Over the weekend, Blizzard – once again – had to endure a shitstorm. This time the reason was a bizarre system to quantify the diversity of video game characters. After outsiders as well as Blizzard’s developers distanced themselves from the ranking tool, a statement follows.
One controversy follows the next
Famous video games were once considered Blizzard’s widest-reaching product, but in recent years there have been scandals in the first place. The publisher seems to leave no stone unturned: Even before the pandemic, Blizzard was caught in the crossfire during the Hong Kong protests, followed by several sexism scandals, a wave of resignations, and most recently, a debate about unions at the end of 2021. The fact that there were a lot of disappointing new launches and postponements in between all that is almost lost.
The latest controversy now revolves around a seemingly absurd diversity ranking tool that developers can use to categorize video game characters in terms of their diversity. Blizzard introduced the tool via a blog entry, but the original wording and images are now only available via Wayback Machine.
Blizzard awards points for race and gender
Blizzard’s own goal may even be laudable. According to the blog entry, the goal is to ensure that every player can identify with the characters of a video game – and that said characters should therefore not only consist of young white men with brown hair and a trained body. Blizzard, on the other hand, wants to systematically ensure that it always offers a diverse plurality of playable characters.
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”. […]. Once it establishes a baseline for typical character traits […]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.
Blizzard’s original blog entry
However, the actual implementation reads as a catalyst for numerous controversies. The blog entry states that the Diversity Tool can be used to determine how diverse a particular character is on a scale of 1 to 10, based on ten criteria: Culture, Race, Age, Cognitive Ability, Physical Ability, Body Type, Beauty, Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation, and Socioeconomic Background. In practice, this means that the tool assigns a score to different ethnicities, cultures or sexual orientations. The higher, the more diverse a character is positioned in the discipline.
In a screenshot, Overwatch’s support heroine Ana is dissected in this way as an example. In terms of the diversity of her culture, the Egyptian scores well, and also for her “Arab race” [sic!] and high age, there are many points. Since Ana has only one functioning eye, there is a mediocre score in physical abilities. On the other hand, her slim body shape, her heterosexuality and her beauty are not diverse. However, the fact that she is a woman is still acknowledged with five points.
Criticism hails – also from employees
The fact that Blizzard therefore not only creates a ranking of character diversity, but also a ranking of the value of individual ethnicities or cultures, caused plenty of uproar over the weekend. Especially on Twitter, numerous players were shocked, angered, or simply disappointed. Among them were Blizzard employees, such as an Overwatch developer.
God I swear our own company tries so hard to slaughter any good will the actual devs who make the game have built
Overwatch doesn’t even use this creepy distopian chart, our writers have eyes. The artists: have eyes. Producers, directors, etc, as far as I know also all have eyes https://t.co/WEMRf8QmBu
– melissa kelly