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«This has been such a punch to the gut for us.»
This software, called Diversity Space Tool, was demonstrated with radar graphs showing breakdowns of the attributes of characters from Overwatch, in particular Ana, who was apparently given scores of 7 out of 10 for culture, race, and age, but 0 for body type and sexual orientation.
The Diversity Space Tool was widely criticized online, with many pointing out the bureaucratic oddity of «creating a tool when you could just hire diverse designers and listen to them«. It’s also a bizarre way of going about it, instantly raising a lot of questions. The scale has as its zero-point the typical middle-class white cis male videogame protagonist, but how exactly do you score something like ‘race’ out of 10? Is someone at King using a color chart to measure exactly how dark characters’ skin tones are? Where do Overwatch’s robot and hamster characters fit on these scales exactly? Who needs a mathematical breakdown to point out Overwatch didn’t have any Black women in its roster at launch?
An update on May 13 tried to address some of the criticism, adding an editor’s note explaining «the Diversity Space Tool–currently in beta–was designed as an optional supplement to the hard work and focus our teams already place on telling diverse stories with diverse characters, but decisions regarding in-game content have been and will always be driven by development teams.» The update also removed the graphics (which I saved and have embedded in this article), and any mention of Call of Duty: Vanguard or Overwatch.
Overwatch character artist Melissa Kelly also commented on the post, saying, «God I swear our own company tries so hard to slaughter any good will the actual devs who make the game have built» and «Overwatch doesn’t even use this creepy distopian [sic] chart, our writers have eyes. The artists: have eyes. Producers, directors, etc, as far as I know also all have eyes».
Apparently the galaxy-brain corporate response to this complaint was to spend six years working on a program that farts out radar charts measuring how mathematically progressive a game’s cast is, then crow about it on the internet without even running it by the people making the game whose characters were borrowed to demonstrate how great it is.
Jody’s first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia’s first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He’s written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody’s first article for PC Gamer was published in 2015, he edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and actually did play every Warhammer videogame.
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