King's Diversity Space Tool: A Leap Forward for Inclusion in Gaming

[EverDash]

I hate to break it to you, but its the boomers that still run everything.

Touche. They also almost OWN everything, as well.

I hate them, too. lol

[Stormdash]

new Quantified Bigotry Tool just dropped

[Roar-Powah]

More woke shit, when will this madness end.

It's becoming more and more clear that if you're straight and male you have no rights in life anymore, it's even worse for women. What a bizarre world we live in when the majority have to bend the mentally ill of the minority.

[Spacewalrus2010]

More woke shit, when will this madness end.

I'm finding the vast majority of left leaning people think this is stupid corporate bullshit.

It's becoming more and more clear that if you're straight and male you have no rights in life anymore

I don't know how you managed to type this with a straight face.

[shadowmatrix]

More woke shit, when will this madness end.

It's becoming more and more clear that if you're straight and male you have no rights in life anymore, it's even worse for women. What a bizarre world we live in when the majority have to bend the mentally ill of the minority.

Who the fuck do you think runs most countries? Your delusional if you think straight males are in danger of losing their rights.

[Kallisto]

Who the fuck do you think runs most countries? Your delusional if you think straight males are in danger of losing their rights.

It's true what they say, from privilege equality feels like oppression.

[kaldonis]

God... how long before you're banned if all of your alts combined don't score your account a correct diversity score???

[VikingBarbie]

I often roll my eyes at the woke whatevers that is going on. And when I heard about this I was like "oh Odin, why you do this?"... But then.. I thought.. So what? Overwatch is a colourful game with all kinds of fun and zany characters (I do not play it my self, but I love the cinematics, I am just awefull at shooters)
What is the problem here really? That they use a tool guide them to make all kind of characters?
It is not like they are raceswapping established characters, or just slap the LGBTQ lable on old iconic characters. They are OC, new and fresh, let them be as woke as they want.

[Short]

hole shit that thing is a racist shit show XD

Zarya has a tiny bit of culture as part of her character design, but 0 Sexual orientation... for a butch lesbian... what?!?!?
meanwhile Torbjörn, who has a pretty hard tie in to his culture is ranked 0 in that... despite being a literal modern interpretation of a J. R. R. Tolkien Swedish dwarven blacksmith...
and the only design features that are of importance for Lucio are a tiny bit culture and some ethnicity....

this thing is literally telling us that Lucio is the token black character.... wtf XD

[Klingers]

Whelp, this is one of the best examples of a well-intentioned self-own I've ever seen.

Can't personally fault their intentions, but... Read the room much? I want whatever the person who thought "This will be a great post. We'll win lots of brownie points with this post" was smoking.

[Adamas102]

hilarious. as a straight white middle height middle weight middle aged man I guarantee I'm a 0 on their "diversity" chart. A character will only get a good score if it looks like a rainbow dildo. Come to think of it, I guess we wont have many of the Wrynn's around anymore will we?

Unless you're actually a video game character it's not really there to score you. The way the scoring system is presented with a 0 to 10 scale is admittedly pretty stupid, but people who keep thinking this is giving some sort of value score (like a school test) are really only slightly less stupid.

A 0 isn't a "bad score" and 10 isn't a "good score". I know that's the gut reaction since a lot of people are still stuck with a grade school mentality, but it's just a metric for determining how often traits are represented in typical video game characters.

The tool doesn't bar designers from creating characters that score "low" on this tool, but if they make say 20 characters and they all score "low" it might make them wonder if there's an opportunity in there to expand on the range of traits being represented.

It (apparently) can also identify stereotypes and tokenism which can help designers avoid common pitfalls when creating characters. For example, I'm not black but let's say I was designing a game and wanted to make one of the main characters black, and in doing so inadvertently gave them traits that might be overly broad and stereotypical (probably a fairly common occurrence given the number of people on this forum who think that only white or Asian guys deserve to work on video games and anyone else is just a diversity hire). This tool would theoretically be able to identify those traits and then it would be up to me to decide "eh, I still like this character as is" or "eh, maybe I should consult someone else (possibly someone who's actually black) and maybe give this character a little more depth beyond generic traits".

[Jshadowhunter]

I don't like the tool either but there's a pretty big leap from a simple tool used for figuring out the social demographics of fictional characters in a video game to eugenics.

When you start to add a score to attributes over which humans have no control, you will make an impression that people with "CERTAIN TRAITS" are superior. What does that sound like?

[oleander]

So how does this work? They take a white, heterosexual, abled man and say: this is baseline score 0? Then you benchmark your way up as long as you are not ‘that’? In what world is that ever okay?? That’s probably 75% of their player base we’re talking about.

I can’t believe no scientist with a working brain looks at this and says: this is just utterly wrong.

[Shakzor]

What's the difference in "Gender Identity" and "Sexual Preference"? Isn't a male attracted to a female just "Heterosexual" in both? Or a female attracted to other females a "homosexual/lesbian" in both? Even if someone is attracted to people older/younger (keeping it legal ofcourse) than them or of a different skin color, wouldn't it still be pretty much the same categories?
I mean "I identify as a straight man" but being sexually attracted to men would sound quite contradictory

[Krixooks]

extreme levels of cringe

[Dejiko]

Isn`t this just the natural conclusion of introducing diversity for the sake of diversity?
It shouldn`t be that surprising that it`s more or less a literal checklist for inclusivity of shallow
and surface level things.

[Relapses]

When you start to add a score to attributes over which humans have no control, you will make an impression that people with "CERTAIN TRAITS" are superior. What does that sound like?

...this tool isn't saying that "certain traits" are superior. It's saying that certain traits exist and then scores the characters based on whether they do or do not possess those traits.

[deviantcultist]

More woke shit, when will this madness end.

It's becoming more and more clear that if you're straight and male you have no rights in life anymore, it's even worse for women. What a bizarre world we live in when the majority have to bend the mentally ill of the minority.

You speak the truth but do expect the snowflakes to bash you for saying this. Also, I believe this woke shit is dystopian trash and people will eventually realize this is not a dramatic statement. It will be too late.

[Adamas102]

The tool is missing a significant parameter - prevalence.

If 66 year old black, autistic, gay women represent 0.1% of the community as a whole - then the game should represent them similarly.

It becomes tokenism when you have 100% of the characters from 2% of the population.

Did you even read the article, or like most of the other posters in here just look at the pictures?

The tool only spits out data given input parameters given by whatever team might work with it. Baselines that can even be tweaked based on a game’s setting.

Tokenism and stereotyping are some of the things it claims the tool can identify by separating out features that are common in token and stereotyped characters. That in turn can theoretically point designers to details that can be fleshed out more instead of just ending up with “generic diverse character”.

As for prevalence and representation in the community, what community are you even talking about? The world in general? A particular country’s demographics? The gaming community specifically? Blizzard’s community specifically?

A large portion of games don’t need to adhere to demographic breakouts of any of those communities since they take place in entirely fictional worlds. And even for ones that take place in specific, real world times and locations, a small group of characters doesn’t need to break out based on large population statistics. The real world doesn’t function that way either. Picking a random 10 people group on the street is not guaranteed to give you a demographic breakout that’s inline with nationwide statistics, so why should a relatively small group of fictional characters match those statistics?

[schwarzkopf]

The tool only spits out data given input parameters given by whatever team might work with it.

That the tool even exists demonstrations the tokenism I'm referring to.

What they should be focusing on is representation within the developer community, not some tool to fake that representation in video games.