Not trying to troll here.
After reading this article and what Blizzard has done, I am wondering if this or something like this will catch a roll and be implemented in other games at Character creation.
Activision tool for diversity players
Ok this part is tongue and cheek…I mean we got peg legs and eye patches for pirates, so there is a bit of crack for a diversity app.
Thoughts?
Here’s another source, less focused on flamebaiting for outrage clicks and more on actual facts:
No, it won’t. This idiotic tool was a typical product of corporate bullshіt culture, a vapid brainchild of some clueless privileged suits who couldn’t care less for actual diversity but were desperate to protect the bottom line by trying to score some political brownie points.
And if you canvas the gaming web sites, you’ll be hard pressed anyone who doesn’t think the same. Some will simply stick to well-deserved derision. Others, like RT, will stir the shіt pot with outrage bait like “don’t be too shocked if the next Call of Duty warfighter protagonist is conceived as an obese pink-haired character who rides around on the battlefield in a mechanized wheelchair”, but that’s just pandering to the other extreme of the political spectrum.
So no, I’m afraid that no matter how loudly some hack on the Internet bleats about the Impending Wokepocalypse of Gaming, a failed publicity stunt won’t turn into the next big fad in game development.
Thanks for sharing that, I found it interesting. If anyone is hesitating reading it, the headline is way more click-baity than the actual article. I was expecting an incel rant, but it didn’t have that tone at all. Anyway there’s a couple of different things I want to say.
To your question, it’s a tool for developers so they can overcome their implcit bias, not for players. I guess some games (some table top RPGs spring to mind) have a mechanic at character creation where you can get more atrribute points or whatever if your character has a disability. I don’t see why that couldn’t be in a video game. It would be hilarious to see hundreds of min-maxxers running around with identical hunchbacks or whatever.
But like the article said, how can you rank ethnicities, or genders or economic status on a diversity scale? How can Arab have more points than Asian or whatever? Is poor more or less diverse than lesbian? It’s just nonsense 
I mean… the very fact that a team of developers were being criticized for not being diverse enough in their characters, and the solution they came up with was “code a tool to quantify diversity and tell us what to make.” I love it. It’s just too delicious. I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer…
It looks like a solution looking for a problem. Yes there is a lack of diversity and a huge range of games with “Brown haired white males.” But that isn’t because the developers have an implicit bias. Have you all seen what game development teams look like? They have a wide range of people in them. The reason they have similar protagonists is due to just going with a vanilla (not meant as a white slur here) bland unimaginative blank slate.
Trying to artificially introduce diversity is patronizing. It in itself is segregationary, regressive, and hurts the very minorities it states it wants to boost.
But let’s be honest here. Video games have always been targeted by those who misunderstand the creative process it takes to create them. In the 80s and 90s, they were too violent. In 2000s and 10s, they had too much sex. Now in the 20s they are too white.
Video game developers should focus on their source material and if they created that source, then make the game with the amount of diversity that their stories need. For games like Conan, we have a vast array of ethnicities (all of which are fantasy inspired by reality).
That’s one of the biggest points in Conan’s favour diversity wise. The “races” and genders are just flavours of human and none of them are mechanically different from the rest. Not like in high fantasy where humans are normally the baseline “brown haired white guys” and Dwarves and Orcs are always mechanically different. Incidentally those two “tradiional” fantasy races are often nowadays seen as problematic depictions of real peoples, and designers will go out of their way to portray them against type.
But yeah, the root of the problem is that not many people, even those in creative fields, have much imagination. And even if they do, society as a whole seems to respond better to the familiar and things change slowly.
There are so many options in Conan, and I imagine there are players of all colours and genders. But I can count on one hand the number of black, asian or middle eastern player-created characters I’ve seen in three years on official servers. For whatever reason, almost every character I have seen or fought against has been white. Although gender has been 50/50 I’d say. I’d be interested to hear other people’s observations.
At best, this one can imagine that a heart somewhere was in the right place.
However, it gets very silly very quickly and the timing of the whole thing seems performative at best while it’s implementation seems… well, this one has nothing nice to say.
It almost seems like an attempt to say, “I’m not a bigot, this programme I designed says so.”
Unfortunate. Moreso if it takes flight.
This one is in favour of cosmetic options.
They enhance the ability for one to express themselves in games. However, applying values to those options changes the entire dynamic.
If people want to play an army of pale gravel voiced melanin deficient not quite middle aged Y chromosome hosts… Let them.
If people want none of the above to be true about their character… Let them.
Bonuses and penalties lead to min-maxing.
Min-maxing is the bane of diversity in game as it gives rise to “one true wayism”.
It’s bad enough when it’s gear/play style superiority (side-eyeing you endless fits about Feroxic Daggers), but when it comes to ethnicities loosely (or not so loosely) inspired by our waking world history… It is a recipe for disaster.
This would actually harm creativity and I believe that the funcom team is capable of doing this with out a Inhuman program.
EDIT: spelling and grammar changes.
I disagree. The imagination is there, but creativity is considered a big risk by their superiors and/or investors.
If i’m teaming up with others on my server i’m usually the only black character, i’ve seen others around though. Many people also don’t bother with character customization and just go with one of the default options.
Little off-topic, how are these considered problematic?
I’m not going to go find references or anything, but it goes back to Tolkien. Every now and again it’s alleged his Dwarves are an anti-semitic stereotype. They’re an insular, exiled people with beards and big noses who love gold. He based their language on ancient near-eastern languages. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t anti-semitic at all by the standards of his time, but you still hear it and modern portrayals of Dwarves in fantasy tend to really lean into the whole Scottish/Viking thing and downplay the greed or turn it into a love of hard work (lol) to avoid it. Also sometimes people say Dwarves as a species erase humans with dwarfism in fantasy fiction.
Orcs are a bit more troublesome since they seem pretty obviously to be a negative stereotype of “savage” people… as are the Darfari in REH lore by the way. But REH is dark fantasy and no-one is portrayed very positively, except the Cimmerians. Anyway I think Tolkien actually meant the orcs to be a parody of the Germans he fought in WWI - “good noble beings” who had been corrupted by bad leaders and magically warped into monsters.
The problematic thing is the idea that there can be entire “monster” races who can’t be reasoned with and deserve no mercy. It’s just not a modern mindset, almost racism distilled. Even though Tolkien invented orcs, early D&D is mostly responsible for the idea of “monster races”.
You can see as early as Warcraft back in the 90s people starting to question the idea, and orcs being shown as “noble savages”. Which is not great but better than monsters. Nowadays “monster races” are pretty unheard of (besides metaphysically evil things like demons), and orcs and their equivalents are often fully rational beings who have been duped by a bad leader. Just like in Tolkein.
Thanks for listening to my presentation 
Oh trust me, the Scottish part wouldn’t downplay greed at all - why do you think Disney turned Ebenezer Scrooge into ‘Scrooge McDuck?’ Scots get all the same stereotypes concerning money with the added bonus of being stupid, violent drunks to boot.
Wow, I never considered Tolkien dwarves in that light. I guess I am not “woke” enough.
What I find amusing is the new Ken dolls with a skin condition. I seriously doubt that a majority of boys and young men want to be reminded that they have a skin condition by looking at their Ken doll.
A tool?..for diversity?..if it’s not a RNG then it’s freaking wrong! I thought the goal was to look past our differences…not make a tool to keep them front and center.
This is why humans as the so…cringy…as a species.
Nothing says diversity quite like everything that makes someone an individual being processed into a formula and shoved into an algorithm made by a company that just can’t stop molesting it’s female employees. Real woke.
Apparently the galaxy-brain corporate response to this complaint was to spend six years working on a program that farts out radar charts measuring how mathematically progressive a game’s cast is, then crow about it on the internet without even running it by the people making the game whose characters were borrowed to demonstrate how great it is.
I’m a simple person but that statement in your link seems pretty flamy to me 
Flamy? Definitely. Flamebaity? Nope 
It might seem like a small difference, but I’m really tired of rabble-rousing on both sides of the political spectrum. These forums are one of the few places where I can mostly escape that crap, so I’m not a big fan of it seeping into these discussions.