Recently, Activision Blizzard's official twitter announced the launch of the newly developed game character diversity detection tool, so that the character design process can avoid symbolism, stereotypes and discrimination in a more practical way. Blizzard officials said that King mobile game studio began to develop the project as early as 2016 to prevent unconscious bias and discrimination when creating games and characters.
The MIT game lab and king then worked together to turn the ideas into tangible software that monitors the process of character conception and creation, studying all the basic elements such as gender, body shape, characters ("Heroes" and "villains") and even subtle factors such as posture or body movements that can reflect the diversity of characters.
Blizzard official said: "the tool can raise these important questions as early as possible from the character conception stage, so as to make the game characters more representative." Jacqueline chomatas, project manager of the tool, said: "this tool can help determine the diversity of a set of character characteristics, and in the process, the tool can also find problems such as unconscious bias."
