Leaked Internal Blizzard Memo: "Global Diversity And Inclusion Initiative" - Sensationalist Headlines

[QUOTE=Mentlegen;52561025]A lot of people are saying they don't understand how "diversity" would effect the making of a game and that they should just hire good people. I get what you're saying but you don't seem to get what they're saying. Gaming is dominated predominantly by white men that are overrepresented in literally everything. It's a lot harder for women and minorities to get into fields like game design because of bias that leans more heavily towards white men. Women in the gaming industry often get heavily harassed by men within the company and men outside of it. It puts a gigantic pressure on them to outperform and their mistakes get them ostracized. A lot of leading female designers have dropped out of the field based purely on the treatment they get as a woman. Minorities also have a much harder time being represented because of racial bias, which leads to them suffering similar treatment. God help you if you're a female minority even because you're just at the bottom of the shitpile. This is moreso a program to fix it's inner structure to remove these horrible biased ideas that shut out women and minorities in favor of white men who get treated like their fairly mediocre work is amazing while these women and minorities have their amazing work get treated mediocrely. Also genuine diversity leads to a lot more creativity and ideas because you have different people from a bunch of backgrounds working on a project instead of a bunch of white dudes. Let's say a game project has some racial undertones in an attempt to show something wrong with how minorities are treated in America. A group of mostly white men can try to understand this concept and pull it off but in the end they'll usually end up with something shallow and stereotyped. A good example is Bioshock Infinite, which tried to show this but failed miserably with a shallow attempt that didn't really matter and was quickly abandoned. A group of more equally diverse people would have greater insight into how to do this. Minorities could show it through their own work and creativity and their colleague's will benefit from the interaction and learn from the greater pool of experience they have access to. tldr; it's a really good thing to do because it makes your games better through more diverse experience and helps people that arent represented in the field [/QUOTE] You don't need a woman writer to write a believable story about a woman. You don't need a black writer to write believable dialog that shows how minorities are treated. Hiring good writers would fix all of that. Maybe that good writer is a white male. Maybe it isn't. Giving jobs to women and minorities just for the sake of diversity won't necessarily make models, game design, music, or anything better. Hiring people with diverse [i]backgrounds[/i] can. Thinking that someone with a different skin color than you will necessarily bring different insights to various topics [b]is[/b] racist. Minorities are just like you on the inside. If their work is unique, it's not because of their skin color. Recognize talent for what it is and just hire people for their talent, no matter their skin color or gender.

[QUOTE=Mentlegen;52561025]A lot of people are saying they don't understand how "diversity" would effect the making of a game and that they should just hire good people. I get what you're saying but you don't seem to get what they're saying. Gaming is dominated predominantly by white men that are overrepresented in literally everything. It's a lot harder for women and minorities to get into fields like game design because of bias that leans more heavily towards white men. Women in the gaming industry often get heavily harassed by men within the company and men outside of it. It puts a gigantic pressure on them to outperform and their mistakes get them ostracized. A lot of leading female designers have dropped out of the field based purely on the treatment they get as a woman. Minorities also have a much harder time being represented because of racial bias, which leads to them suffering similar treatment. God help you if you're a female minority even because you're just at the bottom of the shitpile. This is moreso a program to fix it's inner structure to remove these horrible biased ideas that shut out women and minorities in favor of white men who get treated like their fairly mediocre work is amazing while these women and minorities have their amazing work get treated mediocrely. Also genuine diversity leads to a lot more creativity and ideas because you have different people from a bunch of backgrounds working on a project instead of a bunch of white dudes. Let's say a game project has some racial undertones in an attempt to show something wrong with how minorities are treated in America. A group of mostly white men can try to understand this concept and pull it off but in the end they'll usually end up with something shallow and stereotyped. A good example is Bioshock Infinite, which tried to show this but failed miserably with a shallow attempt that didn't really matter and was quickly abandoned. A group of more equally diverse people would have greater insight into how to do this. Minorities could show it through their own work and creativity and their colleague's will benefit from the interaction and learn from the greater pool of experience they have access to. tldr; it's a really good thing to do because it makes your games better through more diverse experience and helps people that arent represented in the field[/QUOTE] Doesnt that operate under the assumption that all individuals that could be classified under those terms automatically must have experienced those things?

[QUOTE=Snowmew;52560837]But that's the root of the problem here, these organizations don't pump out women and minorities in big enough numbers. You can't enforce diversity in employment when the qualified candidates aren't diverse in the first place. There's not waves of women and minorities going through education and training only to just not get hired. They're addressing the problem from the wrong end of the system. It begs the question where they're going to find these people in the first place without lowering their skill standards and overlooking more talented individuals who don't fit the diversity qualifications.[/QUOTE] While STEM fields certainly need earlier involvement and encouragement than this provides, it should also be noted that game development isn't just programming, especially with high content games like WoW or Overwatch. While speculation, there could be masses of artists, animators, and writers that haven't been exposed to doing those things in a game studio environment, or perhaps think that game development is just programming. I'd doubt Blizzard will have to lower their skill floor to hire people in those areas, as those areas certainly have a more diverse pool of educated individuals.

wouldn't it be cool if artists, writers, designers, developers etc were hired based on a semi-anonymous portfolio and resume with no ethnicity or gender attached.

[QUOTE=Mentlegen;52561025] tldr; it's a really good thing to do because it makes your games better through more diverse experience and helps people that arent represented in the field[/QUOTE] Obviously, different groups are massively discriminated against than others, but you shouldn't be looking at the fact that you have a bunch of X group as an immediate matter of no diversity. Being a member of a certain group doesn't necessarily mean you have lived a certain life style. Not all X people get the same shake. Tons of them are homosexuals and get it that way. Tons of them are Y people in a Y-minority country. There are also many of Z people that live in comfort, free of racism and all that. You can interchange the letters with white, jewish, female, black, it doesn't matter, it all applies pretty much in every possibly combination. Society is way more of a mixing pot than you think.

[QUOTE=AaronM202;52560980]Not knocking you but theres something about this train of thought that really kind of, i dunno, rubs me the wrong way, where the intent is for everyone no matter their background to be of equal standing and opportunity, which is good, but trying to fix it by going out of your way to look for people of that background specifically seems counter productive to the intended goal of nobody being judged by elements of their person that are outside of their control. Its still thinking of them as separate groups in a way, instead of individuals. I feel like its a situation where people keep trying to find an easy solution when there really isnt an easy solution.[/QUOTE] Yeah man I get that its just that the claim that everyone should be treated equally realistically has to deal with the more subtle and perhaps insidious ways in which they're not treated equally. Its an interventionist outlook sure but saying 'were all equal now' without addressing the subtle ways women and minorities are glossed over when it comes to hiring means that, for all intents and purposes, nothing of substance is really being done to ensure that equality exists. I agree it isn't an easy solution but I think Blizzard is doing something admirable by actually looking for ways to include both groups (without quotas) rather than pretending a problem doesnt exist

[QUOTE=TheServer;52560763]I wish big game companies hired creative people instead.[/QUOTE] I have argued about this in the Google memo leak thread. Fucking this. People should be welcomed on their merits, not arbitrary differences.

You can't expect a dynamic system to balance itself in finite time without applying corrective adjustment. It's well metered and understood there's too few women in the industries BECAUSE there's too few women in the industries. It's a self maintaining anomaly. Schools try to incentivize women? People bitch. Industry tries to incentivize woman workers? People bitch. If you speak out against corrective action, you aren't for equality, you're for status-quo.

[QUOTE=millan;52561300]You can't expect a dynamic system to balance itself in finite time without applying corrective adjustment.[/QUOTE] This is complete bullshit. Yes I can. It's called evolution

[QUOTE=millan;52561300] If you speak out against corrective action, you aren't for equality, you're for status-quo.[/QUOTE] Why does this always boil down to "If you're not with us, you're against us" kind of arguments?

[QUOTE=DatHarry;52561127]wouldn't it be cool if artists, writers, designers, developers etc were hired based on a semi-anonymous portfolio and resume with no ethnicity or gender attached.[/QUOTE] How would you interview them without doing a face2face meetup?

[QUOTE=DatHarry;52561127]wouldn't it be cool if artists, writers, designers, developers etc were hired based on a semi-anonymous portfolio and resume with no ethnicity or gender attached.[/QUOTE] [url=http://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact-%E2%80%9Cblind%E2%80%9D-auditions-female-musicians]Interestingly enough there are industries where they have introduced blind testing and it ended up with hiring fewer males[/url] At some point you do have to meet your employee, you can't hire someone without meeting them. Games development is an industry where people work together, you have to be sure someone will be a co-operative, positive addition to the team, and like it or not, people do treat eachother differently based on their gender, sex, ethnicity, nationality, etc (eg, assertive men are seen as leaderly, assertive women are seen as mean and bossy). Ideally we should be working to eliminate those prejudices, and one of the ways to do that is to assist people who [url=https://fullfact.org/economy/job-applicants-ethnic-minority-sounding-names-are-less-likely-be-called-interview/]are disadvantaged during the hiring processs[/url]

[QUOTE=Tetsmega;52561333]Why does this always boil down to "If you're not with us, you're against us" kind of arguments?[/QUOTE] Again, I have called this ironic tendency back in the Google memo thread. Most of people who push equality for women/minorities stand on a muck up of fascist ideology.

[QUOTE=Laserbeams;52561320]This is complete bullshit. Yes I can. It's called evolution[/QUOTE] ... okay this is wrong and stupid on so many levels I am not even sure where to begin. Firstly, evolution absolutely relies on corrective action, the one based on massive die-off and failure to reproduce within a majority of the participants with a mild statistical tendency to favour the better suited (but first and foremost, the lucky). This leads onto the second part; what kind of balance can you expect from evolution and is that what we want for ourselves? Evolution is a blind, random chance driven descent with really weak retroactive bias towards the locally, temporarily desirable advantages - we already understand principles like these fairly well, and well, even if you don't wanna get bogged down by something so fleeting as [I]morals[/I], it's fairly shit at getting stuff done. This isn't philosophy or pol-sci, this is pure, cold, [I]nature-driven[/I] maths. Biological evolution is very slow at adapting, very short sighted, with bad tendency of getting stuck on local optima. It's easy to get lost in admiring the current snapshot of what it achieved in all these fantastic lifeforms around us, but when you judge it critically and compare it to products of an analytical human mind, it's obvious how ineffective it is. We made it to another fucking space rock and back, and outside of soft fiction like Starship Troopers or Starcraft, there's no implication any "evolution based development" could ever achieve this. The evolved beauty around us is only so impressive because it's been literal aeons of trial and error. I can assure you you would hold evolution in a much lesser regard if you visited earth after one of the major extinction events when everything that's left is always roaches and rat like garbage and it's all very dumb, short lived and survives through outbreeding the risks. It's great to understand evolution, and it's great it got us to, uh, the starting point, but we've tossed the training wheels away. Natural selection won't push us further as a species. Thirdly, a "corrective action" ala evolution that would lead to the desired effect (social equality) would be historically most likely to come in a form you would hardly fucking like. Most likely? A major war breaking out, significant portion of the male populace dying or becoming unable to contribute, and the industry having no other choice but filling in with women. Outside of extreme cases like that? The gradient is facing the other way - if any person randomly ends up in the industry like that, their chances are better as a man than as a woman, if for no other reason then just because of how they are currently represented - researches have shown times and times again that the workforce dominated by some particular majority makes for an implicitly (not always, just, statistically significantly) hostile work environment for the minority. Seriously, you badly misunderstand social progress [B]as well as evolution.[/B] Please, don't post like this. [editline]11th August 2017[/editline] [QUOTE=Tetsmega;52561333]Why does this always boil down to "If you're not with us, you're against us" kind of arguments?[/QUOTE] Because sadly that's how it is. You either voice your support, your disagreement, or complacency. Considering the issue has proven itself to not be self correcting, complacency with the issue hampers correction. You can't opt out of having impact on the society unless you decide to, uh, not participate, living as a hermit. Which I would have absolutely no issue with whatsoever, but something tells me it's not an option for you.

[QUOTE=millan;52561373]A major war breaking out, significant portion of the male populace dying or becoming unable to contribute, and the industry having no other choice but filling in with women.[/QUOTE] This is literally what happened in the UK during the second world war, for the record

[QUOTE=Shibbey;52561380]This is literally what happened in the UK during the second world war, for the record[/QUOTE] Now you got me thinking, it's starting to make sense. The aggressive right wing will lead the world into a massive war to get a bunch of the white males killed, leading to social progress. How could I not see this before? :thinking:

Why is it shocking that minority groups make up a minority of the workforce? Isn't that why it's called a minority?

[QUOTE=PyroCF;52561404]Why is it shocking that minority groups make up a minority of the workforce? Isn't that why it's called a minority?[/QUOTE] *minority groups making up a disproportionally lesser minority of the workforce clear yet?

[QUOTE=millan;52561300]You can't expect a dynamic system to balance itself in finite time without applying corrective adjustment. It's well metered and understood there's too few women in the industries BECAUSE there's too few women in the industries. It's a self maintaining anomaly. Schools try to incentivize women? People bitch. Industry tries to incentivize woman workers? People bitch. If you speak out against corrective action, you aren't for equality, you're for status-quo.[/QUOTE] I'm sorry I'm apparently racist because I don't see race I guess

[QUOTE=jiggu;52561469]I'm sorry I'm apparently racist because I don't see race I guess[/QUOTE] No that doesn't make you racist, that just makes you socially regressive and ignorant.

In essence it doesn't really sound like a bad idea since they want to create more outreach, not force the recruitment of minorities via quotas. Even from a purely cynical standpoint, if you want to improve your chances at making a game that stands out you're going to want to extend your outreach to as many qualified employees as you can simply to make sure you don't miss out on some potential golden goose that would have normally flown under your radar. A lot of people will often turn down job opportunities, even ones they have the skills for, simply out of principle. It's a legitimate issue, at least in France, that plenty of women choose literary studies not because it's their domain of predilection but because they inherently ignore anything related to engineering since they consider it to be a man's job - there's a form of sexism in there but the fault doesn't lie in the job or the employer, it lies in the students/employees automatically gating themselves without much thought put into it. Things like Blizzard's initiative as well as Girls Who Code are designed primarily to make people second-guess themselves and help them explore lines of work they would have otherwise simply ignored and missed out on. Of course time will tell if this turns out to work out for Blizzard, but if they outreach to more qualified candidates, they're statistically more likely to find good employees. [QUOTE=DatHarry;52561127]wouldn't it be cool if artists, writers, designers, developers etc were hired based on a semi-anonymous portfolio and resume with no ethnicity or gender attached.[/QUOTE] Once again the problem lies within personal motivation. Some people have the talent, qualifications, etc, but will completely ignore job opportunities on principle. Stop thinking about who's hiring for a second and think about who's getting hired.

[QUOTE=aussiedropbear;52560870]They should care more about getting people who can actually do their job well, it doesn't matter what they look like/if they're some minority[/QUOTE] You do know that by saying this you're making the implication that women and minorities can't do the job as well as non-minority men, right? This is an HR/hiring-decision that eliminates personal biases in hiring when two candidates of equal skill are up for a position. [b]Edit:[/b] To clarify, I mean even if he didn't mean to make the implication, that [I]is [/I]what that [I]sounds [/I]like. Diversity in the workplace is a good thing - it allows for more nuanced work, more interesting ideas. In the context of game development you can get more interesting characters, environment and stories - something that isn't [I][URL="https://i.warosu.org/data/tg/img/0463/46/1459324141100.jpg"]more of the same[/URL].[/I]

[QUOTE=millan;52561478]No that doesn't make you racist, that just makes you socially regressive and ignorant.[/QUOTE] Not.giving fuck about race and looking past racial prejudices suddenly becomes ignorant? Wow. This is like a The Onion forum board, this must be satire.

[QUOTE=Paramud;52560958]How did the 1950's get an account on Facepunch?[/QUOTE] nice one. unfortunately for your narrative a LOT of women leave jobs for this very reason, shockingly enough in 2017. They don't want to look after a baby in a high work hours job, and if they can't cut back hours will quit and re enter workforce later. women are still stuck in the social construct in a majority of cases where they will have to do this sacrifice and not the men, it's not right but it is what it is. hopefully it will change in the future, but it has started changing already.

[QUOTE=Coyoteze;52561501]You do know that by saying this you're making the implication that women and minorities can't do the job as well as non-minority men, right? [/QUOTE] The fact that people think into this too much makes it sound incredibly insane. He didnt make any implications, or if he did, you can also argue he implied that merit and accomplishment is what matters in the job, not the persona behind it.

[QUOTE=J!NX;52560769]What he meant was that instead of choosing a worker purely because of gender/race, they should hire base on skill/talent[/QUOTE] yeah that's the whole point of this initiative

[QUOTE=CruelAddict;52561518]Not.giving fuck about race and looking past racial prejudices suddenly becomes ignorant? Wow. This is like a The Onion forum board, this must be satire.[/QUOTE] Seeing past prejudices and "not seeing race" implies something bit different?

[QUOTE=millan;52561300]You can't expect a dynamic system to balance itself in finite time without applying corrective adjustment. It's well metered and understood there's too few women in the industries BECAUSE there's too few women in the industries. It's a self maintaining anomaly. Schools try to incentivize women? People bitch. Industry tries to incentivize woman workers? People bitch. If you speak out against corrective action, you aren't for equality, you're for status-quo.[/QUOTE] Depends on your definition of "equality". You see equality as being equality of outcome, whereas I and many other see equality as equality of opportunity. I don't have to support this so called "corrective action" that tries to leverage certain people over others to support equality. I see the fact that not everyone has the same opportunity to become what they want to be troubling, not that we don't have a proportional split of the demographics in every work field.

[QUOTE=Coyoteze;52561501]You do know that by saying this you're making the implication that women and minorities can't do the job as well as non-minority men, right? This is an HR/hiring-decision that eliminates personal biases in hiring when two candidates of equal skill are up for a position. Diversity in the workplace is a good thing - it allows for more nuanced work, more interesting ideas. In the context of game development you can get more interesting characters, environment and stories - something that isn't [I][URL="https://i.warosu.org/data/tg/img/0463/46/1459324141100.jpg"]more of the same[/URL].[/I][/QUOTE] not really. how does hiring a say black person suddenly make it more interesting? it can be just the same, or even worse. theres absolutely no guarantee that your game will suddenly improve just because you suddenly hired 20 women or people of different ethnicities. just as theres no guarantee itll be good if you only had 50 white dudes working on it. race and gender are entirely irrelevant. its literally just down to skill and qualifications. if I hire Amy Hennig its because of her qualifications, not because shes a woman.

[QUOTE=Coyoteze;52561501]You do know that by saying this you're making the implication that women and minorities can't do the job as well as non-minority men, right? This is an HR/hiring-decision that eliminates personal biases in hiring when two candidates of equal skill are up for a position. Diversity in the workplace is a good thing - it allows for more nuanced work, more interesting ideas. In the context of game development you can get more interesting characters, environment and stories - something that isn't [I][URL="https://i.warosu.org/data/tg/img/0463/46/1459324141100.jpg"]more of the same[/URL].[/I][/QUOTE] How the fuck did I even imply that? I said it doesn't matter what they look like or what their traits are including if they're the majority or the minority, you should be hiring on their skill/talent not their traits. I really doubt most studios care who are, and more if you can get along with everyone and able to do your job well just like in most types of workplaces. Being diverse is completely fine. Also you say that like if the minority are more capable of coming up with interesting ideas, characters, environment or stories than the majority.