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Penny Arcade - Comic - Intentionality
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Intentionality
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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VO
I went to check it out and OOF, it's fucking embarrassing.
https://www.activisionblizzard.com/newsroom/2022/05/king-diversity-space-tool
I read this not as it generating a diverse character so much as saying, "Look, this character you just created is a hackneyed stereotype of someone who is _________." I don't think that's a bad idea.
Yes, they should be more diverse in their hiring practices - including leadership - to avoid this issue. But that's not a panacea. How'd you like to be a Black person in a five person group that has to always be the one arguing for why you think the Black character is kind of a stereotypical one? That's not fun at all. Wouldn't it be great if you could have something to take a bit of the load off there?
Edit: I will add, though, that the people who decided "we should shout about this to the world!" are fucking idiots.
Possibly part of the reason for the outrage. Though it doesn't seem to have actually been anywhere near the case.
For instance. When fox yells about twitter crushing free speech while twitter influencers yell about fox being tyranically anarcho-capitalist, they're both Not just insulting each other, they're driving each other's ad revenue up. By being an idiot and reading into it deeply, you help each of their causes; or by being an idiot and reading only the surface of it, you help each of their causes; then there's the idiot who doesn't read any of it at all and is just offending both sides.
We shouldn't be "armies" for anyones cause, otherwise we just heat the flames of an engine too hot and then people die in protests that just promote both side's revenue again. Just be informed enough and realize the story given is probably occluding information for the sake of rage, take it with a grain of salt.
i REALLY freaking wish we would allow the comments under the gd comics so I didnt have to dig down into the site to have this discussion. I think things like this could help educate the ragers to help gird them against the trolls. Trolls that might be as big as a company or a media these days. The browsing people would have a higher chance of seeing some of our intelligent (and unintelligent) discourse.
I believe the outrage is more around them seeming like they're looking for praise for being so diverse, which is against the entire spirit of incorporating diversity.
Ideally, diversity and inclusion is something that should happen without any outside influence acting upon it, so once they go "Hey, look how inclusive we are. We even came up with a handy scale to show just how inclusive our characters are!" it reeks of disingenuity, thus being seen as just another form of tokenism.
pleasepaypreacher.net
They said they did until it blew up in their faces.
There's a *really* uncomfortable clip of them explaining it at GDC applying it to Mario's cast.
Is this the one you were talking about, or is it another one? This one mentions Mario characters from about the 21 to 24 minute mark. The presenter seems kind of nervous, but what stood out the most to me is the presumption that the characters are all heterosexual, Toad and Toadette are children, and Mario, Luigi, and Peach are white (Mario and Luigi are supposed to be Italian, but at least Peach could hypothetically be "mukokuseki", which basically means "racially ambiguous").
This video is from 2017, by the way.
It's (nongendered) techbros thinking they're so smart by "solving" real world issues thru technology without considering actual humans are involved.
Edit: and OMG that GDC video. You're "presuming they're straight"?
My other impression is that this feels less like them taking genuine steps to make their work more diverse, and more like them showing off this app to demonstrate how great they already are. "So, in order to make our work more diverse, we came up with this app to see how we're doing. Let's plug a few Overwatch characters into the equation just to test it out. Oh, that's funny...look at how well they are scoring! Hmm, is this calibrated right? Yup, all the settings are good...we must just have really good character diversity! Huh!"
And I like the Overwatch characters, and I don't think the game itself is guilty of tokenism. But this is quantifying diversity in terms of a graph. The type of graph you use to represent data matters, and they chose a radar chart. This graph type only works for quantifiable factors, values that get larger or smaller. They only really make sense if you are then going to measure the area enclosed and use that as a general idea of how "much" something is, when taking multiple axes into account. So, how much Ethnicity does Lucio have? Because he is plotted somewhere along a line, implying "less ethnicity" and "more ethnicity". Does Torbjorn get more of an Ability score because he has a prosthetic hand and a laser eye? Or....dwarfism?
Like, this would be very different if it were counting, say, the number of characters that represent minorities represented in a given game. There's value in recognizing the prevalence of white male cishet norms and taking active steps to broaden representation. And that is something you could actually represent in a chart: how many characters in x game diverge from the majority or norm in these different categories. You could actually put that on a radar graph not too different from the Activision one. That would be giving you a sense of how much varied representation there is in a given game. But the current chart only measures "how diverse" a particular character is, which is a concept that makes no sense.
TL;DR this bothers me on a data visualization level more than anything else. Almost as bad as the unlabeled axes on the graphs in PragerU videos...
My impression from what I saw of it was that for most of the people (well, the center to leftist ones) that are upset, it was about the same aspects as Dashing, here.
I'm also not really sure how this is supposed to represent whether a given character is playing into stereotypes like the statement Dennis quoted from King claims? Look at the axes on the chart, what about that says whether you're making a blaxploitation character or not?
it raises so many questions: how is trust measured? how do you convert trust into distance units? is there any accounting for my own throwing prowess? presumably everyone needs their own scale because someone who is a world-record holding shotput thrower, for instance, can throw a given object-of-questionable-trust a lot further than, say, me. but maybe we trust that object the same amount! are babies and the very elderly just...naturally suspicious?!
but at the same time, it is implicitly understood to mean "i trust this thing very little".
that kind of dichotomy just gets me. anyway. that's it. it's in the news post if you're confused.
For example, if it ended up that all of your Black characters were heterosexual, and all of your bisexual characters were white, that could appear appropriately diverse if you just looked at the individual traits in isolation. But a tool like this could reveal the stereotyping of Black characters as straight and never bi.
It's not a substitute for hiring diverse team members. But it's not intended to be, either -- and hiring diverse team members doesn't necessarily solve the problem. It's not their job to make sure the product doesn't evince stereotypes; a tool like this offloads some of that responsibility from individuals and puts it on the team as a whole.
Powers &8^]
Yeah, the chart - which I found after my post - puzzles me. I do wonder if that was generated as part of the original tool, or a Suggestion from management once they found out about it.
They talk about the value of avoiding stereotypical designs, but they don't present any methodology for assessing that sort of thing.
Here's the other main image I can find, which is just the chart with a few more categories (braking ability into cognitive and physical, adding socioeconomic class & facial beauty):
Edit again: there is this other perspective, which seems to show average scores across the individuals' charts for certain arbitrarily defined groups (alignment, gameplay class, character difficulty, & note the gender binary):
But to be honest, I look at that chart and I can't draw a single fucking conclusion from what it's trying to show me. Is this... a diverse design? Are you showing me that it's NOT a diverse design?
What gets me is that outside of Overwatch, what recent ActiBlizz games actually HAVE these diverse casts they're claiming to strive for? Pretty much all the recent Call of Dutys seem to have the same identical grab bag of generic white soldier dudes and women with a few generic people of colour mixed in. And I honestly cannot think of anything else the company has out out with a distinct cast.
Well don't forget King is part of the lineup, so you've got
Little girl
Molasses monster
Bubblegum monster
Lollipop fairy
Licorice king
So, Asheram, Blizzard will always be evil, and they'll never be allowed to report on themselves making an effort to get better, even a crappy one like this? Can anyone report on their own efforts to try to become better? Literally every major media corp is going to have a PR department or firm to try to improve their image, and its better if they're telling the truth about what they're doing when they attempt PR, because thing things like this come to light.
You say "report on", Asheram said "looking for praise." There's a pretty big difference between looking for a pat on the back and saying "we know we're still failing, but here's what we're trying to do to not fail as badly."
It might not be a pre-design tool, maybe its a tool for determining the situation afterwards, like a heart monitor. Something to help them direct whether they're leaning one way or another, like taking a picture in a moment in time of the situation. And if it doesn't make sense to you, then are you the type of HR, PR, or Psychometrician (yes its a real job) who would normally look at this? Do you do work in those fields to understand this type of output, or to know when its used?
Of course you'd say that. You have the brain pan of a stagecoach tilter.
You stay away from my lumps. Thems MY lumps!
Austin Walker put it best, I think:
In stuff like this, you don't actually get an A for effort.
The ranges that they used to quantify these buckets was stated to not just be pulled out their asses, so much as they worked in conjunction with DEI experts and such. DEI experts are focused on diversity, equity and inclusion and such. So the definitions aren't just coming from a complete vacuum, or at least not one consisting of people not versed diversity.
Furthermore, when you consider which part of Activision created the tool, King, they as a have very consistently pushed diversity and ensuring diversity and all those things over the years. This tool was started back in 2016. On Glassdoor's 5 point diversity rating scale, King has a 3.9 rating. The extent to which their company's culture seems to be focused on diversity such that they would make a tool like this is also very high. Over the years they've gone very big and publicly into diversity as a culture (or a facade thereof, if we ant to be a cynical :P). But here's just some of the articles dropped over time regarding their activity:
2017 article re Diversity from King's diversity person
Case Study of their diversity efforts using mentoring software
Desirée Brathwaite, Candy Crush producer on diversity, 2020.
Interview about Crash Bandicoot that also digs into diversity and King
So for the people who made this tool and who spent time off hours and whatnot working on it, this was a project-project. But to Activision, it was an "opportunity" of a different sort? Though the more I think about it, given the level of enthusiasm they have on this, it's likely that they just posted this out and really failed the to read the room because diversity analytics and the like are a rather touchy thing. So maybe this isn't Activision proper's whole fault. IDK.
It's good to say just have a diverse staff and listen to them, but it's easy to miss the forest for the trees is that staff is looking at their individual components and not the whole and various slices of the whole.
That's fair. I feel like a lot of the outrage, including part of my own "OOF" is that Blizzard/Activision is a huge corporation trying to make tons of money, like many others, and often via methods of discutable ethics. So when you see them show a chart or tool that quantifies human experiences and identities, there's definitely a visceral reaction; it feels disingenuous, like a bunch of suits going: "How do we attract the urban market?"
It just feels a little gross.