As this blog post evolved, it became more of an advocacy for news literacy and knowledge of basic research methods. But a title that accuses a highly scrutinized and immensely popular video game company of wrong-doing so much catchier than “intro to nominal and ordinal variables?”
So I went to grad school to create qualitative research. From the very beginning, as early as the application process, I hoped to publish a thesis that explored how community gardeners felt about their gardening spaces and globalized food production systems. I wanted to gather data through observations and interviews and advocate for food-growing spaces.
Though I never experienced it myself (my department was very supportive), I was routinely informed that the space for qualitative research was far smaller than the space allotted for quantitative research in mainstream academia and policy-making.
So where was my research going to fit in? In an increasingly data-driven world, was my “thoughts-feelings-meanings” data going to matter to anyone?
But this week, memories of knowledge obtained in my research methods courses have been flooding back due to an unlikely source: Activision Blizzard’s Twitter feed.
Activision Blizzard, one of the largest video game media companies in the world, deleted this tweet a day after posting:
Though the original was deleted, here’s the apology tweet and replies critical of the Diversity Tool.
And here’s a link to the original blog post on Activision Blizzard’s website.
So this “tool” is supposed to be “a leap forward in inclusion” and is “a tangible way of avoiding tokenism, stereotypes, and inclusion.” The now-deleted tweet is presented in a way that suggests they actively use this tool in their development process. But they removed the tweet, apologized for ever posting it, and said that they, in fact, do not use this tool. But how does the tool work, assuming that they do use it?
It looks like there are 7 identity attributes that every character in their games has mapped: culture, ethnicity, age, ability, body type, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Each character’s map will have a different shape. And I’m guessing that the goal is to create a character whose shape does not yet exist in the Activision Blizzard library of characters.
Now, at first glance, I was horrified, and many others on the internet also seemed to be. I can only imagine a board room full of white guys in suits spinning an unironically named Wheel of Identities to design their next great side character.
But let’s dig a little deeper and become a little (just a little) less horrified.
I am not an active tweeter, but I’ve been under the impression that the loudest and most polarizing voices get the most attention, and are therefore pushed to be seen by more eyes. And the criticism for this tweet was no exception. The Tweet replies that were pushed toward my eyeballs fell into two categories: 1) “Who cares about diversity, just make good games again,” and 2) “Stop trying to quantify identity and just hire more diverse teams, and then the stories and characters will come through.”
To the first group, who claims that diversity of teams and characters does not matter: fuck off, respectfully. I’m not here to prove to you the importance of identity representation in media today. That mission is being taken up by many scholars and writers for decades. If you’re not on board with the importance of identity representation, there are only three possibilities. You’re either consciously avoiding the literature, your identities are already represented in media, or you’re overtly bigoted. You tell me.
And to the point of “just make good games again,” I cannot speak deeply. I’m a casual gamer, at best. The last Activision title I played was the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater remake, which has a Metacritic score of 88/100; the only Blizzard title I ever sunk time into was Overwatch, a title that won numerous Game of the Year Awards and has a Metacritic score of 91/100. I’m a poor judge of what their library is/was.
But to the second group, who was horrified at the creation and implementation of a tool that attempts to quantify identities, I get it. It appears that the company is ranking some cultures/ethnicities/ages/genders/etc as better or worse than others. I assure you, they are not. It appears that they are getting some kind of diversity quota in their character-creation process, and, well, they probably are, to some capacity. But here’s my reasoning.
As a disclaimer, this is by no means a defense of Activision Blizzard. They’ve had their controversies. And I’m not on the payroll of employees who have opinions on how multibillion-dollar companies are supposed to convey the identity diversity of their characters. But we gotta have a quick lesson in research methods, my friends.
With just this basic, day-one understanding of research methods, many of the folks upset at Activision Blizzard over this diversity tool would not be.
I took at least four semester-long college courses dedicated to sociology research methods. But on day one of all of them, students were served a refresher course on identifying the characteristics of variables (exciting shit, am I right?)
I don’t want to lose anyone’s attention in a sea of jargon. Those who get turned on by research methods must be in a pretty exclusive club. But you want to solve a research question, you collect data. And that data, the independent variables, can be described as nominal, ordinal, or interval.
A nominal variable is one that has two or more responses, but they cannot be placed into any particular order. The responses to a yes/no question are nominal because it doesn’t matter what order “yes” and “no” are in. A survey question that asks for blood type, gender, or political party would provide nominal data. There is no natural order, no ranking.
When I was taught nominal variables, I was given a pneumonic device that connects “nominal” with “name.” We’re just naming the data point.
Ordinal variables are responses that have a discernable order. Responses for economic class status (poor, middle class, upper-middle-class, wealthy) or education the respondent has completed (high school, some college, bachelor’s degree, doctoral degree) are examples of ordinal variables.
And finally, interval variables are also placed in order, but the value between each response is equal. Years of education completed could be worded in a way that it is also an interval variable (12, 13, 14, 15 years completed, etc.). The difference here is that each response is equally distant from the responses before and after it.
If you just need more on variables, here’s a bit from UCLA, you fuckin weirdo.
But let’s bring it back to Activision-Blizzard’s tweet last month. They have a research question: how do we increase diversity in our character library while still avoiding tokenism and stereotypes? And the team there decided that was to survey the identity attributes of past and future characters.
With just this basic, day-one understanding of research methods, many of the folks upset at Activision Blizzard over this diversity tool would not be.
The responses like the one above completely miss the mark. In no way was Activision Blizzard ranking cultures, genders, ages, or body types. If those questions appeared on a survey, there is no logical order in which they could be defined by.
But I get the feeling that this is what happens when quantitative research methods are used to solve qualitative problems. This big tech company, whose motive is profit (not diversity) used the knowledge they specialize in to make a product that produces profit. And it appears to have backfired on a grand scale, for one day in the Twitter News Cycle at least.
What are your thoughts on companies using these kinds of methods and tools to increase character diversity? Is this the best way to go about it? Drop your thoughts in the comments.
And thanks again for letting me Overshare.
Alex Francisco
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