Overwatch creators explain they didn't use King's 'creepy' diversity charts
On May 12, the Activision Blizzard newsroom published a blog post titled King's diversity space tool: a leap forward for inclusion in gaming. It explained that King, the Candy Crush developer acquired by Activision Blizzard in 2016, had been working since that year alongside the MIT Game Lab to make software that would «create and monitor guidelines for character conception and creation» to identify how diverse a set of character designs are.
This software, called Diversity Space Tool, was demonstrated with radar graphs showing breakdowns of the attributes of characters from Overwatch, in particular Ana, who was apparently given scores of 7 out of 10 for culture, race, and age, but 0 for body type and sexual orientation.
The post explained the Diversity Space Tool had been «tested by developer teams working on Call of Duty: Vanguard», with Alayna Cole of Sledgehammer Games quoted saying, «we're going to use that data going forward into the next games that we're working on». The post then claimed, «The Overwatch 2 team at Blizzard has also had a chance to experiment with the tool, with equally enthusiastic first impressions.»
The Diversity Space Tool was widely criticized online, with many pointing out the bureaucratic oddity of "creating a tool when you could just hire diverse designers and listen to them". It's also a bizarre way of going about it, instantly raising a lot of questions. The scale has as its zero-point the typical middle-class white cis male videogame protagonist, but how exactly do you score something like 'race' out of 10? Is someone at King using a color chart to measure exactly how dark characters' skin tones are? Where do Overwatch's robot and hamster characters fit on these scales exactly? Who
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