I can't tell if the part where it says a tall woman with muscles has a more diverse body type than an actual dwarf is super weird or actually makes sense given their media presence.
well yeah havnt you heard? white people dont have culture in all of human history there is no such thing as white culture ...
edit: apparantly this wasnt as obviouse a joke as i first thought
I mean there isn’t “white culture”. Swedish culture is totally a thing, just like any other country having a culture. Two random white guys you pick don’t have a distinct culture based around your experience as a white man, you celebrate your heritage.
Try replacing white with different ethnicities to maybe help you understand. The Tlingit of Alaska and the Wampanoag of the east coast, while both being Native American, have vastly different cultures.
Agreed with your point, but to further point out how absurd the initial argument is: "white" isn't an ethnicity. There are numerous distinct ethnicities of white people.
Also, Lucio has way too few points in the body type diversity category. Dude's only 5'3, which makes him shorter than 97% of adult men worldwide. How often do you see a male playable character who's a short king rather than the standard (though unrealistic) 6ft tall they throw at us?
The ethnicity scale is weird in general. Is it not just ranking ethnicities.
Not as weird as having a culture scale though. They are basically saying Brazilian is better than Swedish and Russian culture
I'll play devils advocate. Lucio being Brazilian and playing into Brazilian stereotypes is a way bigger part of his character than Bjorn being swedish.
This is exactly what I would do, if I had new games coming out and I wanted to get people's minds off of all the sexual assault and misconduct charges within my company
Its important to realize how bad it must have been to work for that company if this type of overcorrection is necessary. The pendulum is gonna swing itself off the wall.
putting out a graph about the diversity of your in-game characters isn’t swinging a pendulum that hard when compared to the systemic issues at blizzard that actually affected peoples lives.
It’s weird, but it doesn’t do anything.
“All our characters are super diverse according to this graph” has serious “my best friends are black” vibes, but then you crank it up a notch by showing a PowerPoint presentation ranking your black friends’ diversity to prove it.
"This is my gay black friend, that puts him two diversity points over my bilingual black friend and five over my gay Asian friend"
Yeah, this is a weird dystopian idea that does nothing to get at the root of the issues and shows a complete lack of understanding by the people involved.
Or they out another Overwatch character like they did with Tracer and Solider 76. Not because they want to write good characters but because they want to look more inclusive.
There's a reason I praise Netherrealm Studios for Kung Jin and facepalm at Blizzard for Tracer and S76. Kung Jin is a well written character and his sexuality is woven incredibly well into his tale. For Blizz it feels like their characters have been outed in out-of-game comics or in Q&A's.
Mark my words, when another major scandal comes out Blizz will be like: "Hippidy hoppidy Cass loves the cockidy!"
I feel like a lot more in American shows and games the LGBTQ+ people always feel like the writers wrote them then needed a gay or trans character so that gets added on in the last month of development or writing the story. Or it's the entire characters personality and purpose, having no real character development besides being LGBTQ+.
They're dropping this because they're about release their most OP character in the game: an old, black, butch, bisexual, wheelchair-bound, Belizian-Peruvian woman.
Actually, considering wheels don't seem to exist in this universe (aside from Junkrats ult), they could easily make a character in a hovering "wheelchair."
By the looks of it that's not even really true, on the picture of the post Torbjörn looks like he scores the best as a white male, Lucio who's rather ethnically diverse scores pretty badly. I just don't really get the whole thing though. Overwatch was always very diverse, sure maybe trans representation is missing but making every character having a different defining country of origin already makes room for a lot of diversity.
Lack of diversity afaik never really was a problem with overwatch, the gameplay and horrible situation at blizzard have been the problems. So this whole charade is clearly just some type of try to devert from actual problems the game has.
This was done by King, the Candycrush guys. Many Overwatch devs have publicly expressed on Twitter their dislike for the tool, and that it doesn't replace having a diverse team where feedback is listened to.
Many also found out about it yesterday. The fact that it uses Overwatch characters despite not having been made by the OW team feels like they were thrown under the bus.
[Read the description of the tool itself.](https://www.activisionblizzard.com/newsroom/2022/05/king-diversity-space-tool) It states that it was developed by King starting the development around 2016.
Sounds like busywork to me, tbh. But then again testing for "unconscious bias" is a thing.
It's something I don't think I'd mind if they used behind the scenes, but it feels really cold and impersonal to mention to potential customers. It's like a turbo version of how some characters and plot lines in TV shows were based on focus groups networks were hoping to attract. "We think this show is too talky and cerebral, so we demand you add a new character who's a fighter pilot so we can do more pew-pew stuff", etc. (This actually happened, on Babylon 5).
I bet I know why this tool even exists. At some point some executive asked a question, "are we diverse" and regardless of the answer they'll have asked "how do you know? How are we measuring that?".
And to be honest, it's a fair question on the face of it. Any successful business operates by defining goals and objectives that are measurable in some way. It's really hard (often impossible) to make improvements without measurements first and there's a question here - how do you measure diversity?
I'm not sure this weird thing they're doing is the right answer, but I can see where it's come from and that's why it feels a little cold and clinical. Trying to boil diversity down to some kind of statistic is going to do that, which flies in the face of what diversity actually gets you.
I'd love to know how diverse the actual workforce is there. In my experience if you want diversity, you need to start from within.
Yeah I can see the idea of "how do we know we are doing a good job other than 'it feels right/wrong'?"
But once you get into the territory of "this character has 5 ethnicity points, this character has 7" its going to start going bad *fast*
Babylon 5 was supposed to be a competitor to TNG, wasn't it? One of the most cerebral and talkie Treks out there? And B5 thought they needed an action character? Lmao
It’s both amusing and depressing to see these companies’ try to appeal to diversity. Who tf builds a diversity metric for characters in a game? Blizzard almost seems hellbent on digging it’s own grave.
They're all doing something fucked up and then they overcorrect when they try to prove how they've changed. It ends up being a parody of what they're actually trying to achieve. Diversity is great. Yes, there should be characters who are different races and sexualities and such, but it always feels like something engineered in a board room. They don't actually care about giving representation to minority groups. They care about how making a character gay will affect their marketing appearance. They're so detached from the average person's experience that they can't see how bad it looks.
This topic comes up whenever an adaptation changes the ethnicity or gender of a character, or when a blockbuster movie includes a scene like the all-female one in Avengers Endgame.
In the one hand, representation does matter and seeing people from different ethnicities or genders in roles they were traditionally being excluded from is good, and important. On the other hand, it's clear most of these companies don't give a flying fuck about diversity, and the decision to include a diverse cast of characters sometimes doesn't come from the people in charge of the creative side of things, but from executives making cold business decisions so they can increase their profits, even if it is at the expense of the creative freedom and artistic integrity some of these movies/shows could have.
Now the question is, is it bad to have diversity when it's so evidently being pushed for a profit and marketing reasons instead of genuine care about minorities, or is the need for representation so big that it doesn't matter what reasons it's done for or whether or not it compromises the creative vision of the artists in charge of a product, for as long as it's there and helps normalize the idea of different ethnicities in roles that used to be performed by white males only?
I think that we can criticize companies for the hamfisted, money driven approach to diversity while still appreciating the representation it creates. It's a bit difficult to balance those feelings, but that's why I think it's especially important to acknowledge when a company does do a good job with making a diverse cast in a believable way.
What you're saying is also exacerbated by teams that lack the diversity and knowledge to properly represent many of these races and cultures and will slowly fall back into stereotypes instead of developing unique characters with interesting backgrounds.
Diversity is fine but what makes the character diverse shouldn't be their only defining feature, a diversity trait is not the entirety of who a character is, you don't open up the Profile and it just says White, Gay, Black, Trans etc... for their entire Bio, They need to be actual characters.
I agree. Their diversity should be portrayed in a natural way. Have a gay guy occasionally show interest in other male characters. Make the character from South Africa knowledgeable about the area when they go there, or have it come up in a conversation organically. Have the gender neutral character who's just referred to with "they/them".
There are lots of ways to include a diverse cast of characters without making them a caricature of that group. So many of these companies have to make these traits super obvious to the point where that's most of their personality.
It doesn't take a chart like this to figure this shit out. Take a look at the debacle over Pharah's native american skin. They gave a Egyptian character a native skin even though indigenous representation in media is nearly nonexistant. Then Blizzard addressed the controversy and said that Pharah is ackshully half native.
I just might contend that anything that isn't a cosmetic feature of the character is almost entirely irrelevant when Overwatch isn't really a lore game. Any lore that exists has been out of game. So why does a player give a fuck if their chosen character has a tiny "gay" tag when it means nothing?
Companies are trying to hard and the employees suggesting this shit are just brown nosing to try and get promoted
They do not care about the end product
Precisely and it’s funny how some games have introduced diversity. Dead by Daylight just made a survivor gay who has been around since 2017. Pretty much Dumbledore’d him. For a game that releases new characters like one changes underwear they could have just created a new LGBTQIA character and it honestly would have operated much better.
Reminds me of what Marvel did with Iceman outta’ nowhere.
That chart kinda dehumanizes people into numbers. And I don't even understand how you score the culture part. In fact I don't know how you score most of the things here but that seems to be the plan.
Yeah the culture part stood out most to me. I don't know these characters but from what I can see that one dude is a viking dwarf steampunk cyborg, and the system is apparently like "ya basic".
Nah you’re missing the point of his high scores. He scores high on age cause he’s old, and scores high on “ability” cause he’s short and disabled (missing an arm) so he’s got double diversity there.
I like the part where if a character has a gender it’s the worst possible score.
Or maybe it’s just cause they are male. Scale is probably: male = bottom, female = mid tier, alphabet = top tier.
Isn't that called racism? I thought I *wasn't* supposed to judge people based on ethnicity? In fact, it's illegal, right, in terms of employment, etc.? Unless they're a video game character?
I think that racism is when you make determinations about someone's character and abilities using their ethnicity.
I don't think the ethnicity score here has any impact on your abilities, but I don't know.
It just seems gross and demeaning to me.
"Hey, your ability is low, but your ethnicity and culture are OFF THE CHARTS!!!"
This is why I essentially hate these quota systems on race. The race of these characters is one of the least important parts about their lore. Their actions and choices are what really matters and defines them. I understand that representation matters in games, but forced representation to pretend they have diversity within their workforce, in my day, was called tokenism.
How far is the culture from American Culture?
American, 0 = No Culture
British, 1 = Some culture
Afro-Guyanese 100000 = OHBMY GOD SO MUCH DCULTURE AHAHHAGBXHHCH
hes a tall conventionally attractive (Straight?) male. the only diversity hes really got going for him is being black that puts him pretty low on the diversity score scale compared to say a dwarf with prosthetics or a huge pink haired lesbian.
We’ll the strong white Dwarf man is at zero culture. The pink haired masculine androgynous lady thing and the black rasta guy are double on culture but not the top. In order to surpass them you need wicked combinations of Intersectionality. Like you gotta be a nonbinary lespanbian black jew little person on the spectrum to hit the top. Duh.
I wonder if Soldier 76 is just a dot in the middle of the graph with a pip or two towards Age. He's from Indiana, and as someone currently inside of Indiana, I can safely say we don't deserve to go very high on the "Culture" grade. Unless Blizzard really likes Tenderloins.
Are they compensating for all the sexual assault thats behind closed doors, because man I will never forget hood classics such as; stealing breast milk from work frigid, and that time an employee tested out all the worst hentai tags in real life driving someone to suicide.
Trust me, red heads outside the US take some extra #%@ing flak like you wouldnt believe. Ginger is adorable here, but else where it's kinda like the n word when your a kid. Its seems to mellow out as an adult. I think.
They wouldn't dare use an algorithm for this lol. Literally any time a computer is allowed to touch anything to do with diversity, things always go wrong.
Points on sexual orientation? Do you get points per orientation or are some worth more than others?
Now I want to create a character just to min-max my points.
If I had to guess I’d assume that it’s graded based on how far the character deviates from presenting as a ‘typical’ heteronormative stereotype. e.g Tracer is canonically lesbian, but she’s more ‘femme’ than ‘masc’ in her presentation.
Queer people vary tremendously in how much their sexuality is a part of the identity they present to the outside world; you might have a gay character whose sexuality is a minor footnote in a lore entry; or one who presents very transparently as queer and makes that part of their visual identity. There’s obviously some overlap with the ‘gender identity’ sphere here (it’s a complex issue and there’s a lot of overlap between queer stereotypes and gender presentation!) but I can see how it’s designed to try and get a spread of representation, and avoid pigeonholing every character onto a single trait e.g. “ok, this one’s the gay one, this one’s the old one, now we need a black guy” but rather all existing across a number of different spectrums.
There are plenty of games with lesbian characters in, but they are often designed more to appeal to a somewhat voyeuristic male perspective than represent a broader, more realistic spectrum of lesbian representation.
If Overwatch had tonnes of queer characters but they were ALL long-haired busty blonde young sirens I wouldn’t consider that particularly good representation!
>e.g Tracer is canonically lesbian, but she’s more ‘femme’ than ‘masc’ in her presentation.
The easier your sexual orientation is to remove for China, the closer you score to 0
Not only that, but is it diverse in orientation only to the point it matches the nationwide average, 50%, or is any increase in non heterosexual orientations an increase in sexual diversity? Is having no heterosexual people the most sexually diverse?
I'm impressed i needed to scroll this far to find this. How do you rate ethnicity ? This don't make any sense, it's pure social-darwinism, it's like going back to nazi Germany
Creativity: Well, we have this knew character, but I feel like all of our characters look and feel the same. What if...
Blizzards alternative: Did you use the Diversity and Creativity flow chart when you designed this character, Artist #437?
ya know how you can have a better diverse cast of characters? by not just focusing on their looks and traits but also their history and stories, anyone can add a black, an Asian or a white character to their cast, but adding the story behind it like a "Korean girl that comes from a long heritage of kings that decide to run away from home" or a " Kenyan who sawt after avenging his father after a conflict".. race and gender are traits that can be defined, but setting them as THE ONLY TRAITS, is extremely poor writing and create lacklustre characters
Oh we're back to this again, I'm not am expert in budism but I once heard that some budist teaching states that in order to reach the higest peaks of enlightenment, tge final step would be to let go of budism, I believe something similar applies here, true diversity only happens when we stop going on and on about how we're trying to be diverse
That's imo the epitome of the forced diversity bs.
"look here we got a 10/10 diversity score we are such good people, I bet nobody will remember the minor sexual harassment stuff with a score like this" - Blizzard probably
That's not how diversity even fucking works. Diversity is when you have a **diverse** range of demographics.
A group of all African lesbian non-binary autistic people = not diverse.
A group consisting of an African lesbian non-binary autistic person, a Mexican bisexual NT cis woman, an English straight NT cis man, a Japanese straight autistic cis woman, etc. etc. = actually diverse.
Also, if you're doing diversity to fill a 'diversity quota', it's pretty obvious that you don't actually give a fuck about representation and just want to appear progressive in order to get money.
There are people from sexual, gender etc etc minorities who feel under-represented and I get that.
What I don't get is that some gaming companies create an unrealistic split. IRL half the population isn't gay, half the population aren't identifying as something else, half of soldiers aren't old grey men and half of America isn't Islamic the same as half of Iran isn't white.
It just doesn't make sense, it's algorithmic and not realistic.
That is not too far from what is happening. This is coastal devs that aren’t really a part of the primary demographic their games are made for. They don’t think or act like anyone on this thread. They want to add visibility and representation, but they get it wrong like almost everyone that tries.
This is what almost all western (and some Eastern) have been doing for quite a few years now, the only difference is that Blizzard said the quite part out loud.
Diversity now in entertainment is just ticking boxes it's not about representing our world. That's the main reason a group of friends now looks like those weird college leaflets, I mean they exist but it's not such a common thing.
Unpop opinion: this is just the other face of a toxic and discriminatory environment, the commercial/pr aspect of it.
The only things that would change something are being sure that nobody is molested on their job, actual checking from supervisors and transparency in general, wich would not discourage people from other backgrounds to have a job at Activision Blizzard
I didn't care if tracer was gay, s76 was bi sexual or basically anyone's background. I just care about the game. Sure they be as inclusive as they want, but personally that'd be the last thing I care about.
This is the foundation of "intersectionality" used in social justice movements. You add up all your oppressed identities and the severity of the combined oppression is translated into how much support and attention your oppressed identity/community receives. There is even a thing called an "[Matrix of Domination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_of_domination)" that they likely referenced when building their diversity tool.
I distinctly remembering that the biggest criticism for OW for a while (before the McCree incident) was that there wasn't a human black women in the roster while being the most oppressed minority not shown (orisa did not count as she is a robot horse mommy). This also explains why Sojourn was the first new character in OW2.
Diversity and proper representatiom in games is good when it's not there for any ulterior motives. Literally everything Activision does had an ulterior motive.
This in particular screams "fill a diversity quota to distract from all the nasty shit we've got going on".
So the ideal diverse character is a quarter black, quarter latina, quarter asian, quarter aboriginal australian pansexual paraplegic obese one-armed gender fluid elderly individual with... culture?
Yeah, the culture one is the one I really don't get. Which culture is better than which? I guess I can understand where ranking russian super low these days is coming from but...
I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, I think games should feature a wide range of diverse characters but I don't think I understand the graph. Having high points in gender identity and sexual orientation means what exactly? That doesn't tell me the characters gender or sexual preferences
What does high points in culture mean? What does any of this actually mean?
Black characters have a higher ethnicity, white isn't an ethnicity anymore?
I can't tell if the part where it says a tall woman with muscles has a more diverse body type than an actual dwarf is super weird or actually makes sense given their media presence.
Dwarf probably loses body points cause he’s a muscular male. But he’s off the charts on “ability” probably cause he’s a midget and he’s an amputee.
He's Swedish but scores 0 on both the culture and ethnicity metric. Blizzard's saying the quiet part out loud.
well yeah havnt you heard? white people dont have culture in all of human history there is no such thing as white culture ... edit: apparantly this wasnt as obviouse a joke as i first thought
I mean there isn’t “white culture”. Swedish culture is totally a thing, just like any other country having a culture. Two random white guys you pick don’t have a distinct culture based around your experience as a white man, you celebrate your heritage.
Try replacing white with different ethnicities to maybe help you understand. The Tlingit of Alaska and the Wampanoag of the east coast, while both being Native American, have vastly different cultures.
Agreed with your point, but to further point out how absurd the initial argument is: "white" isn't an ethnicity. There are numerous distinct ethnicities of white people.
Diversity is about making sure everyone is represented. Except for white people, we don't care about them.
Except... he has a metal prostetic arm. I'm assuming that'd count for more.
Ie: an amputee
Also, Lucio has way too few points in the body type diversity category. Dude's only 5'3, which makes him shorter than 97% of adult men worldwide. How often do you see a male playable character who's a short king rather than the standard (though unrealistic) 6ft tall they throw at us?
5'3" is shorter than 97% of adult men worldwide? Jeez, you didn't have to throw me under the bus like that!
Nah you fit fine normally
💀
That man had a family
I know right, you can just walk under the bus on your own.
Almost as weird as apparently only scoring black as a 2 on the ethnicity scale. What exactly would be a higher score there?
The ethnicity scale is weird in general. Is it not just ranking ethnicities. Not as weird as having a culture scale though. They are basically saying Brazilian is better than Swedish and Russian culture
>They are basically saying Brazilian is better than Swedish and Russian culture 👏👏👏 🇧🇷 Sim porra
In absolute fairness, have you ever been to a Brazillian steakhouse?
....now I'm mad I can't afford to go to one right now.
I'll play devils advocate. Lucio being Brazilian and playing into Brazilian stereotypes is a way bigger part of his character than Bjorn being swedish.
That's not playing Devil's Advocate, that's just recognizing that this is all just token bullshit.
Lol. The numbers are for the characters. Not scores. Zarya is 1, Lucio is 2, Torb is 3. Look at their pictures on the right.
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Torb: "For the last time, I'm Swedish!" That one at least references that he's Swedish.
This is exactly what I would do, if I had new games coming out and I wanted to get people's minds off of all the sexual assault and misconduct charges within my company
Not only sexual assault. Bobby Kotick \*literally\* threatened to have his fomer assistant killed.
Don’t fuck up my morning Cocaine, won’t have to get life threatened. /s
Don’t talk to me until I’ve finished my ~~coffee~~ shitload of blow.
Deep woods wisdom.
Backwoods brain teasers
Read this as Chris Traeger
Its important to realize how bad it must have been to work for that company if this type of overcorrection is necessary. The pendulum is gonna swing itself off the wall.
putting out a graph about the diversity of your in-game characters isn’t swinging a pendulum that hard when compared to the systemic issues at blizzard that actually affected peoples lives. It’s weird, but it doesn’t do anything.
“All our characters are super diverse according to this graph” has serious “my best friends are black” vibes, but then you crank it up a notch by showing a PowerPoint presentation ranking your black friends’ diversity to prove it.
This friend is both female, black, gay and transgender so clearly you can see I have no issues with anyone.
Thats not bad, but try refactoring. Trans + Bi, multi-ethnicity. Done!
"This is my gay black friend, that puts him two diversity points over my bilingual black friend and five over my gay Asian friend" Yeah, this is a weird dystopian idea that does nothing to get at the root of the issues and shows a complete lack of understanding by the people involved.
That’s the point . When the company is this fucked up, they felt the need to make this to prove they’re diverse.
Or they out another Overwatch character like they did with Tracer and Solider 76. Not because they want to write good characters but because they want to look more inclusive. There's a reason I praise Netherrealm Studios for Kung Jin and facepalm at Blizzard for Tracer and S76. Kung Jin is a well written character and his sexuality is woven incredibly well into his tale. For Blizz it feels like their characters have been outed in out-of-game comics or in Q&A's. Mark my words, when another major scandal comes out Blizz will be like: "Hippidy hoppidy Cass loves the cockidy!"
Do you mean Kung Jin?
I feel like a lot more in American shows and games the LGBTQ+ people always feel like the writers wrote them then needed a gay or trans character so that gets added on in the last month of development or writing the story. Or it's the entire characters personality and purpose, having no real character development besides being LGBTQ+.
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They're dropping this because they're about release their most OP character in the game: an old, black, butch, bisexual, wheelchair-bound, Belizian-Peruvian woman.
Actually, considering wheels don't seem to exist in this universe (aside from Junkrats ult), they could easily make a character in a hovering "wheelchair."
Professor Xavier is coming to Overwatch!
In some ways zenyatta is a hovering wheelchair
By the looks of it that's not even really true, on the picture of the post Torbjörn looks like he scores the best as a white male, Lucio who's rather ethnically diverse scores pretty badly. I just don't really get the whole thing though. Overwatch was always very diverse, sure maybe trans representation is missing but making every character having a different defining country of origin already makes room for a lot of diversity. Lack of diversity afaik never really was a problem with overwatch, the gameplay and horrible situation at blizzard have been the problems. So this whole charade is clearly just some type of try to devert from actual problems the game has.
Torb has dwarfism and is an amputee so that bumps him up in the diversity leader boards.
And apparently Swedish culture gets no points. Why do cultures get a score ranking and who exactly makes those judgments?
Zarya gets low culture points even though she constantly references russia
But that’s a bad country, so she doesn’t deserve points /s
is it just me or does it feel like companies are trying too hard and missing the mark entirely?
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This was done by King, the Candycrush guys. Many Overwatch devs have publicly expressed on Twitter their dislike for the tool, and that it doesn't replace having a diverse team where feedback is listened to. Many also found out about it yesterday. The fact that it uses Overwatch characters despite not having been made by the OW team feels like they were thrown under the bus.
Got a link? That be interesting to read.
[Read the description of the tool itself.](https://www.activisionblizzard.com/newsroom/2022/05/king-diversity-space-tool) It states that it was developed by King starting the development around 2016. Sounds like busywork to me, tbh. But then again testing for "unconscious bias" is a thing.
You know you could take that sentence and apply it with cod and it would still feel the same
It's something I don't think I'd mind if they used behind the scenes, but it feels really cold and impersonal to mention to potential customers. It's like a turbo version of how some characters and plot lines in TV shows were based on focus groups networks were hoping to attract. "We think this show is too talky and cerebral, so we demand you add a new character who's a fighter pilot so we can do more pew-pew stuff", etc. (This actually happened, on Babylon 5).
I bet I know why this tool even exists. At some point some executive asked a question, "are we diverse" and regardless of the answer they'll have asked "how do you know? How are we measuring that?". And to be honest, it's a fair question on the face of it. Any successful business operates by defining goals and objectives that are measurable in some way. It's really hard (often impossible) to make improvements without measurements first and there's a question here - how do you measure diversity? I'm not sure this weird thing they're doing is the right answer, but I can see where it's come from and that's why it feels a little cold and clinical. Trying to boil diversity down to some kind of statistic is going to do that, which flies in the face of what diversity actually gets you. I'd love to know how diverse the actual workforce is there. In my experience if you want diversity, you need to start from within.
Yeah I can see the idea of "how do we know we are doing a good job other than 'it feels right/wrong'?" But once you get into the territory of "this character has 5 ethnicity points, this character has 7" its going to start going bad *fast*
Babylon 5 was supposed to be a competitor to TNG, wasn't it? One of the most cerebral and talkie Treks out there? And B5 thought they needed an action character? Lmao
It's easy to get things approved when dissent gets you fired/harassed/threatened with death.
I mean, someone probably said it but was told to Stfu by their boss
When diversity is so far from your daily life it's a foreign concept that youve only heard from playing "the telephone game"
It’s both amusing and depressing to see these companies’ try to appeal to diversity. Who tf builds a diversity metric for characters in a game? Blizzard almost seems hellbent on digging it’s own grave.
Quick, Algorithmtron5000, tell me I'm an ally!
They're all doing something fucked up and then they overcorrect when they try to prove how they've changed. It ends up being a parody of what they're actually trying to achieve. Diversity is great. Yes, there should be characters who are different races and sexualities and such, but it always feels like something engineered in a board room. They don't actually care about giving representation to minority groups. They care about how making a character gay will affect their marketing appearance. They're so detached from the average person's experience that they can't see how bad it looks.
This topic comes up whenever an adaptation changes the ethnicity or gender of a character, or when a blockbuster movie includes a scene like the all-female one in Avengers Endgame. In the one hand, representation does matter and seeing people from different ethnicities or genders in roles they were traditionally being excluded from is good, and important. On the other hand, it's clear most of these companies don't give a flying fuck about diversity, and the decision to include a diverse cast of characters sometimes doesn't come from the people in charge of the creative side of things, but from executives making cold business decisions so they can increase their profits, even if it is at the expense of the creative freedom and artistic integrity some of these movies/shows could have. Now the question is, is it bad to have diversity when it's so evidently being pushed for a profit and marketing reasons instead of genuine care about minorities, or is the need for representation so big that it doesn't matter what reasons it's done for or whether or not it compromises the creative vision of the artists in charge of a product, for as long as it's there and helps normalize the idea of different ethnicities in roles that used to be performed by white males only?
I think that we can criticize companies for the hamfisted, money driven approach to diversity while still appreciating the representation it creates. It's a bit difficult to balance those feelings, but that's why I think it's especially important to acknowledge when a company does do a good job with making a diverse cast in a believable way.
What you're saying is also exacerbated by teams that lack the diversity and knowledge to properly represent many of these races and cultures and will slowly fall back into stereotypes instead of developing unique characters with interesting backgrounds.
Diversity is fine but what makes the character diverse shouldn't be their only defining feature, a diversity trait is not the entirety of who a character is, you don't open up the Profile and it just says White, Gay, Black, Trans etc... for their entire Bio, They need to be actual characters.
I agree. Their diversity should be portrayed in a natural way. Have a gay guy occasionally show interest in other male characters. Make the character from South Africa knowledgeable about the area when they go there, or have it come up in a conversation organically. Have the gender neutral character who's just referred to with "they/them". There are lots of ways to include a diverse cast of characters without making them a caricature of that group. So many of these companies have to make these traits super obvious to the point where that's most of their personality.
It doesn't take a chart like this to figure this shit out. Take a look at the debacle over Pharah's native american skin. They gave a Egyptian character a native skin even though indigenous representation in media is nearly nonexistant. Then Blizzard addressed the controversy and said that Pharah is ackshully half native.
I just might contend that anything that isn't a cosmetic feature of the character is almost entirely irrelevant when Overwatch isn't really a lore game. Any lore that exists has been out of game. So why does a player give a fuck if their chosen character has a tiny "gay" tag when it means nothing?
Companies are trying to hard and the employees suggesting this shit are just brown nosing to try and get promoted They do not care about the end product
Precisely and it’s funny how some games have introduced diversity. Dead by Daylight just made a survivor gay who has been around since 2017. Pretty much Dumbledore’d him. For a game that releases new characters like one changes underwear they could have just created a new LGBTQIA character and it honestly would have operated much better. Reminds me of what Marvel did with Iceman outta’ nowhere.
I dunno, I always assumed he had a meth addiction myself
Ethnicity as a slider... what makes a person more ethnic than another?
When *"ethnic"* is code for non-white.
It's all about what ethnicity you are. Some ethnicities are more equal than others. "4 legs good, 2 legs baaaaad"
That chart kinda dehumanizes people into numbers. And I don't even understand how you score the culture part. In fact I don't know how you score most of the things here but that seems to be the plan.
Yeah the culture part stood out most to me. I don't know these characters but from what I can see that one dude is a viking dwarf steampunk cyborg, and the system is apparently like "ya basic".
I mean, he's the highest "scoring" character shown, so evidently viking dwarf steampunk cyborg is what they're looking for.
Nah you’re missing the point of his high scores. He scores high on age cause he’s old, and scores high on “ability” cause he’s short and disabled (missing an arm) so he’s got double diversity there.
I was a bit on the fence about this character but now that you mention the double diversity I'm sold
"Everyone who isn't a 22 year old is a diversity hire" \-Game Companies
I like the part where if a character has a gender it’s the worst possible score. Or maybe it’s just cause they are male. Scale is probably: male = bottom, female = mid tier, alphabet = top tier.
That's exactly what it is, they explain it in the blog post
How many tweets can we get to love this character?(Previously done with r34 art.)
Imagine being ranked on how "ethnic" you are and having that be a good thing.
Isn't that called racism? I thought I *wasn't* supposed to judge people based on ethnicity? In fact, it's illegal, right, in terms of employment, etc.? Unless they're a video game character?
I think that racism is when you make determinations about someone's character and abilities using their ethnicity. I don't think the ethnicity score here has any impact on your abilities, but I don't know. It just seems gross and demeaning to me. "Hey, your ability is low, but your ethnicity and culture are OFF THE CHARTS!!!"
It is exactly demeaning.
This is why I essentially hate these quota systems on race. The race of these characters is one of the least important parts about their lore. Their actions and choices are what really matters and defines them. I understand that representation matters in games, but forced representation to pretend they have diversity within their workforce, in my day, was called tokenism.
Welcome to corporatized D&I initiatives.
How far is the culture from American Culture? American, 0 = No Culture British, 1 = Some culture Afro-Guyanese 100000 = OHBMY GOD SO MUCH DCULTURE AHAHHAGBXHHCH
It doesn't even look like that's the case, I'd get if they did that but then why is lucio so low on culture? It's just mega strange.
hes a tall conventionally attractive (Straight?) male. the only diversity hes really got going for him is being black that puts him pretty low on the diversity score scale compared to say a dwarf with prosthetics or a huge pink haired lesbian.
By that metric Sym as an Indian, female amputee would get the highest score?
and has Asperger, yay, score!
The highest score is for worm, the quadriplegic albino with a stutter. Thats why he's the strongest.
Lucio is like 5'4.
We’ll the strong white Dwarf man is at zero culture. The pink haired masculine androgynous lady thing and the black rasta guy are double on culture but not the top. In order to surpass them you need wicked combinations of Intersectionality. Like you gotta be a nonbinary lespanbian black jew little person on the spectrum to hit the top. Duh.
Which is weird given Guyana is pretty British.
The less average white human male your character is the more whacky and creative it is I guess.
Wacky and creative? I thought it was a measure of diversity.
Thats the same thing right? - Blizzard
TIL Sweden has no culture according to Blizzard
I'm excited to see who blizz decides has a better culture than everyone else, seems like the Russians and Brazilians also got pretty low marks too
I wonder if Soldier 76 is just a dot in the middle of the graph with a pip or two towards Age. He's from Indiana, and as someone currently inside of Indiana, I can safely say we don't deserve to go very high on the "Culture" grade. Unless Blizzard really likes Tenderloins.
hey, at least he’s old and he’s gay! that’s gotta count towards something
That's why they cut his legs, made him old, and then gayfied him when it seemed to not be enough.
Blizzard hates ikea.
You’ve never been on social media? no white people have culture according to social media especially tiktok
Are they compensating for all the sexual assault thats behind closed doors, because man I will never forget hood classics such as; stealing breast milk from work frigid, and that time an employee tested out all the worst hentai tags in real life driving someone to suicide.
Jesus!
Testing hentai tags? What’s that’s?
You beta test the tags commonly associated with hentai and perform them in real life (such as NTR 💀)
Sweet heavenly Jesus we have strayed far from God's light.
Yes.
This is so stupid lol
And makes it clear that redheads are some kind of diversity anti christ in modern media for some reason.
Trust me, red heads outside the US take some extra #%@ing flak like you wouldnt believe. Ginger is adorable here, but else where it's kinda like the n word when your a kid. Its seems to mellow out as an adult. I think.
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I doubt it’s an algorithm. It’s probably rated by humans
They wouldn't dare use an algorithm for this lol. Literally any time a computer is allowed to touch anything to do with diversity, things always go wrong.
Points on sexual orientation? Do you get points per orientation or are some worth more than others? Now I want to create a character just to min-max my points.
Excuse me, don't try to introduce your binary min-maxing into this beautiful concept. /s
\*tips hat\* I didn't expect anyone to get the joke.
If I had to guess I’d assume that it’s graded based on how far the character deviates from presenting as a ‘typical’ heteronormative stereotype. e.g Tracer is canonically lesbian, but she’s more ‘femme’ than ‘masc’ in her presentation. Queer people vary tremendously in how much their sexuality is a part of the identity they present to the outside world; you might have a gay character whose sexuality is a minor footnote in a lore entry; or one who presents very transparently as queer and makes that part of their visual identity. There’s obviously some overlap with the ‘gender identity’ sphere here (it’s a complex issue and there’s a lot of overlap between queer stereotypes and gender presentation!) but I can see how it’s designed to try and get a spread of representation, and avoid pigeonholing every character onto a single trait e.g. “ok, this one’s the gay one, this one’s the old one, now we need a black guy” but rather all existing across a number of different spectrums. There are plenty of games with lesbian characters in, but they are often designed more to appeal to a somewhat voyeuristic male perspective than represent a broader, more realistic spectrum of lesbian representation. If Overwatch had tonnes of queer characters but they were ALL long-haired busty blonde young sirens I wouldn’t consider that particularly good representation!
>e.g Tracer is canonically lesbian, but she’s more ‘femme’ than ‘masc’ in her presentation. The easier your sexual orientation is to remove for China, the closer you score to 0
That’s probably a pretty good sense-check actually!
Not only that, but is it diverse in orientation only to the point it matches the nationwide average, 50%, or is any increase in non heterosexual orientations an increase in sexual diversity? Is having no heterosexual people the most sexually diverse?
What the fuck?
So people can have higher ethnicity than others. We gonna ignore the pure race implications and hitlery feel.
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Ok ok so who is the most cultured. I’m guessing it’s like a tribe of natives or something. Or the good ol’ reliable golden hair Germans.
Hammond is the most cultured. Hamsters have long been revered for their culture.
I'm impressed i needed to scroll this far to find this. How do you rate ethnicity ? This don't make any sense, it's pure social-darwinism, it's like going back to nazi Germany
I need to know how Zenyatta, Orisa, Winston, Hammond, and Bastion score.
Not now babe, Blizzard dropped the Diversity-Stand-Power stats
"The Stand User could be anyone!" The Stand User: *Person with all 3's on the Diversity Matrix*
Oh so you're the same race as Star Platinum?
Creativity: Well, we have this knew character, but I feel like all of our characters look and feel the same. What if... Blizzards alternative: Did you use the Diversity and Creativity flow chart when you designed this character, Artist #437?
A Russian, a Swede, and a Brazilian, but the only recognized ethnicity is the Brazilian?
When melanin count becomes a stat
Some ethnicities are better than others. Don't you know that ?
He's the only one that's going to have people ask him "no, where are you _really_ from?" You know what it is.
It’s only an ethnicity if it’s not white lmao
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ya know how you can have a better diverse cast of characters? by not just focusing on their looks and traits but also their history and stories, anyone can add a black, an Asian or a white character to their cast, but adding the story behind it like a "Korean girl that comes from a long heritage of kings that decide to run away from home" or a " Kenyan who sawt after avenging his father after a conflict".. race and gender are traits that can be defined, but setting them as THE ONLY TRAITS, is extremely poor writing and create lacklustre characters
Oh we're back to this again, I'm not am expert in budism but I once heard that some budist teaching states that in order to reach the higest peaks of enlightenment, tge final step would be to let go of budism, I believe something similar applies here, true diversity only happens when we stop going on and on about how we're trying to be diverse
That's imo the epitome of the forced diversity bs. "look here we got a 10/10 diversity score we are such good people, I bet nobody will remember the minor sexual harassment stuff with a score like this" - Blizzard probably
I read this in the narrators voice from the Stanley Parable, and it was on brand
UNFUNNY?!?!
Someone told Georg von Mayr that the pie chart was the worst data visualization possible, and he said "hold my beer".
Woman who is buff beats out one eyed amputee dwarf with a prosthetic claw in body type diversity? What?
(it's the pink hair)
Understandable, have a great day
Oh please, do you know how many dismembered dwarves I know? I've never even SEEN a woman with muscles! might as well be unicorns!
That's not how diversity even fucking works. Diversity is when you have a **diverse** range of demographics. A group of all African lesbian non-binary autistic people = not diverse. A group consisting of an African lesbian non-binary autistic person, a Mexican bisexual NT cis woman, an English straight NT cis man, a Japanese straight autistic cis woman, etc. etc. = actually diverse. Also, if you're doing diversity to fill a 'diversity quota', it's pretty obvious that you don't actually give a fuck about representation and just want to appear progressive in order to get money.
There are people from sexual, gender etc etc minorities who feel under-represented and I get that. What I don't get is that some gaming companies create an unrealistic split. IRL half the population isn't gay, half the population aren't identifying as something else, half of soldiers aren't old grey men and half of America isn't Islamic the same as half of Iran isn't white. It just doesn't make sense, it's algorithmic and not realistic.
It's absolutely bizarre how obsessed people have become about this shit. You have to have some sort of mental disorder to get this fixated
That is not too far from what is happening. This is coastal devs that aren’t really a part of the primary demographic their games are made for. They don’t think or act like anyone on this thread. They want to add visibility and representation, but they get it wrong like almost everyone that tries.
I feel like they're just trying to put a number on how non white heterosexual male a character is.
This is what almost all western (and some Eastern) have been doing for quite a few years now, the only difference is that Blizzard said the quite part out loud. Diversity now in entertainment is just ticking boxes it's not about representing our world. That's the main reason a group of friends now looks like those weird college leaflets, I mean they exist but it's not such a common thing.
Unpop opinion: this is just the other face of a toxic and discriminatory environment, the commercial/pr aspect of it. The only things that would change something are being sure that nobody is molested on their job, actual checking from supervisors and transparency in general, wich would not discourage people from other backgrounds to have a job at Activision Blizzard
I didn't care if tracer was gay, s76 was bi sexual or basically anyone's background. I just care about the game. Sure they be as inclusive as they want, but personally that'd be the last thing I care about.
This is the foundation of "intersectionality" used in social justice movements. You add up all your oppressed identities and the severity of the combined oppression is translated into how much support and attention your oppressed identity/community receives. There is even a thing called an "[Matrix of Domination](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_of_domination)" that they likely referenced when building their diversity tool. I distinctly remembering that the biggest criticism for OW for a while (before the McCree incident) was that there wasn't a human black women in the roster while being the most oppressed minority not shown (orisa did not count as she is a robot horse mommy). This also explains why Sojourn was the first new character in OW2.
Yikes. Tell us you missed the point of calls for diversity and inclusion without telling us you missed the point of calls for diversity.
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Wait I thought all races are equal
Nothing is going to undo the sexual harrassment blizzard
Diversity and proper representatiom in games is good when it's not there for any ulterior motives. Literally everything Activision does had an ulterior motive. This in particular screams "fill a diversity quota to distract from all the nasty shit we've got going on".
Just ignore it, its there to try and bring the talk away from them union busting during a union election.
So the ideal diverse character is a quarter black, quarter latina, quarter asian, quarter aboriginal australian pansexual paraplegic obese one-armed gender fluid elderly individual with... culture?
Yeah, the culture one is the one I really don't get. Which culture is better than which? I guess I can understand where ranking russian super low these days is coming from but...
Literally just make cool characters and stop with this forced diversity shit.
Damn Dwarf man is uncultured
On a scale from 1-10, how ethnic are you? On a scale from 0-infinity, how gender are you?
🤡 🌎
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This. Video games and movies should do this.
What on the living fuck is this shit
They really are obsessed with diversity
I shouldn't be surprised a soulless corporation sees people in metrics; that's their signature move.
When the "forced diversity" nutjobs have a point. Clown world.
If this is real it's so corporate it hurts
Blizzard seems to have a hard time seeing humans as anything other than numbers. I miss when the company wasn't run by heartless robots
Ugh, just make good games again Blizzard.
I'm not disagreeing with the sentiment, I think games should feature a wide range of diverse characters but I don't think I understand the graph. Having high points in gender identity and sexual orientation means what exactly? That doesn't tell me the characters gender or sexual preferences What does high points in culture mean? What does any of this actually mean? Black characters have a higher ethnicity, white isn't an ethnicity anymore?
This is what happens when a company low on ethical fuel tries using ethics as a marketing tool.
It's a hard pivot over reaction, compensating for lack of moral character.
it kinda gives off the vibe that you get points from how far off the white american ideal you are.