Since Activision Blizzard was sued for discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying in July 2021, the company is constantly in the headlines: The extent of the abuses was devastating and many current and former employees spoke up to give their fates a voice.
At the beginning of the year, the surprising news followed that Microsoft was buying Blizzard – not a negative headline per se, at least until a new lawsuit was recently filed in which CEO Bobby Kotick is accused of wanting to pull himself out of the affair with the deal. With the recent unveiling of a tool that diversity valued in video games with numbers, Activision Blizzard is now cutting itself in the flesh again.
Diversity as a numbers game: the program evaluates skin color, gender and sexuality with points
Developed primarily by the studio Kingwhich belongs to Activision Blizzard and, among other things, for cash cows like Candy Crush is known, the tool is a program with which the diversity of characters can be measured in order to create more diverse characters and build them into video games.
“The Diversity Space Tool is a measuring tool to help identify how diverse a set of character traits is and, in turn, how diverse that character is compared to the norm.”, says the blog post presenting the program. The description is more than accurate: Here are properties such as skin colour, gender or physical limitations measured with numbers to assess their diversity factor.
Activision Blizzard wanted to show how the tool works in images that have since been deleted from the blog post, but are still easy to find thanks to the internet. For example, Austin Walker shared images of the blog post on twitterwhere the characteristics of the heroine Ana from the hero shooter over watch were rated.
So her Egyptian and Arabic descent get seven points each, for her female gender there are still five. Their heterosexual orientation unsurprisingly scores zero given it’s the dominant sexuality in video games and the “norm”.
Also kotaku was able to take some screenshots before Activision Blizzard edits the blog post: one of the images compares the stats of several Overwatch heroes, while another depicts the ethnic, cultural, and sexual backgrounds of Overwatch characters Zarya, Torbjörn, and Lucio with colorful lines . The blog post explains, among other things, that the tool is intended to ensure “true representation” and to avoid so-called “token characters”.
Although it is in a now added excuse means that this tool is not used during active game development, concrete examples of the use of the tool in Call of Duty Vanguard and Overwatch 2 were given earlier in the blog post (via GamesRadar). You can read a detailed excerpt from Activision Blizzard’s apology on the next page!
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