The idea of a “tool” to make characters more diverse and inclusive may seem a little hard to wrap your head around. In practice, it has to be more than just, say, a pop-up reminder that between 2017 and 2021 nearly 80% of the highest selling games in the world featured white, male protagonists (according to a study conducted by Diamond Lobby). It needs to become a part of the incubation process from the start, baked into the pipeline as an unmissable and consistent step - which is exactly what this tool was designed to be.
“The Diversity Space Tool is a measurement device, to help identify how diverse a set of character traits are and in turn how diverse that character and casts are when compared to the ‘norm’,” explains Chomatas. Once it establishes a baseline for typical character traits (which is done by the creative team working closely with DE&I experts), it can then weigh new character designs against it to measure their diversity. During this process, the tool can also uncover unconscious bias, such as why certain traits are seen as “male” vs. “female,” or why characters from certain ethnic backgrounds are given similar personalities or behaviors.
Why do you need a tool for that. Do they think the developers just go, "whoops, we accidentally made yet another white guy the protagonist" and would give a shit about diversity showing a white guy protagonist is not diverse
I want to see how "diverse" a bunch of really generic characters are because they have things like eyepatches or whatever
Academically, I might agree with assigning a "diversity score" (uggggggggh) to a playable character's trait based off of its relative frequency in the total "population" of playable characters in every other video game on the market/historically? The more "rare" the trait, the higher the value? I sure as hell wouldn't use a 0-10 score for that, though.
I could justify independent researchers using that kind of measure to quantify how typical a PC in a specific video game is. But what Actiblizz is doing with this though is pure... What did @Jedoc call it? Incestimation? "Inventing metrics to make themselves look good"? That.
Children's rights are human rights.
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Yup, at best what we have here is a plain old incestimate. "At best" is doing a great deal of heavy lifting, mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sXFXWoF7vA
Birds with feelings is a cozy turn-based strategy game about manipulating bird feelings for the greater good. 20220513 Birds with Feelings (Strategy Turn-Based Story Rich Cute)
So I only have an hour in this, but it's pretty fun! The basic idea is that each of your team members has an emotional grid (the center is a Neutral square, and then around its sides you have opposing Confidence&Caution and Social&Solitary. Positioning and success in battle will move their state pin around this grid (have no allies around -> +Solitary, win a fight -> +Confidence, etc). What you want to do is match like with like- you'll almost always win a fight against a bird of the same type, almost no chance to win against one of the opposite type (ie, Social <-> Solitary) and 50/50 you'll win against the two emotions on the perpendicular axis.
Oh, and if you're Neutral then you're just boned, you're losing against everyone.
Winning the fights themselves isn't very hard, the actual game revolves around manipulating your team's emotional state for the fights ahead. You can see the theme of all the encounters ahead of you (3 Confident fights, 2 Random fights, etc) and each chapter appear to wrap up with a Trial where your birds' emotions are locked for the duration and you're just going through a gauntlet. Like the other encounters, you know what you'll be facing in advance, so ultimately you want to build your team appropriately.
I just unlocked leveling up, which is done by moving the pin on you emotional grid to land on top of seeds, which will level you up, so that's yet another thing to plan for. All in all I'm having a good time, between the cute story and the game not being terribly demanding (so far) it's been a chill time.
Glal on
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
edited May 2022
The diversity graph rules
Edit like besides the laughable volunteer project thing
I think trying to score "culture" is bad but some kind of analytical look at your cast of characters in terms of diversity isn't a bad idea. Overwatch has enough characters that trying to wrap your head around all of them at once is impossible. But being able to say to your creative lead (or whoever)
"All our male character are straight, shouldn't we add one who isn't?"
Or, "We have actually made it so that all our Black characters are also our poor ones, yikes"
Seems like something worthwhile. Of course they probably paid some consultant huge money for something that you could do pretty easily with a database or spreadsheet.
I think trying to score "culture" is bad but some kind of analytical look at your cast of characters in terms of diversity isn't a bad idea. Overwatch has enough characters that trying to wrap your head around all of them at once is impossible. But being able to say to your creative lead (or whoever)
"All our male character are straight, shouldn't we add one who isn't?"
Or, "We have actually made it so that all our Black characters are also our poor ones, yikes"
Seems like something worthwhile. Of course they probably paid some consultant huge money for something that you could do pretty easily with a database or spreadsheet.
You could do that with a pie chart where each slice represents some unique combination of traits so diversity looks like a large number of small slices. And lack of diversity is easily recognized as any one slice being too big.
But a radar chart and numerical values assigned for specific cultures for example is goddamn bizarre. The only reason to do that is they think 1 person with 10 diversity traits is somehow equivalent or better to having 10 people with 1 diversity trait. Or that the "rarity" of a trait is somehow tied to it's worth.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
Like I could see the value in a system that says, for like, a wide scale RPG, these are the identities you have used and what percentage of the characters they are?? In some attempt to make the population of the game reflect the real world better and prevent it from being all straight cis white guys?? Maybe????
But Overwatch doesn't have like a million characters being written by a variety of writers, here
You really just need to hire some DEI consultants and embed them with the writer/character design teams, while also just hiring diverse teams in themselves
I could understand wanting a system to track the characters in your game so that you can go "oh hey I didn't realize we were so tilted towards x type of character, we should rectify that." But the part where you start assigning points to stuff and have a numerical score for how 'diverse' a character is? That's where you lose me.
Not only is the entire premise of putting various values on a person's characteristics to determine how diverse they are fucked up, but like all systems humans make it's going to have it's own inherent biases based on who exactly is creating the tool. Do we have to now have a diversity tool to judge if our team that is putting together the other diversity tool is diverse enough?
H0b0man on
FFXIV: Agran Trask
+10
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
The thing I keep coming back to is the fact that being a woman is 5
I'm assuming that this is in an attempt to counterbalance typical video game gender splits, but being part of a demographic that represents nearly half the population shouldn't be considered more diverse than say, missing an eye
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I also can't get over the fact that the actual metrics that they've shown simply do not look good
Like, there's a significant split on gender identity based on role there, with a heavy lean towards women fulfilling support roles
If we know that middle class is a 0 on socio-economic background, then the implications of the only two categories to hit 1 there being Evil and Role: Damage are pretty bad too
Apparently every neutral person is slim and curvy (or equivalent)
The thing I keep coming back to is the fact that being a woman is 5
I'm assuming that this is in an attempt to counterbalance typical video game gender splits, but being part of a demographic that represents nearly half the population shouldn't be considered more diverse than say, missing an eye
I think the Actiblizz article said that the chart was not intended to be about the numerical score or maximizing the chart area to maximize diversity, but then that chart makes absolutely no sense. But seeing as how my wife works in DEI (and hates the chart), the explanation of "management or the staff making it is super incompetent on data visualization" is not surprising, nor is the potential explanation of "whoever had to polish this turd knew it was awful and hedged the language to show they knew it didn't do what they claim."
The thing I keep coming back to is the fact that being a woman is 5
I'm assuming that this is in an attempt to counterbalance typical video game gender splits, but being part of a demographic that represents nearly half the population shouldn't be considered more diverse than say, missing an eye
The way they went about it turns straight white males into a baseline and everyone else functions as a deviation from that norm
Which unfortunately mirrors how a lot of people outside video games think about the world
For how many characters Overwatch has its still a small data set. One should be leery of trends like the number of women supports, but it’s really easy to see trends of two samples. Akin to flipping a coin 5 times and determining a bias to it.
The thing I keep coming back to is the fact that being a woman is 5
I'm assuming that this is in an attempt to counterbalance typical video game gender splits, but being part of a demographic that represents nearly half the population shouldn't be considered more diverse than say, missing an eye
Well, see, a character having only one eye isn't "political"
"Race: Arab, Culture: Egyptian" also has a lot to unpack
The press statement says that the tool has already been used by CoD developers
I assume they have multiple "races" for Middle Easterners because of a former tendency to just throw everything into a blender
The country they made up for Modern Warfare is located inside Europe (near the Caucasus), mostly desert, has an Iranian name and Iranian symbols of state but is populated by Arabs
The thing I keep coming back to is the fact that being a woman is 5
I'm assuming that this is in an attempt to counterbalance typical video game gender splits, but being part of a demographic that represents nearly half the population shouldn't be considered more diverse than say, missing an eye
The way they went about it turns straight white males into a baseline and everyone else functions as a deviation from that norm
Which unfortunately mirrors how a lot of people outside video games think about the world
See, this is why I think the volunteers (or maybe the DE&I experts who worked with them) based that norm not by looking at the total Real-World population but at the total AAA Video Game Playable Character population, for which, sadly, straight white males were the crushing majority until... less than five years ago? Maybe?
Yeah I mean if you score "straight/white/American/non-poor/non-disabled/neurotypical male" as 0 and give yourself a point every time you deviate from that, that's a good scoring system. If the average score of characters in your video game is like, 0.5, you probably need to diversify.
I get it in the context of video-games but I can totally think of other ways to organize this information
Treating other people as deviations from an imagined zero point is how racism and sexism and other -isms operate
For example, white people don't really think about whiteness in the same way they think about other races, they think about whiteness as the absence of race
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
I get it in the context of video-games but I can totally think of other ways to organize this information
Treating other people as deviations from an imagined zero point is how racism and sexism and other -isms operate
For example, white people don't really think about whiteness in the same way they think about other races, they think about whiteness as the absence of race
A possibly less bad way to do it is have a denominator that is your number of heroes/characters in a given slice (total, good, evil, role, etc) and the numerator being simply the number of distinct values for whatever trait you're looking at.
A result closer to 1 indicates you're more diverse, and that way you don't end up with a situation like 5 women being considered more diverse than 5 men.
Tofystedeth on
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
I get it in the context of video-games but I can totally think of other ways to organize this information
Treating other people as deviations from an imagined zero point is how racism and sexism and other -isms operate
For example, white people don't really think about whiteness in the same way they think about other races, they think about whiteness as the absence of race
i don't have an accent
you're Canadian, yes you do
only us Americans have no accent
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
I first discovered I had an accent when I came home from college for the summer and found myself code-switching in order to have lunch in the general store in the 13-person excuse for a village closest to my family farm.
I don't know what my accent is these days, but watching videos of news reports from the northern New Mexico wildfires inspires all sorts of primal feelings in me.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
My accent is fucking all over the place. It's pretty neutral-American most of the time, the Boston comes out occasionally, and I definitely picked up a slight drawl after all the years in North Carolina that was more pronounced when I was living there.
I get it in the context of video-games but I can totally think of other ways to organize this information
Treating other people as deviations from an imagined zero point is how racism and sexism and other -isms operate
For example, white people don't really think about whiteness in the same way they think about other races, they think about whiteness as the absence of race
i don't have an accent
you're Canadian, yes you do
only us Americans have no accent
No anglophone has an accent. Your vocabulary doesn't use them.
Héééé?
Children's rights are human rights.
+3
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BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
Master Chief just lost his virginity in the halo tv series
And then there’s Cortana, Chief’s AI companion, who kinda just…stands there, watching on with a mixture of emotions that are entirely indiscernible due to the uncanny valley.
As far as sex scenes go, it’s incredibly tame too, relying more on implication than anything else. Chief and Makee kiss a bit. Smash cut, then they’re naked in a bed, appearing to have already done the deed. It’s about as steamy as the iconic Cold Storage multiplayer map. (Side note: 343, please port that one into Halo Infinite.)
i actually have a trait that really annoys me where, i had a speech therapist when i was younger because i slurred my speech, and to this day when i focus hard on enunciation i sort of slip into his accent, which was british, which makes me sound like i'm being kind of a fucking twat
i actually have a trait that really annoys me where, i had a speech therapist when i was younger because i slurred my speech, and to this day when i focus hard on enunciation i sort of slip into his accent, which was british, which makes me sound like i'm being kind of a fucking twat
bloody hell
though I feel you there, I also had to do speech therapy due to slurring certain letters back in elementary school
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Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I want to see how "diverse" a bunch of really generic characters are because they have things like eyepatches or whatever
I could justify independent researchers using that kind of measure to quantify how typical a PC in a specific video game is. But what Actiblizz is doing with this though is pure... What did @Jedoc call it? Incestimation? "Inventing metrics to make themselves look good"? That.
Oh, and if you're Neutral then you're just boned, you're losing against everyone.
Winning the fights themselves isn't very hard, the actual game revolves around manipulating your team's emotional state for the fights ahead. You can see the theme of all the encounters ahead of you (3 Confident fights, 2 Random fights, etc) and each chapter appear to wrap up with a Trial where your birds' emotions are locked for the duration and you're just going through a gauntlet. Like the other encounters, you know what you'll be facing in advance, so ultimately you want to build your team appropriately.
I just unlocked leveling up, which is done by moving the pin on you emotional grid to land on top of seeds, which will level you up, so that's yet another thing to plan for. All in all I'm having a good time, between the cute story and the game not being terribly demanding (so far) it's been a chill time.
Edit like besides the laughable volunteer project thing
Or doesn't have an arm and instead has a robot arm that is functionally exactly the same as having an arm?
"All our male character are straight, shouldn't we add one who isn't?"
Or, "We have actually made it so that all our Black characters are also our poor ones, yikes"
Seems like something worthwhile. Of course they probably paid some consultant huge money for something that you could do pretty easily with a database or spreadsheet.
I suspect you are giving this more thought than the people who worked on it did
Is it worse if the people barely worked on it and then released it, or if they worked really hard and this was the best they could do?
woof
You could do that with a pie chart where each slice represents some unique combination of traits so diversity looks like a large number of small slices. And lack of diversity is easily recognized as any one slice being too big.
But a radar chart and numerical values assigned for specific cultures for example is goddamn bizarre. The only reason to do that is they think 1 person with 10 diversity traits is somehow equivalent or better to having 10 people with 1 diversity trait. Or that the "rarity" of a trait is somehow tied to it's worth.
But Overwatch doesn't have like a million characters being written by a variety of writers, here
You really just need to hire some DEI consultants and embed them with the writer/character design teams, while also just hiring diverse teams in themselves
3DS Friend Code: 0216-0898-6512
Switch Friend Code: SW-7437-1538-7786
Not only is the entire premise of putting various values on a person's characteristics to determine how diverse they are fucked up, but like all systems humans make it's going to have it's own inherent biases based on who exactly is creating the tool. Do we have to now have a diversity tool to judge if our team that is putting together the other diversity tool is diverse enough?
I'm assuming that this is in an attempt to counterbalance typical video game gender splits, but being part of a demographic that represents nearly half the population shouldn't be considered more diverse than say, missing an eye
Like, there's a significant split on gender identity based on role there, with a heavy lean towards women fulfilling support roles
If we know that middle class is a 0 on socio-economic background, then the implications of the only two categories to hit 1 there being Evil and Role: Damage are pretty bad too
Apparently every neutral person is slim and curvy (or equivalent)
oh look at mister "got both my eyes" over here
The way they went about it turns straight white males into a baseline and everyone else functions as a deviation from that norm
Which unfortunately mirrors how a lot of people outside video games think about the world
Well, see, a character having only one eye isn't "political"
The press statement says that the tool has already been used by CoD developers
I assume they have multiple "races" for Middle Easterners because of a former tendency to just throw everything into a blender
The country they made up for Modern Warfare is located inside Europe (near the Caucasus), mostly desert, has an Iranian name and Iranian symbols of state but is populated by Arabs
See, this is why I think the volunteers (or maybe the DE&I experts who worked with them) based that norm not by looking at the total Real-World population but at the total AAA Video Game Playable Character population, for which, sadly, straight white males were the crushing majority until... less than five years ago? Maybe?
Treating other people as deviations from an imagined zero point is how racism and sexism and other -isms operate
For example, white people don't really think about whiteness in the same way they think about other races, they think about whiteness as the absence of race
Please clap
i don't have an accent
A result closer to 1 indicates you're more diverse, and that way you don't end up with a situation like 5 women being considered more diverse than 5 men.
you're Canadian, yes you do
only us Americans have no accent
I don't know what my accent is these days, but watching videos of news reports from the northern New Mexico wildfires inspires all sorts of primal feelings in me.
No anglophone has an accent. Your vocabulary doesn't use them.
Héééé?
https://kotaku.com/master-chief-sex-halo-show-porn-makee-cortana-paramount-1848916673?utm_campaign=Jalopnik&utm_content=1652373011&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_source=facebook
bloody hell
though I feel you there, I also had to do speech therapy due to slurring certain letters back in elementary school