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Activision/Blizzard and MIT announce "Diversity Space Tool", a software that helps developers determine how diverse their characters are

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Russia and/or China funded a study by MIT that was eventually taken over by A/B as an in-house tool all as some long con to "destroy the west. . ."

Really. REALLY. REALLY?
Yes, that’s exactly what I said. :pie_eyeroll: I know broad scope nuance is not your strong suit, so I won’t engage with you any further. Waste of time and energy.
 

ANDS

King of Gaslighting
Yes, that’s exactly what I said. :pie_eyeroll: I know broad scope nuance is not your strong suit, so I won’t engage with you any further. Waste of time and energy.

Your response is literally a push back against the dismissal of the absurd suggestion that this SPECIFIC instance of a diversity initiative is part of some larger goal to destroy "the West." There isn't any nuance to discover in that; the crazy is on full display.
 

Ozzie666

Member
But what about the elves and the dwarves? Are they anywhere in this tool? On a serious note, forced things or knee jerk re-actions like this are terrible. On the flip side, this company obviously brought this upon them self. The very fact that a company needs a tool like this, is just crazy town. In the end though, profits > than all of this.
 

Buggy Loop

Member
Heterosexual? Here's ZERO points for your sexual orientation..

iu
 
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DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Your response is literally a push back against the dismissal of the absurd suggestion that this SPECIFIC instance of a diversity initiative is part of some larger goal to destroy "the West." There isn't any nuance to discover in that; the crazy is on full display.
No, it wasn’t literally. You took it literally. This is a side effect of decades of social engineering and polarizing pushes from inside and outside forces at play.

Pick up a damned history book. A non revisioned one from yesteryear I will add.
 

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
No, it wasn’t literally. You took it literally. This is a side effect of decades of social engineering and polarizing pushes from inside and outside forces at play.

Pick up a damned history book. A non revisioned one from yesteryear I will add.

Don't bother trying to talk with the blatant troll who purposefully takes things disingenuously and creates strawman arguments.
 

ANDS

King of Gaslighting
But what about the elves and the dwarves? Are they anywhere in this tool? On a serious note, forced things or knee jerk re-actions like this are terrible. On the flip side, this company obviously brought this upon them self. The very fact that a company needs a tool like this, is just crazy town. In the end though, profits > than all of this.

What is forced or kneejerk about any of this? Candy Crush developers had an internal idea six years ago that was operationalized by folks at MIT who saw an interesting problem and worked on a solution. A solution that has evolved into an internal performance tool that currently, which isn't being mandated for use or has had man hours diverted for its development. The doesn't scream "forced" to me. Nor does a response, not even a decade old, feel kneejerk in addressing an "issue" that is several decades long.

Don't bother trying to talk with the blatant troll who purposefully takes things disingenuously and creates strawman arguments.

Feel free to point out the disingenuous or fallacious statements; otherwise this is just drive-by shit-posting.
 

lefty1117

Gold Member
Yeah. This is just too much. I'm all for representation and all that but now it's getting stupid. As for the conspiracy destroying civilization stuff, that's just as dumb as the tool. The reality is just that some people are taking it way too far and ultimately there will be a backlash, a snap back just like there is anytime society goes overboard on something.
 

Xenon

Member
Social justice movement became the social justice industry. Can't blame companies for going after the easy money.

What really is scary, is now all characters will be built with a bunch of identity attributes and they are going to start tracking things and coming up with asinine conclusions.


"Hello this is your game support and social behavior representative. We have noticed that you've been killing a lot of Asian NPC's and we want to have you take a quick bais test."

"I have been trying to get the speed record in Ghost of Tsushima 3, all the NPCs are asians!"
 

DaGwaphics

Member
Agree with all of this. I think people in here are just overreacting and assuming that this will be used an abused by Activision Blizzard for every single project when in reality they have already be extremely inclusive already in most of their games. CoD and WoW already had plenty of great representation and inclusivity. And overwatch is arguably one of the most inclusive games on the market given the global cast of characters that represent different cultures and backgrounds.


So in reality I don't know how much this program will even change considering they were already really inclusive. But it makes for great headlines and drama for certain kinds of content creators and social media. So there's that I guess.

I admit that I read headlines like this and then make cynical immediate posts without much research, so, I can't judge overreactions/knee-jerk reactions of others. :messenger_grinning:

I did just see a video talking about this and they brought up the possibility of using something like this to automate the creation of npc profiles in an open world type thing. Where if you combined this with AI voice generation you could have much more varied and realistic conversations going on around you. And where, even though we all joke about the sexuality preferences and things like that in games, in a rpg type game where they have romantic type interactions it could be more realistic if it was possible to just waste your time on a character because they were just never going to be feeling you in the first place. Through that type of lens this could be very cool.
 
This is a waking nightmare..Philip K Dick would have eaten a dick before entertaining the mere possibility of imagining this ever happening. 🤡🤡🤡
 

DinoD

Member
I remember when they accused a famous French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet of not having any Arab or Black people on the streets of Paris in "Amelie". Director defended this by saying it was the deliberate artistic decision to give Paris the 1800's look.
 
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DinoD

Member
I think Tarzan (book/movie) is ultimately racist. Would I want them to erase/ban movies/books? Heck no, but if I was in charge of casting for the similar character, in the same location/context, I would chose a black protagonist. If I was making the game/movie about Vikings , I would not deliberately/purposefully want to cast gay or black protagonist unless it has the historical relevancy. IMO. All this woke stuff is essentially a commercialism, and its fair enough. Because it reflects (tries to appeal to) the demographic and cultural changes in most of the modern societies. But, shoveling it into everything by force, when completely unnecessary, just lessens the artistic achievement.
 
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killatopak

Gold Member
I would love to see myself represented in Western games but the problems start when I ask excitedly why you decided to include mine and get answered that I was just a quota.

Really? Am I just a number to you?
 

Jigsaah

Gold Member
Good Lord no....Microsoft won't even stop it either. They are all about it. I'm all for diversity as long as it makes sense.

Like ok, so as many of you know, I'm black right? Here's how this feels to me.

It's like when you have the "token" black guy. It's kind of offensive because you're being included just for some white folks to say they gotta black guy.

This is like that, but now everybody's a got damn token. They don't get it. Diversity is fine as long as it's not SJW service to do it.

You don't have to force it. If it doesn't come natural I'd rather you not do it at all.
 
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Should be open source so we can test out with other game characters. Cal Kestis from Jedi Falen Order = 0. Ashley Tisdale from House of Ash = 5. Nadine from Lost Legacy = 15. Knack = 100.
 

Grildon Tundy

Gold Member
I guess we'll have to wait and see. If it's allegedly an ever-evolving tool then hopefully they'll continue to do the work to make sure it doesn't fall prey to the same issues every other algorithm-based technology does. I do like the concept of character narratives evolving beyond the simple times of good and bad though. I'll take more character stories that are more about different perspectives rather than 'for or against'. Some of the best games have those types of narratives.
What issues are those?
 

lucius

Member
See we good, please just forget how we abused a person and pushed her to her death and tried to hide it.
 

Fredrik

Member
Maybe this could give Lara her curves back? There is no diversity at all on female protagonists when it comes to the body.
 

Dirk Benedict

Gold Member
Whoa. This news is enough to maybe get me to Think Twice about buying anything from this company, going forward.
Instead of pre-ordering D4, I am going to look at it from an analytical POV and go from there.

What this company is turning into... is not something I agree with. While they have tons of problems internally, with how they treat their employees, I don't see their "fixes" doing anything to help both them and game development. Not in my opinion.

Eh... D2 Remastered and D3 before that, were the only games I've bought from them within the last 10 years. I don't even think it would matter if I stopped buying games from Activision/Blizzard.
But, hey, maybe D4 will turn out good... who knows?
 

nush

Gold Member
This fair and automated diversity is not going to appease the people crying about lack of diversity at all because it's going to spit out the wrong type of diversity and not the agenda diversity they are actually pushing for. They want their bias represented, not fair and equal representation.
 
We live in the age of mental retardation.
You'd think that at some point, one of these young beta male programmers learn that traits among human individuals aren't distributed evenly for fairness. That, for example, an IQ between 90 and 110 is much more likely for any given individual than say 150 oder 70. That men are much more likely to act aggressively than women. And so on. I guess the bell curve is racist. Mother nature is, too. To me this sounds like self hatred, a rejection of life itself. Pure nihilism.
 

Fredrik

Member
This fair and automated diversity is not going to appease the people crying about lack of diversity at all because it's going to spit out the wrong type of diversity and not the agenda diversity they are actually pushing for. They want their bias represented, not fair and equal representation.
Yeah I’m thinking it could end with some interesting results. Could be a good thing since they’re actually talking about body types as well. For some reason that has been completely forgotten when talking about diversity in character designs, for awhile now there has been zero body diversity in the west, could almost just do a head swap to change gender.
 
People are not dump .. i am an Arab and i dont like when they add an Arab character just for sake of ''diversity" .. they
did it in stupid and offensive way in MW 2019 with Farah .. people are not just colors and clothes we have our values
and if they dont respect our values than we dont want any representation


No people are pretty dumb.
Bad writing is bad writing. I have no idea why people get so pissed if it regards a minority.
 
I am a Jew and I have yet too see any prominent or important character with a Jewish background. I think the closest thing we had was Dina from TLOU 2 lol. But to be fair, I don't really care, but if we're gonna go down this rabbit hole I have yet too see them represent Israeli or Jewish in any shape or form. It's always the black or mixed race that gets reprsented quite a lot and again I do not really care but I just find it how certain nationalities get represented more than others.

I'd be interested in seeing Aztec, Indian, Egyptian characters more than anyone else to be honest. When was a last time we had a game that was based of Aztec culture or civilization ? Or Mayan? Like never lol.

TLDR - Forced diversity still sucks. Either do it because you want to from the get go or do not do it at all you fucking morons.
 
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