Written by Shawn Gao 2022 Cohort
What has to be acknowledged is that with the popularity of video games, more and more developers are beginning to shift from traditional white roles to focus on minorities and minority groups. This trend not only happened in emerging cultural industries such as video games but also proliferated in traditional digital media industries such as film production.
In the games released in recent years, we see that political correctness is gradually becoming a significant production guide for the entertainment industry in Europe and the United States. The reason behind this is attributed to the fact that there seems to be a growing consensus in society to focus on people of different colours who were once ignored, as well as sexual minorities.
On May 12 of this year, Activision Blizzard published a blog post titled “King’s Diversity Space Tool: A Leap Forward in Gaming Inclusivity.” In this blog post, they introduced software for identifying and quantifying the level of diversity in game character design. The software visually quantifies attributes such as character gender, character orientation, and personality type, identifying stereotypes and characters with stereotypes in different genres of work while helping creatives look more closely at their designs to create more out-of-the-box characters that “better represent women, non-binary people, and other underrepresented minority groups in the industry groups.”
In short, this “diversity tool” will score how “politically correct” the character design is. Yet the software’s criteria for achieving diversity across groups are unclear. Assuming that a score of 0 is the baseline for “least politically correct” as designated by the software, what is the “most politically correct” score of 10 for the race, gender and sexual orientation? Why don’t women get a passing grade, and heterosexuality is worth nothing? How should the characters of Bastion, Winston and Hammond in Overwatch be rated? After the blog post, the diversity tool was criticized on social media for “using racism to overcome racism.” While scores can lead to superiority and inferiority, dividing superiority and inferiority on sensitive issues such as culture, race, gender, and sexual orientation is the antithesis of diversity, equality and inclusion from the start.