed. ”

Blizzard may be able to find middle ground with Rajan Zed. A part of Zed’s complaint was that their goddess was misinterpreted in the game. If negotiations do happen and succeed in keeping Symmetra’s skin, Overwatch players may be getting a “more accurate” Hindi-inspired skin.