{"id":17778,"date":"2022-05-14T05:07:15","date_gmt":"2022-05-14T09:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pley2win.com\/featured-news\/activision-makes-diversity-tool-for-overwatch-2-call-of-duty\/"},"modified":"2022-05-14T05:07:15","modified_gmt":"2022-05-14T09:07:15","slug":"activision-makes-diversity-tool-for-overwatch-2-call-of-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pley2win.com\/?p=17778","title":{"rendered":"Activision Makes ‘Diversity Tool’ For Overwatch 2, Call of Duty"},"content":{"rendered":"
Today Activision Blizzard fulfilled its daily oopsie quota by blogging about how the publisher\u2019s subsidiaries have apparently been using a special tool<\/span> to help develop more \u201cdiverse\u201d characters. It apparently thinks it can accomplish this without, I don\u2019t know, actually talking to or hiring marginalized developers. Why rely on pesky, fallible humans when we have powerful data <\/em>to tell us we\u2019ve reached enough Diversity Points to start a new video game culture war? Numbers do not lie. I mean look at this. It\u2019s obvious, isn\u2019t it? The well-designed graph tells all, clearly and calmly.<\/p>\n
Damn, I\u2019m glad technology let us solve racism, sexism, ableism, and every other issue facing video games. Who knew it was so easy? When former Overwatch<\/em> director Jeff Kaplan said that he \u201cwould hate for the diversity to ever feel pandering, like we just had this spreadsheet with a bunch of checkboxes,\u201d Activision Blizzard really took that to heart. Okay, not really.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m being sarcastic, but in many ways it\u2019s hard to contain how galling this is. It\u2019s not just that someone thought a problem this complex could be solved with a glorified Dungeons & Dragons<\/em> character sheet that makes no goddamn sense. And it\u2019s not just that Blizzard is in the middle of a wide number of ostensible \u201cdiversity\u201d disasters right now, including allegations of sexual harassment<\/span>, inability to recruit<\/span> or retain marginalized talent<\/span>, and ongoing union-related tensions<\/span>.<\/p>\n
But a number of people likely not just built this thing, but also wrote the blog, got interviewed for it, and then signed off on it to share with everyone else. The reaction on the internet to the post and the tool it describes has been complete disbelief, and rightly so. Consider the fact that nobody there saw this coming, amid all the other complete PR disasters. What does that say about Activision\u2019s actual ability to address the rampant problems that have come under public scrutiny over the last year, and that the publisher has repeatedly vowed to fix? Right now, it seems like nobody in charge is truly capable of that, if this is what they\u2019re coming up with.<\/p>\n
And make no mistake, this is a PR disaster. I\u2019m not just saying this because I disagree with the basic premise that you can, as the blog post states, use one handy-dandy tool to magically and quickly \u201cdissect their own assumptions,\u201d avoid \u201ctoken characters,\u201d and achieve \u201ctrue representation\u201d by identifying \u201cmore diverse character narratives\u201d that go beyond \u201cappearance alone.\u201d Humans have difficulty with these things not because we are mere mortals who can\u2019t fathom the pristine logic of 1s and 0s, but because achieving a better world is a process, and a painful one. You can\u2019t expedite it. The moment you try to take a shortcut is the moment you\u2019re no longer engaging with the actual problem.<\/p>\n
While solving these problems can involve tools, Activision Blizzard has repeatedly proven that it\u2019s at the stage where it needs more education, guidance, and mentorship from actual people with soft skills to help establish a basic understanding of what diversity even means before it can even think about creating a tool like this. When a company like this takes years to introduce a Black woman into a video game<\/span>, I cannot in good faith believe that it has the capacity to \u201cmeasure\u201d what the hell diversity is or means, much less implement it well.<\/p>\n
But even if we take the thing on its own terms, it makes no goddamn sense. Can you look at any of the visualizations shared in the blog post and tell me what they might mean? <\/p>\n\n
I assume there\u2019s some logic to it, possibly one that is only explained and known to the people regularly using the tool, but even suggesting <\/em>that you can enumerate something like \u201cability\u201d is completely batshit. What is ability 0? What does it mean when the picture in the blog post says that someone is \u201csexual orientation: 0.357″?<\/p>\n
How do you even put that in front of someone and not feel fuckin\u2019 weird about what you\u2019ve done or what you\u2019re saying?<\/p>\n
While this is hardly important, the example use cases cited in the blog post won\u2019t be compelling to the average person. There\u2019s Call of Duty Vanguard, <\/em>a game that Activision not only has tried to distance itself from<\/span>, but one which chuds actively hate because <\/em>it has diversity. Then its other example is Overwatch 2<\/em>, a game that has nearly everyone asking, \u201cWhy does this exist?<\/span>\u201d Are these fair reasons to dismiss a thing? No, admittedly not. But they are adding on top of an already shitty-looking pile. Nobody is going to go, \u201cOoo, they used this for the Call of Duty <\/em>that disappointed everyone<\/span>!\u201d Again, the levels of marketing fail here are unfathomable.<\/p>\n
So, yeah, not the most compelling way to package what is already <\/em>a hard sell for people who want change but don\u2019t think it can be achieved through representation alone. Nor for those other people who think that just putting a woman in a video game is inherently too political.<\/p>\n
Perhaps this was inevitable, though. Tech in many ways is the most extreme manifestation of whiteness and capitalism, structures that have an active investment in defining, codifying, and filing away markers of identity for the sake of maintaining power and profit. The marginalized are not perceived until it\u2019s useful, and then only on the most degrading terms, for shitty purposes. Identity is key to achieving those aims. After all, if you can develop a system to, say, define things like gender or race, you could <\/em>use that information to \u201cinform\u201d larger choices, like making sure your character designs are diverse in more complex ways.<\/p>\n
In actuality, more often than not, data like that is used to surveil, imprison, and police the identities that get put under the microscope, often by people outside of their own communities. In this case, whether the entities collecting the data realize it or not, its most direct effect will be better equipping them to deflect criticism from the very parties they claim to want to empower. Funny how that works.<\/p>\n
Why hire more people of color when you have a bit of software that already tells you what you need to consider, or worse, might make you believe you already know what\u2019s what? Do you really have to reflect on your biases if the character you came up with spits out a 3, 4, and 5 on the computer\u2019s diversity scale? Those are pretty good numbers, my man! Now that we\u2019ve got that out of the way, time to spend some quality time developing realistic horse balls<\/span>. Polish is king.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe traits and measures are applicable to wider entertainment verticals including TV, film, and literature,\u201d reads the blog. \u201cThe only change required if used in these verticals would be the baseline traits, which would need to be calibrated to be relevant to the genre and universe each character exists in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Activision Blizzard\u2019s blog post does end by saying that ultimately, it\u2019s just a tool, and that at the end of the day it\u2019s still up to the people at the wheel to make the choices. But not before betraying a grander vision of a world that lives under the rule of its tool, and therefore its master logic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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