[Link to their blog explaining it]
So, as part of everyone being mad at them, Activision-Blizz announced that they have made an internal tool to aid them in their quest to make their characters "more diverse" and to get rid of "tokenism." And some brilliant (most likely cishet) guy (there's no way it wasn't a guy) said "hey, what if we put it all as numbers? And made it into a graph?
Now, I love data and graphs, I am an idiot, but I would do something like "what % of characters are gay? what % are trans?" But this absolute braingenius decided that, no, that wasn't granular enough. They need to have dropdowns of a bunch of different options AND assign them a value from 1-10.
One of the examples they show is Ana, an Egyptian woman whose a healer and the mom of another one of the characters. You can see that, as an Egyptian and an Arab, her culture and race are a 7. She is straight, therefore, a 0. A woman is 5 out of 10 on the gender identity scale.
Which made me go: wait, this is real? This wasn't the onion? This is fucking real? And then go: THis could have just been a spreadhseet. They spent all this time + engineering resources to make this fucking stupid tool WHEN IT COULD HAVE BEEN A SPREADSHEET. Which I did. [Here is my trans gay werewolf MC, who is only 38% diverse], and here is my [intentionally shitty white fuckboy character].
As I made it, I really had to think about the data and the values. Like this is made for an American game studio, which is, presumably, full of white people, along with certain Asian countries (India, China, Korea, Japan), like most places in tech. So an Arab character would be diverse...but what if this were a Saudi Arabian game studio? Everyone there would probably be Arab, and most of their characters would probably be Arab. Plus, Overwatch (the game where Ana is from) has robots. And a hamster. Where do they fit? All of these characters are essentially "able bodied," even if they don't have their natal arms/legs/etc, since they have super prosthetics and can wall climb and rocket jump around the map just like everyone else....so are they really even "disabled"? What would a 10 on cognitive ability be, a total dumbass? The only dumb character they have is Junkrat, and he's more "crazy guy but in a comedic way," not necessarily low IQ. And on and on and on.
Also what if your work has non-humans, like LOTR? What if there's no humans like Redwall or Zootopia? What would a robots gender even be? Who gets to determine the "facial beauty" of a character? One man's scrunkly is another man's sexual awakening to a new fetish (looking at you, every monster movie ever).
So yeah, Activ/Blizz is Absolutely Fucking Stupid, once again, and they're attempting to increase diversity but going about it in a way that is even more offensive than just not doing anything at all. But straight people having a value of 0 is probably the funniest thing I've seen all year, maybe all century.
(also if you want the Excel file lmk and I'll send it to you. I tried to make it as culturally neutral as possible but also inclusive of non-human characters, because I'm a furry. Also some of the values are really shitposty so I'm not gonna post it where anyone can see it lol)
So, as part of everyone being mad at them, Activision-Blizz announced that they have made an internal tool to aid them in their quest to make their characters "more diverse" and to get rid of "tokenism." And some brilliant (most likely cishet) guy (there's no way it wasn't a guy) said "hey, what if we put it all as numbers? And made it into a graph?
Now, I love data and graphs, I am an idiot, but I would do something like "what % of characters are gay? what % are trans?" But this absolute braingenius decided that, no, that wasn't granular enough. They need to have dropdowns of a bunch of different options AND assign them a value from 1-10.
One of the examples they show is Ana, an Egyptian woman whose a healer and the mom of another one of the characters. You can see that, as an Egyptian and an Arab, her culture and race are a 7. She is straight, therefore, a 0. A woman is 5 out of 10 on the gender identity scale.
Which made me go: wait, this is real? This wasn't the onion? This is fucking real? And then go: THis could have just been a spreadhseet. They spent all this time + engineering resources to make this fucking stupid tool WHEN IT COULD HAVE BEEN A SPREADSHEET. Which I did. [Here is my trans gay werewolf MC, who is only 38% diverse], and here is my [intentionally shitty white fuckboy character].
As I made it, I really had to think about the data and the values. Like this is made for an American game studio, which is, presumably, full of white people, along with certain Asian countries (India, China, Korea, Japan), like most places in tech. So an Arab character would be diverse...but what if this were a Saudi Arabian game studio? Everyone there would probably be Arab, and most of their characters would probably be Arab. Plus, Overwatch (the game where Ana is from) has robots. And a hamster. Where do they fit? All of these characters are essentially "able bodied," even if they don't have their natal arms/legs/etc, since they have super prosthetics and can wall climb and rocket jump around the map just like everyone else....so are they really even "disabled"? What would a 10 on cognitive ability be, a total dumbass? The only dumb character they have is Junkrat, and he's more "crazy guy but in a comedic way," not necessarily low IQ. And on and on and on.
Also what if your work has non-humans, like LOTR? What if there's no humans like Redwall or Zootopia? What would a robots gender even be? Who gets to determine the "facial beauty" of a character? One man's scrunkly is another man's sexual awakening to a new fetish (looking at you, every monster movie ever).
So yeah, Activ/Blizz is Absolutely Fucking Stupid, once again, and they're attempting to increase diversity but going about it in a way that is even more offensive than just not doing anything at all. But straight people having a value of 0 is probably the funniest thing I've seen all year, maybe all century.
(also if you want the Excel file lmk and I'll send it to you. I tried to make it as culturally neutral as possible but also inclusive of non-human characters, because I'm a furry. Also some of the values are really shitposty so I'm not gonna post it where anyone can see it lol)
