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

Just say you can’t explain how communists and bankers are one the same team buddy and just call me a Cultural Bolshevist 😉
They're not on the same team. Well, depending. Current administration in US is 100% pro China. Bankers own them. Obviously not pro Russia as that party has used them as the boogeyman scapegoat for quite a few years now.

But if your enemy is hurting your bigger enemy, would you interrupt them?

Now i'm going to leave it at that because as important as this is, I don't want to catch a ban having a bad faith argument with you.
 
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They're not on the same team. Well, depending. Current administration in US is 100% pro China. Bankers own them. Obviously not pro Russia as that party has used them as the boogeyman scapegoat for quite a few years now.

But if your enemy is hurting your bigger enemy, would you interrupt them?

Now i'm going to leave it at that because as important as this is, I don't want to catch a ban having a bad faith argument with you.


Both major sides are beholden to bankers. That isn’t a new or bold thing to say.



Again how that ties into the downfall of the west isn’t apparent.
Your points are very old and super transparent.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
RLxgXDv.jpg

So according to their diversity maximizer diagram, that means if someone made this character, it would be a perfect score? I think I got all bases covered.

Culture - Has lived in 40 countries, travelled to 100, knows 18 languages. Life goal to live and travel in all 200+ countries

Race - Family tree shows the elders were globetrotting sexaholics in various countries. So their background is 10% white, black, latino, oriental, east indian, native indian, middle eastern, hawaiian, eskimo, random pacific islander

Age - Unknown to prevent haters, but has grey hair like an old person, and it's rock star length to show youth

Cognitive ability - Rain Man. IQ 200, but acts handicap for simple things so it covers both ends of the spectrum

Physical ability - Permanently in a wheel chair and missing an arm. But still shows amazing ability to beat pro athletes in basketball and ice hockey

Body type - Fat gut, skinny legs

Facial features/beauty - Must make the face look as stereotypical as possible from all races so it sticks out.... dark skin + asian eyes + blond hair + freckles should be good enough to cover it all

Gender identity - It's Pat. Dont ask, dont tell. Gamers cant tell what gender they are

Sex orientation - Free for all. Character hooks up with everyone so no gamer feels left behind. So chapter 1 he's straight, chapter 2 he's gay, chapter 3 he's into trans

Socioeconomic background - Drives a Ferrari, but also shops at dollar stores
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Alayna Cole, DE&I manager at Sledgehammer Games, says the tool was tested by developer teams working on Call of Duty: Vanguard, and it left a sizable impression. “We used [the Diversity Space Tool] to figure out what ‘more diversity’ looks like across all of our characters in both campaign multiplayer and Live seasons,” says Cole. “And now we’re going to use that data going forward into the next games that we’re working on.”
The diversity tool is working wonders already.

I think Vanguard is the worst rated COD game possibly ever. Even some of those editions people didnt like much such as WWII, Infinite Warfare and Ghosts got higher ratings on MC. Goes to show how much Alayna Cole really knows about Vanguard. PRing a diversity tool implemented for a game that is possibly the worst rated in the entire franchise isn't exactly good timing.

Tip for game makers: More focus on gameplay and coding. Less focus on listening to what Human Resources says should be in a video game.
 
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Their twitter is on fire:

Amazing shitstorm.
And they'll probably understand NOTHING from this backlash.

A lot of idiots are responding to this by saying "JuST hIrE mOrE divERse DeSIGners!"

Like that isn't just as racist.

Mother fuckers, they should hire people who are good for the job, if that's 99 percent white men it still wouldn't be racist. If it's more of a mixture... that also wouldn't be racist.
 

Sgt.Asher

Member
Yo people, this has been done before!


Come on, let's all post our scores! I'll start, I'm just an 18!
I got a 17.

Then I decided to crank them all up to max and scored a 97, then I had to crank christian all the way down to get to 100. So i have to be a devout muslim, Jew, black, poor crippled transgender female to score the highest.

This is a joke right, it has to be. My mind cannot comprehend it otherwise.
 
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Mozzarella

Member
Well i never cared about or supported this company that much but i dont like this lame tool to influence others. It's such a horrible way to view things and no wonder most AAA games are soulless crap when that is the primary focus instead of game design.
The sad state of this trend...
I know a writer that was doing fine with a good fantasy story but was attacked on goodreads because he didnt met the requirements needed for diversity and female roles, so he changed it to avoid "bad press" which speaks about how the freedom of the artist is getting treated these days. Honestly i dont really care about that, to me it doesnt give any benefits whatsoever, like nothing at all. As much as some people hate that KCD dev i think some devs/writers etc need to grow some balls like him.
 

AGRacing

Gold Member
I imagine the Nazis would use something similar to determine if someone passes the requirements for existing?
Yes!

Think of that shape as like a toddlers shape and hole game... if your shape doesn't fit in the hole... into the bin with you!
 

SSfox

Member
And the retardation continue.

I was done with acti long ago anyway. Now thinking about it it would have been a win if their games will never be release on playstation consoles.
 
Fucking yawn.

Make a cool game that suits a woman protagonist, just like Timb Raider, and people will play it.
Make a cool game that suits a black protagonist, like Miles Moralis, and people will play it.
But Make a game that is cringe because you deliberately added a cast of token minorities that do nothing to raise the game, then you can shove it up your arse.
Pull shit like re-imagining existing characters for the sake of token diversity and you will go broke.
 

MilkLizard

Member
The fact that they need such a creepy tool to have a somewhat diverse cast in their games is pretty telling thb. I'm all for diversity of characters in games and movies and so on but not like this.
 

BadBurger

Is 'That Pure Potato'
They seem to confuse "more rare" with "diverse", coming from only a US centric and not worldly perspective. Furthermore, how can they possibly, objectively gauge / rate "culture"?

Aside from the obvious moral complications of this tool, it seems like it will end up creating a cast of characters that don't reflect any actual society. May as well just spin a series of wheels for each trait.
 

Kamina

Golden Boy
I scored a 3. Does that make me evil?
I just checked again, and i dont believe you
In order to score a 3 you need to be a white, rich, able bodied baby that is a devout christian, not jew or muslim, didn’t migrate, has their countries language as their primary, and is cis.
 
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EekTheKat

Member
It's hilarious that while Activision Blizzard is using analytics and algorithms to determine what characters belong in their next game, Kamiya simply decides to share his love for tall posh english women with glasses in his games.

Though honestly, given most AAA games are already driven by analytics and data crunching over well....goofy fun and a lot of heart. It's not surprising that the future of AAA development will have characters designed literally by algorithms to appease the most people out there.
 

WitchHunter

Member

“The Diversity Space Tool is a measurement device, to help identify how diverse a set of character traits are and in turn how diverse that character and casts are when compared to the ‘norm’,” explains Chomatas. Once it establishes a baseline for typical character traits (which is done by the creative team working closely with DE&I experts), it can then weigh new character designs against it to measure their diversity. During this process, the tool can also uncover unconscious bias, such as why certain traits are seen as “male” vs. “female,” or why characters from certain ethnic backgrounds are given similar personalities or behaviors.

In this effort, the Diversity Space Tool can clearly delineate between token characters and true representation. “[The tool] identifies what stereotypical characters in different genres look like, which are not always the most conducive or representative of diversity,” says Chomatas. “It helps identify those stereotypes, while also helping creatives look closer at their designs, so they can dissect their own assumptions and presets. It also helps identify opportunities for more diverse character narratives, to ensure that we are not only creating diverse characters in appearance alone.”

By starting at the character conception stage, the tool allows King and others, to ask these important questions at the earliest possible moment, to promote more thoughtful creative choices from the ground up – which, in turn, leads to games that are more representative of their player base.

Over the past few months, King has let developer teams at Activision and Blizzard “beta test” the Diversity Space Tool, and the results have been immediate and enthusiastic.

Alayna Cole, DE&I manager at Sledgehammer Games, says the tool was tested by developer teams working on Call of Duty: Vanguard, and it left a sizable impression. “We used [the Diversity Space Tool] to figure out what ‘more diversity’ looks like across all of our characters in both campaign multiplayer and Live seasons,” says Cole. “And now we’re going to use that data going forward into the next games that we’re working on.” The Overwatch 2 team at Blizzard has also had a chance to experiment with the tool, with equally enthusiastic first impressions.

The plan is to release the tool internally across Activision Blizzard starting this summer and into Q3, with an eye towards what Chomatas calls “the ultimate goal”: Making the tool available to the industry as a whole.

“We strongly believe in the tool’s potential to change the gaming landscape,” says Chomatas.

Diversity_Space_Tool_1.png


Diversity_Space_Tool_2.png
What is happening? : DDD Are these people afraid of something and pretending to be retarded or just want to distance themselves from rest of the society? Maybe test the rest of society whether they share the same characteristics, gullibility or wtf?
 
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WitchHunter

Member
I am sorry, but as a big fan of intersectionality and all that liberal shit. THIS...this is some dystopian bullshit. Holy fuck

Is the algorithm at least open source? Or is it some ML black box?
Don't be afraid Musk will buy them too... and save the world, just like Iron Man!
 

old-parts

Member
With every action there's a reaction. I can't wait for this era to end and bring the world back to normal
Might be a while, DEI has institutionally captured parts of the USA and almost all of Canada, present in some parts of western Europe too.

Stuff like this tool are only the beginning, eventually Microsoft might make it a mandatory requirement that all games on Xbox must be filtered through the DEI prism. Sony/PS is pretty much a California company so I'd expect the same from them.
 
This is really dumb, but also just the logical conclusion of diversity quotas already put in place by Amazon, Apple, the Oscars and other entertainment outlets. They opened Pandora's box and are now complaining that things are going that way?
When identity becomes more important than great gameplay and good story-telling, you end up with hollow and absolutely bland products that nobody wants to play.

Might as well just let an AI generate your games in the future.
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
rZelaJY.jpg

What's behind those dropdowns?
What do you get if you max them all out?
So many questions!
I'll take a guess starting from the top filter. You get this maxing it out. The perfect Universe Hero.

Culture: African 10 pts
Race: Black 10 pts
Age: 80+ 10 pts
Cognitive ability: Idiot Savant 10 pts
Physical ability: Wheelchaired 10 pts
Body type: TLC Channel episode of the 600 lb behemoth 10 pts
Facial features/beauty: Ugly duckling, face piercings, nose ring, pink hair 10 pts
Gender identity: Trans 10pts
Sex orientation: Anything but straight 10 pts
Socioeconomics: Dirt poor 10 pts

(PS For all you middle eastern folks, looks like Activision and MIT think you're a pretty diverse set of people, but at 7 pts there's going to be others ahead of you unless 7 pts is the max scale. But on the plus side you blow away anyone rated a 0 because all of you have been classified by god's gift of sociodemographic reviewers called: video game makers)
 
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I'll take a guess starting from the top filter. You get this maxing it out. The perfect Universe Hero.

Culture: African 10 pts
Race: Black 10 pts
Age: 80+ 10 pts
Cognitive ability: Idiot Savant 10 pts
Physical ability: Wheelchaired 10 pts
Body type: TLC Channel episode of the 600 lb behemoth 10 pts
Facial features/beauty: Ugly duckling, face piercings, nose ring, pink hair 10 pts
Gender identity: Trans 10pts
Sex orientation: Anything but straight 10 pts
Socioeconomics: Dirt poor 10 pts
Please make this an Overwatch character 😯
 

Nickolaidas

Banned
This is really dumb, but also just the logical conclusion of diversity quotas already put in place by Amazon, Apple, the Oscars and other entertainment outlets. They opened Pandora's box and are now complaining that things are going that way?
When identity becomes more important than great gameplay and good story-telling, you end up with hollow and absolutely bland products that nobody wants to play.

Might as well just let an AI generate your games in the future.
But the A.I. itself should identify as a stag and go by they/them in order for that to work.
 

Elginer

Member
I remember laughing at the 'Progressive Stack' during Occupy Wall Street.
Now they're actually code tools to produce a "useful" metric similar to that shit.

If they make a character that's a wheelchair bound trans-woman autistic midget of color with crippling learning disability, it's going break the software.

ca38883ab7c243c279326e1db670adfed413b6e8.gifv
Boom
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
If they make a character that's a wheelchair bound trans-woman autistic midget of color with crippling learning disability, it's going break the software.
I knew Activision and MIT are prejudice than they are trying to portray. They cant do midgets because their diversity options having nothing about height.
 

badblue

Member
Can they make this open for everyone to use.

I want to throw Quite into it. She's a woman and half naked that's got to be worth a few oppression points.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Out of all the diversity options, I'm more interested in the cognitive ability one. All the others, you can tell which side of the spectrum will get 0 pts or max pts.

But for cognitive ability diversity, does a dumb ass who grunts get the 10 pts? Or does a coherent smooth talking brainer get max points??

You can see in their pic, it's greyed out as default 0 pts as they didn't pick a choice.
 
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Culture: African 10 pts
Race: Black 10 pts
Age: 80+ 10 pts
Cognitive ability: Idiot Savant 10 pts
Physical ability: Wheelchaired 10 pts
Body type: TLC Channel episode of the 600 lb behemoth 10 pts
Facial features/beauty: Ugly duckling, face piercings, nose ring, pink hair 10 pts
Gender identity: Trans 10pts
Sex orientation: Anything but straight 10 pts
Socioeconomics: Dirt poor 10 pts

If they make a character that's a wheelchair bound trans-woman autistic midget of color with crippling learning disability, it's going break the software.

Never thought they would unironically turn a literal joke into a content creation tool.
That is how unaware the plants at Blizz really are.
 
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MastaKiiLA

Member
What the hell kind of world are we living nowadays? I'm getting way too old for this.

I imagine even the younglings are getting fed up with this crap too thougwereh.
I know everyone likes to think that their bad opinion represents a substantial majority of the public, but that's not reality.

The reality is that businesses generally don't do much of anything unless there's a financial benefit to it. The reality is that increased diversity and inclusion pays. I don't have the numbers to support this, but you see it playing out in pretty much every sector now. So clearly there's a financial upside, or this trend would not continue.

So, those who continue to question the validity of these trends are going to quickly find themselves on the wrong side of history, as society continues to evolve around them. I'd say the young people are at the forefront of this movement. They're growing up in an ever more-connected world, and they interact and engage with more diverse groups of friends, not just ethnically, but also geographically. They're getting a closer look at tons more cultures than we were able to growing up, and they're largely embracing the differences in others. Victims of racism often lament the indoctrination of kids from an early age. Well, I'd like to think that access to smart devices from a young again, and familiarity with the internet from early on will have the opposite effect, and instill values of acceptance and tolerance in young kids. Hell, even that little kid who became a meme for being against gay marriage ended up changing his mind just a couple years later, while still a young kid. It shows that he was really just parroting what he was hearing at home or in church, and not necessarily what he really felt.

tl;dr: Society as a whole is changing, and I hope that it's the youth who get to steer the direction that we're going in, because as we all learned growing up, past generations don't fucking get it, and are stuck in their ways to a detriment. So if diversity is profitable, then a diversity tool is nothing more than a business investment for the future that bigots can't prevent.
 

ssringo

Member
I'll take a guess starting from the top filter. You get this maxing it out. The perfect Universe Hero.

Culture: African 10 pts
Race: Black 10 pts
Age: 80+ 10 pts
Cognitive ability: Idiot Savant 10 pts
Physical ability: Wheelchaired 10 pts
Body type: TLC Channel episode of the 600 lb behemoth 10 pts
Facial features/beauty: Ugly duckling, face piercings, nose ring, pink hair 10 pts
Gender identity: Trans 10pts
Sex orientation: Anything but straight 10 pts
Socioeconomics: Dirt poor 10 pts

I dunno. Sounds like a "magical negro" character and that's a whole other problematic problem.

For any perpetually offended lurking about. That's actually a thing.

 
I know everyone likes to think that their bad opinion represents a substantial majority of the public, but that's not reality.

The reality is that businesses generally don't do much of anything unless there's a financial benefit to it. The reality is that increased diversity and inclusion pays. I don't have the numbers to support this, but you see it playing out in pretty much every sector now. So clearly there's a financial upside, or this trend would not continue.

So, those who continue to question the validity of these trends are going to quickly find themselves on the wrong side of history, as society continues to evolve around them. I'd say the young people are at the forefront of this movement. They're growing up in an ever more-connected world, and they interact and engage with more diverse groups of friends, not just ethnically, but also geographically. They're getting a closer look at tons more cultures than we were able to growing up, and they're largely embracing the differences in others. Victims of racism often lament the indoctrination of kids from an early age. Well, I'd like to think that access to smart devices from a young again, and familiarity with the internet from early on will have the opposite effect, and instill values of acceptance and tolerance in young kids. Hell, even that little kid who became a meme for being against gay marriage ended up changing his mind just a couple years later, while still a young kid. It shows that he was really just parroting what he was hearing at home or in church, and not necessarily what he really felt.

tl;dr: Society as a whole is changing, and I hope that it's the youth who get to steer the direction that we're going in, because as we all learned growing up, past generations don't fucking get it, and are stuck in their ways to a detriment. So if diversity is profitable, then a diversity tool is nothing more than a business investment for the future that bigots can't prevent.

This reads like written by a snooty teenager. There is so much wrong with this post, it should be enshrined as an example of how not to argue.
 
Meanwhile, just google intersectionality and you're immediately greeted by pictures like this.

sXFwFOn.jpg

Intersectionality.png


This second one explicitly ranks them. This is literally the ENTIRE POINT of intersectionality. The main thing they've been pushing this entire time. It's like they're literally never even seen it before and have no clue what they're talking about.

Now someone does it and they think it's racist, or reduces people to dehumanizing categories and pits groups against each other. Well guess what? That was always the case. That's the whole point of people that have been criticizing this oppression olympics bullshit for many, many years.
 
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