Activision Blizzard’s “Diversity Tool” scores game character race, triggering overseas collective criticism | 4Gamers

Activision Blizzard is in another PR crisis. This Thursday (12) Activision Blizzard’s official blog introduced a new game design tool “Diversity Game Tool”, which has a standard set of rules for scoring characters that appear in the game, but the announcement After it was released, it attracted criticism from many overseas game media.

according to”King’s Diversity Space ToolAccording to the announcement, the “Diversified Game Tool” was developed by King, the game studio that developed “Candy Crush”, and MIT technicians in 2016. It can be used to detect character concepts and provide creative directions. The Activision Blizzard announcement emphasized that this tool software can study all the basic elements of the character, including gender, body size, good and evil, sexual orientation, and even subtle factors such as posture and physical strength can be scored.

“For us at King, the most important principle is that all players are welcome and respected,” said Jacqueline Chomatas, general manager of King’s globalization program. Thinking frameworks to challenge preconceptions about how characters should behave and act. So hopefully we can create more out-of-the-box characters to better represent women, non-binary people, and other underrepresented minorities in the industry ”

At the same time, the announcement also released some screenshots of the software, showing the check scores of the well-known auxiliary character “Ana” in “Overwatch”.

As shown in the screenshots, Ana’s options in each character setting were “quantified” by the researchers into the following scores:

• Culture: Egypt – 7
• Race: Arab – 7
• Age: 60-7
• Appearance: One-eyed -4
• Body appearance: thin and curvy – 0
• Facial Features/Aesthetics: Slightly older – 1
• Gender: Female – 5
• Sexuality: Heterosexual – 0
• Socioeconomic Background: Middle Class – 0

In other words, the purpose of this tool is to programmatically quantify the design of all characters in order to identify auxiliary programs to achieve the goal of diversity in the game design process.

“The Diversity Tool is a detection device that can help identify a character’s diversity of traits to show how that character is performing compared to a ‘typical’ norm.” Chomatas explains: “Once the typical character trait criteria are defined, it can be Used to measure new character designs and identify their diversity. In the process, the tool can also detect subconscious biases, such as why certain traits are classified as male or female, or certain races are always assigned Similar personality or behavior.”

Finally, the report ends with a mention of Call of Duty, a beta version of the diversification tool that has been applied, emphasizing that the results were “immediate and enthusiastic” (and the results have been immediate and enthusiastic.).

Alayna Cole, Manager of Diversity and Inclusion at Sledgehammer Games, emphasized that the tool was impressive in Call of Duty: Pioneer, and said that Sledgehammer’s next game will also use this tool, and “Battle Strike 2” also has a chance Use this set of tools.

However, the announcement did not mention that Activision was disappointed by the sales failure of “Call of Duty: Pioneer” in the financial report.The knock-on effect of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s battle royale loss of 50 million players in 2022.With the announcement, not only did the Twitter post attract many players dissatisfied with the quantification of game characters, many overseas media Gamesradar、Gamedeveloperand even always support equality my box Also wrote an article criticizing this tool.

pic.twitter.com/3516VJC1nU

— Cute Guillotine (@cuteguillotine) May 13, 2022

How out of touch do you gotta be to make a tool set for “diversifying” your characters instead of just hiring actual people with said backgrounds.

They even used it for Vanguard char’s as well pic.twitter.com/c5vRsjRLrL

— BllippyBoi (@Cloudcape64) May 13, 2022

how do you quantify race and sexual orientation in this. what does it even mean that a character has a higher race than another

— cm (@coolpantsjohnny) May 13, 2022

As the announcement continued to spread on the Internet after the announcement, Activision Blizzard subsequently updated the text, emphasizing that the software is still in beta, emphasizing that “the purpose is to identify opportunities for inclusive growth by examining existing benchmarks in the representation of game characters. Uncover unconscious bias. This tool does not replace any other significant team effort in this area, nor does it change the company’s diversity hiring goals.”

In addition, apparently noticed that the tool quantified game design caused players’ anger,Updated announcementAll images have been removed, but they can still be found through web inventory records.

Activision Blizzard has been affected by the company’s internal sex scandal in recent years. In order to rectify the atmosphere,Kristen Hines appointed as new DE&I Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Executive in Aprilexpects to achieve diversity goals to restore image, but also hopes to strengthen the perspective of diversity and inclusion in game design.

However, this set of tools undoubtedly adds a shackle to the current game developers. Almost every character you design needs to be reviewed by the tool, and whether the game character is actually “quantified” into a score to achieve a better game experience , which is still difficult to measure in terms of effectiveness, but the tool has a very significant effect in terms of topic engendering (negative).