In what seems like actual evidence that we live in a dystopian society one of the companies working under Activision/Blizzard, King, recently released their latest development to help diversity within their games, a ‘Diversity Chart’.
This software is designed to take characters put into it and give it score ratings based on a variety of factors such as gender identity, age etc to then provide number scores for each of these factors and thus determine how ‘diverse’ a character is. Now I like to think my readers are very lovely and intelligent people so I think you can all see how putting a diversity quota to an algorithm is one of the most ridiculous ideas anyone has ever thought of. The mere notion that people at the company have used this to create characters that are meant to inspire people is sickening and really puts into perspective the kind of corporate culture present at the company.
The initial blog post talking about this has examples from the Call of Duty and Overwatch games but after the warranted massive amount of backlash were taken away however the images were still saved and I have one of the Overwatch ones available to look at above. Many artists from Activision/Blizzard have stated that the existence of thie chart is sickening and that trhey are fully capable of designing and integrating diverse characters without the need of an algorithm to tell them how to do their job. I’m interested to see how this is implemented throughout the rest of the company and if this will be yet another blow to the reputation of Activision/Blizzard who really could take a hint from Hello Games and just stop communicating things until they have resolved their issues.
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.