talking about FFXVI and hollow corporate diversity
our holding company has been pushing the diversity consultants on us, and this stuff is so performative for every party involved. telling a bunch of middle-aged white dudes the usual corporate diversity platitudes, while making no moves to affect the makeup of these studios and the sorts of games they make, is going to accomplish nothing beyond the sorts of tokenized representation that's becoming more common in the increasingly homogenized AAA space
this is such a thorny subject to talk about without coming off as dismissive, but when I see conversations about something like FFXVI not having any characters of color, I wince a little thinking about all the big prestige games recently that fulfill a burger king kid's club rainbow of representation while still being primarily stories by white dudes with distinctly white dude sensibilities
here's a blunt question: do you think that the last of us 2 having a prominent lesbian romance and a trans main character will cause even a single queer person to wanna work in the AAA games industry? I'm going to say "absolutely not," because those types of people are making way more interesting stuff in the indie space, often with much truer depictions of queerness in their stories. they are not interested in making Tentpole Franchise Game 4
it's worth bringing up when like witcher 3 or FFXVI don't have any non-white people in them because it's just weird and generally ahistorical with their european-inspired backdrops. but something about the suggestion that these are malicious decisions doesn't sit right with me. it makes me wonder if the ultimate goal is just that every big game ticks a few diversity boxes while the actual development staff have no one of those represented demographics
corporate won't take the drastic measures of diversity hiring initiatives and putting non-white non-hetero non-cis neurodivergent people who aren't interested in making the same mainstream junk that sells 20 million copies into leadership roles. that's a future I'd actually like to see, but the reality is that gears of war 8 and uncharted 6 will have the same staff makeup while making the main character a bisexual black woman, then find the most normcore minority in the company to say "it feels great to be part of this company :)" in front of a camera
projects led or primarily made by people of other backgrounds will interest me far, far more than seeing some some NPC in horizon 6 with "Wow I Love My Gay Husband" dialogue lines. I feel like I'm toeing a line really close to saying diversity doesn't matter, when I'm specifically trying to say corporate diversity does not matter