telling a story through character design

i want to use cop as a module that not only informs me about what factors effect the profession i want to be a part of, but i want to develop some skills that i have not practiced that much. by this i mean digital media.
as right at the start of this module it became apparrent that digital imagery is much preferred to traditional means in character design, i feel a huge need to develop some sort of digital knowhow.
last year i did one brief that i chose to do digital imagery with and i feel that allthough i learnt some key features of photoshop, i didnt really get much better using the tool.

therefor this module may be a means to find out what im capable of at this given point.

as character is a wide range of things, i want to touch on what makes a sucesfull character, as well as what character means to the audience

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 i have looked at how culture effects character design. for obvious reasons when making characters the culture its created in will have the biggest influence over appearence and personality. however what else would it control?

looking at events that have happened over 2016 i have found one example of a game that has caused multiple problems with multiple cultures.
overwatch is a new game that revently was released, but the makers have been one of the biggest companies that produce games. Blizzard has been making games such as world of warcraft. so naturally this company needs to keep appearences and customer satisfaction high as it is a well known company worlwide.
so knowing this its unexpected that it would have managed to cause some issues with some countries.
in 2016 blizzard has managed to make russia ban one of the character lore comics as it includes homosexuality. nothing rude, just the main character of the game overwatch kissing someone assumed as her girlfriend
then there was also another issue that a skin for a character offended a religion and was requested to be takes out of the game as it missrepresented Devi

-shows that games are influencing cultures
-why risk bad publicity?
-who will it effect amd is it nessecary?
- what purpose did they do it, or was it lack of research for the religious offence?