I’m curious about who actually sat down, had a meeting and thought this was going to be a good idea and be well received by anyone with a functioning brain.
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This whole thing makes sense to me in only one way.
All attributes have the same score but as you make characters with certain attributes the value points of those attributes drops.
So if we start with 10 points in White and 10 Points in Man then if you make 5 characters that are White Men then score for these attributes drops down to only 5 points. Hence explaining why a new character who is also white scores only 5 points for Race and Gender but a Black female character would have the full 10 points because she is a minority in this cast of characters and hence the points encourage her creation.
In essence, they gave a culture issue to an Accountant and he/she made an excel tool to calculate the most optimal return for each character design.
Somebody in the PR team saw this, thought it was brilliant and made it all pretty and presentable.
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I’m just saying I’m trying to pay way more attention to Blizz now.
I simply cannot believe a sane human being would greenlight the presentation of a representation improvements plan, that is based on how much people aren’t straight white men - as evidently we’re the alpha and omega - with a straight face.
$100 says this is a smoke screen for something darksided like crushing labor organizers. I cannot believe this is presented in good faith. It’s just too stupid.
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It was already tweeted by an employee who actually works on games (Overwatch) that they don’t use this tool, this is just some dystopian cost-cutting measure corporate likely mandated to try and avoid hiring an actual person to sometimes go “Maaaaybe don’t do that…”.
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I can see making a chart if you, say, have lots of characters and are worried they’re mostly pummeling the same themes into the ground. Sort of a way to check yourself so that your entire main cast doesn’t wind up being a stoic nice white guy (gender neutral use of guy, but skewing male) with black hair and blue eyes who happen to be unusually strong and smart. Just a tool to double check and maybe if you keep pulling stoic but friendly orphan with slightly curly black hair and blue eyes, you might spread things out a bit.
The presentation of this doesn’t exactly look like that. Especially with how bloody arbitrary some of these are.
For instance, giving Zarya a 0 on sexuality when it’s actually kind of unusual for the LARGE MUSCLEY CHICK with interesting hair not to be as straight as a U-turn feels off.
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NOTE: This reply will have some spoilers for Horizon Forbidden West.
It always makes me laugh seeing “gamer bro’s” lose their mind when a modern game has a female protagonist like the Horizon series. Seen so many of them try and justify their hatred with, “clearly the developers are pushing an agenda cause the main character is a woman!!!”. Or how some of the main antagonists are male or male coded (in the case of AI’s like HADES and HEPHAESTUS). Acting like there were no female characters who had a hatred towards Aloy. Even though there was. And Aloy was made an outcast from birth because of her. Hell, Tilda is a groomer. She tried to forge Beta (another clone of Elisabet Sobeck) into what she saw in Elisabet. Then tried to forge Aloy into that image when she learned about Aloys past.
I love Aloy as a character. Seeing her struggle with living in Elisabet’s shadow and losing herself in it in Forbidden West was engaging to see. Seeing her get frustrated at Beta because Beta is not as self-confident due to her upbringing is a great way to show that Aloy has flaws. Both Aloy and Beta are the same person generically, but completely different due to how they were raised. Aloy had the loving father figure of Rost. Beta had Tilda. Whom wanted to mold her into someone she wasn’t all because of “what if”. (Tilda and Elisabet were romantically involved for a short time). Mirrors Erend living in his sisters shadow. Always thinking he will screw up when given big responsibilities because of that. As Ersa died tragically and Erend felt he was not up to the task of doing her job as the leader of the Vanguard.
Can argue that they’re defying stereotypes.
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You do realize where this is heading, now? An “m.i.t. ‘genius’” gets paid to “strongly suggest” nerfing light skinned video game characters, in a world where light skinned workers are last in line for a job. men in paricular!
luckily, i play a female = so when my light skin is nerfed (and it is inevitable, if not happening already lol) - i will be a distant 5th in dps UNDER THE BEST POSSIBLE CIRCUMSTANCES, if i actually bothered to keep playing actively as a mythic plus “light skinned” bm venthyr.
hooray!
stocks are up!
~ a finance grad/truck driver who chose to buy gold instead of invest in america’s downfall to a “soon to be” THIRD world nation, in paricular! + the only college student in america to write a “middler year thesis” against racist “affirmative action.” ? 20 years ago.
The technomancers of ALPHA CENTAURI!
Can I note how weird it is that the ATVI twitter is pointing at King as the origin of this?
Do they have games with actual human characters?
Considering it’s made in partnership with MIT, no it’s just that stupid.
EDIT: Looking over the example images, this could be a useful tool purely in a comparative sense; since it has a fairly large number of different things to compare character backgrounds. The Overwatch characters in the example have fairly low differences in the ‘Socioeconomic Backgrounds’ so looking into a character design that is different from the general middle to high class of the 29 examples could be used as a starting point.
It’s one of those things where the numbers exist because they have to exist for a graph to work, but they paradoxically don’t work for the graph itself.
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Kinda shows their approach to storytelling through. Because you’d think you could just, ya know, remember what characters are in it. Kind of a foundational part of a narrative.
And this is just a robotic way to try to do representation. Is it really THAT HARD to go;
“Ya know seeing as this is set on a version of Earth, maybe we could try to do a Southeast Asian character. Ya just don’t see too many Cambodian super heroes. Let’s make some phone calls. I’m we could find some cultural experts and creatives who could help us make a well rounded, authentic feeling character”
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Reading the backpedal part of the article is hilarious.
“People inferred the correct application of the tool, but because we didn’t explain why being Arab or Egyptian earned a 7 we’re going to now pretend they don’t understand the aggregate scoring that they plainly understood the implications of. Also, the teams that were using this tool aren’t using it and we probably lied about positive internal reception and definitely lied about ubiquitous usage in the immediate future.”
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bit of a pet peeve, but aggregate implies adding multiple things for the score, not arbitrarily assigning numbers.
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In all honestly something like this is only going to be divisive and discriminating.
For example why does being Arab only merit a 7 (as mentioned in the OP)? “Whose call was that and how much do they dislike Arabs to rate them only a 7?” We can nitpick every score that way and they have no real defense for it.
Any low score also reveals all their discriminations. “They must dislike that/them to rate them so poorly.” Every score, positive or negative gets to come under judgement.
It also wholesale abandons the concept of everyone being equal. Blatantly abandons it because you are handing out scores which by its very existence means you don’t look at the various things/people being judged as equal.
I guess they are still throwing noodles at the wall to see if something will stick.
King’s main revenue stream was originally mobile games, which are very statistics driven. People and customers are treated far more as mere data streams because the nature of mobile games is to hijack the brain via Skinner Box methods while cutting as many costs as possible. Quality and any sort of engagement with social concepts falls entirely by the wayside as everything is reduced down to the most basic cost versus profit stats.
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if this originated with them, at all.
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Who is ‘everyone’? This is outright stated as a character conception tool, nothing more.
Any one the character conception system evaluates.
I’m guessing they count the amount of characters of x ethnicity. Like if there are more black characters than say Asians, then maybe black gets a lower score.
Why is this in the story forum?