LogFAQs > #965153080

NeatoAnAccount posted...

i think that a diversity tracking tool for an ensemble cast of 3d models is fine because it's an easy way to generate extra ideas and avoid accidentally getting homogenous, which is different from a tool that tracks the diversity of the employees and gets mad whenever you've hired too many white people, but that's just my opinion. what do you guys think?

In the general sense it's not a bad thing, but this tool as it's been shown seems flawed. First because it assigns numerical values to different identities to rank them by which one is "most diverse" feels very close to phrenology & bioessentialism, and also could still lead to a lack of representation among identities that are ranked lower. Like the screenshots shown say that a white character scores 0 Race, but an Arab character scores 7. My understanding is that a Black character would be somewhere in between those two, so this tool would consider it "more diverse" to always make characters Arab and never Black.

Secondly, the way it's set up places greater emphasis on the highest scoring identity in a category, rather than a breakdown of how frequently a given identity appears in that category. Going back to the example of a white character getting 0 in Race and an Arab character getting 7, they could have all support characters in Overwatch be white, and then add one Arab character, and suddenly support characters go from 0 to 7. That's the definition of tokenism, which this tool is supposed to prevent.

It also isn't very useful to prevent homogeneity, as long as it's not homogenized on low-scoring identities. Like making all healers female would score higher than having a mix of genders, even though that's not actually diverse at all and in fact feeds into a stereotype.

A better tool would just be to track the facets of each character's identity & gameplay role, and then be able to view a breakdown of how different categories intersect, i.e., what's the breakdown of race among DPS characters, gender among elderly characters, body type among female characters, etc. The push to metricize everything is what makes this tool weird.