Today, Activision Blizzard fulfilled its daily oopsie quota by blogging about what the publisher’s subsidiaries are like apparently used a special tool to help develop more “diverse” characters. Apparently it believes it can achieve this without, I don’t know, actually talking to or hiring marginalized developers. Why rely on annoying, fallible people when we are powerful Data to tell us that we’ve reached enough diversity points to start a new video game culture war? Numbers don’t lie. I mean look at this. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The well-designed graphics say it all, clear and calm.
Heck, I’m glad that technology is letting us solve racism, sexism, ableism, and all other video game problems. Who would have thought it was that easy? As former over watch Activision Blizzard really took it to heart that director Jeff Kaplan said he “would hate if diversity ever felt pandering, like we just had this chart with a bunch of checkboxes.” OK, not really.
I’m being sarcastic, but in many ways it’s hard to get over how annoying this is. It’s not just that someone thought a problem of this complex could be solved with glorification dungeons Character sheet that doesn’t make any goddamn sense. And it’s not just that Blizzard is in the midst of a large number of alleged “diversity” disasters right now, including allegations of sexual harassmentinability to recruit or retain marginalized talentand ongoing union-related tensions.
But a bunch of people probably not only built this thing, but also wrote the blog, got interviewed for it, and then signed it to share with everyone else. The reaction on the internet to the post and the tool described in it was completely incredulous, and rightly so. Remember, in the midst of all the other complete PR disasters, no one saw this coming. What does that say about Activision’s actual ability to address the rampant issues that have come under public scrutiny for the past year and that the publisher has repeatedly promised to fix? At the moment it seems like no one responsible for this is really capable of it if that’s what they’re dreaming up.
And make no mistake, this is a PR disaster. I’m not just saying this because I disagree with the basic premise that, as the blog post states, one can use a handy dandy tool to magically and quickly “dissect their own assumptions”, “token characters” avoiding and “true representation” by identifying “more diverse character narratives” that go beyond “appearance alone”. Humans struggle with these things, not because we are mere mortals who cannot understand the primal logic of ones and zeros, but because achieving a better world is a process, and a painful one. You can’t speed it up. The moment you try to take a shortcut is the moment you stop dealing with the real problem.
While solving these problems may require tools, Activision Blizzard has repeatedly proven that it’s at a point where it needs more education, guidance, and mentoring from real people with soft skills to develop a basic understanding of what diversity is all about means before it can even think about creating such a tool. If a company like this takes years to introduce a black woman to a video gameI can’t in good faith believe it has the ability to “measure” what the heck diversity is or means, let alone execute it well.
But even if we take this thing for itself, it doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Can you look at any of the visualizations shared in the blog post and tell me what they might mean?
I suppose there is some logic, possibly one that is only explained and known to people who use the tool regularly, but even suggest being able to enumerate something like “ability” is complete nonsense. What is Skill 0? What does it mean when the image in the blog post says someone has “sexual orientation: 0.357”?
How can you even put that in front of someone and not feel damn weird about what you’ve done or what you’re saying?
While this hardly matters, the use cases cited in the blog post will not be convincing to the average person. There is call of duty Vanguard, a game that Activision didn’t just try to distance himself from itbut one which Chuds actively hate there it has variety. Then his other example surveillance 2a game that has almost everyone wondering, “Why is this there?” Are those fair reasons dismiss something? No, admittedly not. But they add to an already crappy looking bunch. No one is going to say, “Ooo, that’s what they used that for that call of Duty that disappointed everyone!” Again, the levels of marketing failure are unfathomable.
So, yeah, not the most convincing way of wrapping what is already a tough sell for people who want change but don’t believe it can be achieved through representation alone. Neither for the other people who think that putting just one woman in a video game is inherently too political.
Perhaps this was inevitable, however. Tech is in many ways the most extreme manifestation of whiteness and capitalism, structures that actively invest in the definition, codification, and filing of identity traits in order to maintain power and profit. The marginalized are only noticed when it is useful, and then only under the most humiliating conditions for crappy purposes. Identity is key to achieving these goals. Finally, if you can come up with a system to define things like gender or race, for example, you could Use this information to “inform” larger choices, e.g. B. to ensure your character designs are diverse in more complex ways.
In fact, data like this is mostly used to monitor, imprison and monitor the identities under scrutiny, often by people outside of their own communities. In this case, the most immediate effect, whether the data-collecting entities realize it or not, will be to better enable them to deflect criticism from the very parties they supposedly want to empower. Funny how that works.
Why hire more blacks when you have a bit of software that already tells you what to look out for, or worse, could make you think you already know what’s what? Do you really need to think about your prejudices when the character you’ve created spits out a 3, 4, and 5 on the computer’s diversity scale? Those are pretty good numbers, my man! Now that we’ve got that out of the way, time to get some quality time Development of realistic horse balls. Polish is king.
“The features and measures are applicable to broader entertainment industries, including television, film and literature,” the blog states. “The only change that would be required when used in these industries would be the base characteristics, which would need to be calibrated to be relevant to the genre and universe in which each character exists.”
Activision Blizzard’s blog post concludes that it’s ultimately just a tool and at the end of the day, it’s still up to the people behind the wheel to make the decisions. But not without betraying a larger vision of a world living under the dominion of their tool, and therefore their master logic.
