cross-posted from: https://yall.theatl.social/post/3229309
From the Atlanta Daily World:
In a surprising yet increasingly common move, Microsoft has quietly dismantled its team dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The decision, communicated via email to the affected employees on July 1, cited “changing business needs” as the reason for the layoffs. While the exact number of employees impacted remains unclear, the team’s lead didn’t … Continued
The post Microsoft Says Bye-Bye DEI, Joins Growing List Of Corporations Dismantling Diversity Teams appeared first on Atlanta Daily World.
Remasters that remove characters or stages because they’re “problematic content”, redesigns of familiar characters that remove their sex appeal because feminity in and of itself is somehow misogynistic (seriously I’m a lady just wants to play a beautiful woman in my escapist fantasies, ya know cause it’s MY fantasy and we all wanna be more attractive?), risque humor no longer being allowed, localizations that remove or change dialogue seen as sexist (Even if it’s villain dialogue, or done to show that a specific character has flaws that include outdated views), the terms “Male and Female” are now “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” (Look I’m trans, non-binary identity is more common, I get it… but… this feels more patronizing than inclusive…)
Lots of shit like that… and as a gamer it is quite frankly embarrassing. Games are a form of art, and we should not apologize for art.
Btw, I know the Body Type A/B thing sounds pedantic, but it really just feels like trying too hard yet not hard enough… If it’s really too offensive to just have a drop down menu that says “MALE or FEMALE” in current year, just have a character creator that lets me pick masculine/feminine/androgynous traits from menus and ask for my pronouns at the end. That’d be a much better solution (and was fucking awesome when Cyberpunk 2077 did it)
A lot of games are very lazy and have two body types, an overly masculine buff guy (A) and a curvaceous lady (B), then ask if you want to be referred to as “He, She, or They”, while I understand They (Non-Binary individuals exist), can someone tell me who the fuck outside of a Right Wing troll trying (and failing) to be funny is going to pick the buff guy + the “she/her” pronouns?
It’s just one of those situations where I just wanna say “Your attempt at inclusion is so poor, I’d rather you just call me a slur at this point.”
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I had heard they were DEI mandates, if they weren’t then I am mistaken and apologize. But as far as I’m aware, this was mandated.
So if you have proof it was a decision of the devs themselves, I’d love to see it.
Do you have proof yourself? You started the whole debate.
Um. I think there are some kinds we should apologize for. I’m sure you could imagine the kind of hypothetical challenge I might put forward.
But that said, it sounds like your concern is more about that sort of rainbow capitalism / design by committee flavor that would balk at, say, Bayonetta. I get that.
It reminds me of a story that… was it Contrapoints? told about how progressive people will sometimes do this thing where they’ve clocked you as probably trans or something, and they want to ask your pronouns, but they’ll do it by having everyone sit down in a circle and share theirs one at a time, which makes the whole thing very strange because everybody is staring and waiting for your turn to go.
Less conscientious people will be like “she looks like a woman… I’ll go with she.” They can guess wrong, of course, but the casualness of it can also be really freeing in its own way.
A thing I’m not sure about, though: while some of the ideas put forward by these well-meaning but oblivious people might be kind of cringe, I don’t know that they haven’t affected anything positive. Rainbow Six Siege sells the shit out of its diversity characters to an almost distracting degree, but still, I think it’s kind of nice.
So, I guess my hope is not that DEI committees get disbanded, that seems kind of bad, but that the right people get involved in them. Hold back the busybodies when they get too sex-repressed, maybe.
God that brings my blood to a boil, I sadly have seen plenty of neo-liberal nonsense, it doesn’t do people like me favors, it just radicalizes people into thinking my existence is a “distraction”
Fuck Rainbow Capitalism