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Activision Blizzard King's Diversity Tool is a head-scratcher

13/05/2022 3Browse 0Like 0Comments
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Activision Blizzard King's Diversity Tool is a head-scratcher

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Activision Blizzard King's Diversity Tool is a head-scratcher

ABK revealed its internal Diversity Tool, which led to confusion and concern.

Over the past year or so, we’ve seen a lot of criticisms and allegations of sexual and racial discrimination come against Activision Blizzard King. The company has been trying to fix its public image, which led it to sharing an internal Diversity Tool that the company uses to create its characters. Unfortunately, that reveal is having the opposite effect.

Activision Blizzard King shared its Diversity Tool in a post to its website. Made in collaboration with MIT, the tool is used to create characters for video games that don’t fall into stereotypes or tokenism.

everyone is seeing the big header image on that actiblizz article, but it was looking at this bigger breakdown is what sent me into space pic.twitter.com/4U4ZKdVrUH

— austin walker (@austin_walker)

The idea of a “tool” to make characters more diverse and inclusive may seem a little hard to wrap your head around. In practice, it has to be more than just, say, a pop-up reminder that between 2017 and 2021 nearly 80% of the highest selling games in the world featured white, male protagonists (according to a study conducted by Diamond Lobby). It needs to become a part of the incubation process from the start, baked into the pipeline as an unmissable and consistent step - which is exactly what this tool was designed to be.

Where a lot of folks take issue with the tool is in its gamifying and numerical equating of what satisfies an arbitrary diversity quota. In the provided graphs, we see features like race, age, and gender identity as factors the company uses to determine how diverse a character is. There’s even a point scale based on different traits and attributes. A “slim + curvy” body type is worth zero points, while being Arab is worth seven.

abk diversity tool

It’s not hard to see why audiences are more than upset with ABK’s Diversity Tool. Developers and publishers are often criticized as seeing diversity as no more than a quota to be met, rather than something that should naturally happen through unbiased and non-discriminatory hiring practices. The news from Activision Blizzard King essentially reinforces all of those concerns.

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Last updated:13/05/2022

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