🐱 Activision's video game diversity tool draws backlash

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Activision Blizzard’s unveiling of a new software program meant to increase diversity in the casts of video games has become a textbook example of what not to do.

Driving the news: The publisher announced the “Diversity Space Tool” last Thursday as “a leap forward for inclusion in gaming,” but by Friday evening had scrubbed those words and more from its online announcement, as developers from the company began slamming it.

Details: The tool starts users with a blank graph, asks them to establish a norm in the middle for a character in a given game genre and has them plot out how different a given character is. It will create a larger shape for a character who is, say, non-white, queer or has a disability.

  • Activision framed it as a method for “avoiding tokenism, stereotypes, and exclusion” and described “enthusiastic” reactions from its Call of Duty and Overwatch development teams.
  • It called the tool “tangible software that would create and monitor guidelines for character conception and creation.”
But the announcement, which included images of the tool that showed numerical values assigned to characters’ ethnicity and sexuality, drew backlash online and across games media. It was labeled “mildly dystopian,” “creepy” and “a glorified Dungeons & Dragons character sheet that makes no ... sense.”

  • Two Overwatch designers tweeted that they hadn’t used or seen the tool before, and the references in Activision's announcement to the teams praising the tool were removed.
  • “God I swear our own company tries so hard to slaughter any good will the actual devs who make the game have built,’” wrote Activision character artist Melissa Kelly in a tweet that went viral.
  • "You know what drives our diversity?” she added. “The devs! We have people who work on the game from these cultures. That's it! That's literally it.”
Between the lines: One of the early architects of the tool says it was not meant to put a score on diversity or replace “common sense” when developers are making a character in a game.

  • “The idea was to slow down time a little bit and have a little bit more discussion and reflection at that crucial point of creation,” MIT Gamelab research coordinator Mikael Jakobsson tells Axios.
  • The project had started several years ago at Swedish mobile studio King by developers who were inspired by a presentation from Anita Sarkeesian, a prominent cultural critic who regularly speaks against stereotypes in game characters. The King designers created a paper prototype for graphing a character’s diversity, presented it at the Game Developers Conference in 2017 and tapped MIT to help make a digital version that could eventually be used by game makers around the world.
  • Jakobsson’s involvement with the project ended in 2019, when MIT gave the studio a workable version. The vision, he said, was to offer it as part of a workshop, alongside readings, and to avoid putting stats on character traits, lest it reduces efforts for diversity to “a numbers game." He lost track of the tool over the last few years and assumed it had been scuttled.
  • Last spring, however, long before showcasing it to the public, Activision mentioned it in a message to shareholders as a top bullet point for its efforts tied to diversity, equity and inclusion.
What's next: The Diversity Space Tool is not being used in active game development, Activision said Friday.

  • A tweet from company president Daniel Alegre last week celebrating its announcement has since been deleted.
 
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What will the dying writers do without their genius creativity in coming up with the fifth black character who is also disabled, a member of the LBGT and plus-sized!
 
LurkTrawl said:
Not really sure how that's progressive lingo as it's an insult against them, but it wouldn't matter if I were. It's not like I'm calling illegal immigrants "undocumented migrants" or some shit.
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It's what the "I'm a woke, but not THAAT WOKE" people say.
 
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milk said:
It's what the "I'm a woke, but not THAAT WOKE" people say.
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Huh, didn't know that. I just picked it up as an insult and ran with it.

I'll still use it as I like having a variety of insults available just like I like my slurs.
 
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I'm glad people are calling it out. It's just hilarious that many of those people who hate it are the same ones who have been demanding diversity for years. Well here you go. We have a handy chart now. You must be this woke to be a vidya character. Isn't that what you wanted? 😏

Airbrushed Van Art said:
They’re just complaining because their jobs have now been automated. No more need of “sensitivity readers” or “diversity consultants”. Haha
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That's pretty much it. Their made up jobs are being done by a computer. You used to have to call Anita. Now you just click a .exe.
 
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The project had started several years ago at Swedish mobile studio King by developers who were inspired by a presentation from Anita Sarkeesian, a prominent cultural critic who regularly speaks against stereotypes in game characters.
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Say what you want about Anita and her retarded grift but damn if she didn't make it a success.
 
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This is what racial science was in the 1920s and 1930s. Robber Barons had to assuage their conscious that the immigrant workers dying in their factories deserved it. So they came up with what we now know as Social Darwinism, This merged (now fringe) disproven sciences like phrenology which experienced a resurrection.

This is also where the term 'white' originates. To be considered white, you had to be from England, France, certain parts of Spain, Germany, all those small countries like Switzerland and Belgium, or the Dutch.

Italians, Irish, Slavic and non-European Hispanics were not considered white. Even then it wasn't a matter of color, it was a matter of lineage and nationality.

They took crime statistics and twisted them around, publishing papers justifying the exclusion of certain peoples because they were of a certain nationality. There were even heavily anti-immigrant political parties like the 'Know-Nothings' who were vehemently opposed to immigration and considered none of these people white, especially the Irish (Gangs of New York is a good way to look at this).

Bloodlines were still big back in those days and if you weren't white but came from a famous lineage as a bastard, you might be considered 'one of the good ones'. Racial science was a gigantic field and a revolution at the time and in the 1930s, it morphed into eugenics. The epicenter of eugenics? Nope, not Germany. The United States. Racial scientists studying eugenics exchanged papers with their German colleagues as late as 1935.

If you take things like socio-economic class, race, culture, whatever and assign values to them, you can use manipulative statistics to 'prove' one race is better than another with a tool like this. Especially in a competitive shooter. Its idiotic, short-sighted and has absolutely no thought behind it other than a rush to distract from their sexual assault lawsuits.
 
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Secret Asshole said:
This is what racial science was in the 1920s and 1930s. Robber Barons had to assuage their conscious that the immigrant workers dying in their factories deserved it. So they came up with what we now know as Social Darwinism, This merged (now fringe) disproven sciences like phrenology which experienced a resurrection.

This is also where the term 'white' originates. To be considered white, you had to be from England, France, certain parts of Spain, Germany, all those small countries like Switzerland and Belgium, or the Dutch.

Italians, Irish, Slavic and non-European Hispanics were not considered white. Even then it wasn't a matter of color, it was a matter of lineage and nationality.

They took crime statistics and twisted them around, publishing papers justifying the exclusion of certain peoples because they were of a certain nationality. There were even heavily anti-immigrant political parties like the 'Know-Nothings' who were vehemently opposed to immigration and considered none of these people white, especially the Irish (Gangs of New York is a good way to look at this).

Bloodlines were still big back in those days and if you weren't white but came from a famous lineage as a bastard, you might be considered 'one of the good ones'. Racial science was a gigantic field and a revolution at the time and in the 1930s, it morphed into eugenics. The epicenter of eugenics? Nope, not Germany. The United States. Racial scientists studying eugenics exchanged papers with their German colleagues as late as 1935.

If you take things like socio-economic class, race, culture, whatever and assign values to them, you can use manipulative statistics to 'prove' one race is better than another with a tool like this. Especially in a competitive shooter. Its idiotic, short-sighted and has absolutely no thought behind it other than a rush to distract from their sexual assault lawsuits.
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How does a literal diversity checklist equate statistics cherry picking? Both are dumb but I am not tracking your reasoning here. You aren't going to be able to cite FBI crime statistics from a tool that shows how much of the protected classes you cover. If anything they are just insulted because machines that don't whine at people can replace them. Or probably moreso offended at the idea that people can ever think they are doing enough to appease the outrage mob and have a neat little graph to prove it.
 
Happy Fish said:
How does a literal diversity checklist equate statistics cherry picking? Both are dumb but I am not tracking your reasoning here. You aren't going to be able to cite FBI crime statistics from a tool that shows how much of the protected classes you cover. If anything they are just insulted because machines that don't whine at people can replace them. Or probably moreso offended at the idea that people can ever think they are doing enough to appease the outrage mob and have a neat little graph to prove it.
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The same way factory owners and elites did it back then. Some characters will be completely useless and a drag while some fit all situations.

Now you just do very simple stats and find which ethnic group, gender, culture or orientation they come from and now you can label them inferior.

You could even have trolls make up their own power ranking system to fit the racial science aspect. It is identical to what happened in the 1920s. They will label races, etc. As inferior because their characters suck.
 
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I think the fun part is going to be when one of these drops and X diversity point isn't afforded a 15/10 score for being uwu so special and the monster infighting begins.

I'm wondering if there's a straight white guy at activistvision that may have grounds for a discrimination suit over this or what legal action may be feesable.
 
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