Actvision Blizzard decides to “improve” diversity in their games by quantifying things like ethnicity, culture and sexual orientation.

Just another, sadly unsurprising step in Blizzard’s long, long journey of promising a more diverse respesentation followed by more sexism and tokenism every time.

If you don’t see what’s wrong with that picture, please stop to ask youself how you’d represent something like ethnicity or gender on a numeric scale. And what would 0 on that scale be.

Thankfully, most of the fandom and media seems to react to this idea with well-deserved bewilderment and mockery (like comparisons to phrenology, a racist pseudoscience). Also with obligatory mentions of how this does the opposite of improving the company’s image in the light of their bigoted, toxic work culture and corrupt business practices.

Moreover, despite now edited-out claims in the official announcement about the diversity tool, Overwatch 2 developers deny using it or even knowing about it prior to the media buzz.

If we could put a number on how out of touch this is, ActiBlizz PR would score off their little dystopian charts!

But hey, it’s not like we’ve been pointing out for years that Blizz seems to do diversity by begrudgingly ticking off boxes on a list of superficial character features (and only after ticking some boxes multiple times),right?

~Ozzie

Media reporting on the matter:

• Activision Inexplicably Introduces Tool to Rate Character Diversity Metrics - FanByte
• Activision Blizzard Discusses Tool to Calculate Diversity in Video Game Characters, May Also Be Investing in Lab Coats - The Mary Sue
• Activision Blizzard’s New Diversity Game Tool Comes Across Terribly&Activision Blizzard’s Diversity Tool Has A Long, Even More Embarrassing History -Kotaku
• Activision’s “Diversity Tool” Is F*cking Awful - The Jimquisition (video)