WoW Alters Its Character Creation System to Add Diversity

Furnished content.


For some years, we have been banging the drum repeatedly pointing out that video games need to be viewed through the lens of artwork. There a variety of headwinds in solidifying this stance, but they mostly revolve around older generations repeating the sins of their forefathers in declaring any art they aren't "in to" to not be art at all. And, yet, thinking about this for ten seconds will reveal just how silly that is. Video games include elements of drawing, storytelling, creative modeling, and music. Any one of those is most certainly art in and of themselves, yet combining them to make something entertaining somehow throws a lot of people for a loop. And, yet, we see revolutionaries turning to games these days to make compelling artwork, while museums have already begun curating the output of this relatively young industry.And once we accept that video games are a form of art, it follows that the flow of culture and society will influence that art. That's the way it's always been. Art is a mirror held up to society. And one of the glaring flaws in that mirror image in gaming has, for a long time, been the multi-faceted lack of diversity in both the industry and the games themselves.

One of Nintendo's recent games, Fire Emblem: Three Houses has some downright insulting LGBTQ+ interactions, which is rife through the series dating back to Fire Emblem: Awakening in 2012. In Three Houses, your male or female avatar can romance other characters of the same gender, yes, but throughout the franchise, the LGBT options have been extremely limited and mostly amount to nothing more than platonic 'special friendships'.Consider as well, characters like Cal Kestis from Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, who are seemingly considered the norm. Respawn could have meaningfully designed Kestis as literally anything other than just one more white male protagonist. The reason behind his design? Respawn has said it thought about having either an alien or female protagonist, but Kestis was ultimately used because they didn't want to “alienate” the player.

Last weekend, Guerilla Collective – something of an alternative to E3 following its cancellation due to coronavirus – held dedicated broadcasts focusing entirely on Black video game studios, which make games with Black protagonists.Among those featured were the likes DecoyGames, Gameheads, Waking Oni Games, and Jesse Wright, among several others.This is, of course, a step in the right direction and only helps spark further conversations about why video games themselves are so white, and why games with people of colour as a starring role are seldom found.

Shadowlands will also bring the ability to make changes to a character’s gender on the fly. As reported in Eurogamer, Blizzard intends to make gender changes free in Shadowlands. Before, one could customize face, skin color, hair, and eye color for a nominal sum of gold in one of the game’s many barber shops. Changing a character’s gender, though, required paying real money to do. “We felt like that’s not the right message,” according to WoW executive producer John Hight. “Unfortunately we can’t fix that right now,” he told Eurogamer. “But it is our intent with Shadowlands to take that out of being a paid service thing and [put it] in the barber shop.”The changes and additions being made to Warcraft’s character creator seem to reflect a broader push for more diversity in the game. This initiative goes beyond the start screen and delves into the world of Azeroth itself. “We are planning on broadly incorporating the range of character customizations for NPCs just across the world,” said WoW game director Ion Hazzikostas during an event yesterday. “Walking through Stormwind, walking around other parts of the world, you will see guards and random civilians that have these looks as if they’ve been there all along. Frankly I think we see this as correcting an oversight on our part over the years. [We’re] trying to improve representation more broadly.”

Character creation is so important because, in games like WoW, it’s the only way we’re able to express our individuality as humans. We tell a bit of our stories in the flesh and fur and bone we shape to our liking. The story of World of Warcraft is one you experience. Sure, your actions drive the plot, but the story is largely not your own. This character creator and the other changes the development team are making allow the player a far greater ability to tell their own, personal, story.

0 comments, click here to add the first

Understanding The 'Splinternet'

Furnished content.


In recent years, technologists have coined the phrase “splinternet” to describe the internet’s supposed evolution from a unified, borderless realm into a fragmented set of parallel internets, divided by national borders.This assumes that the internet was, at one point, global in some meaningful sense. But the reality has always been more complex. From the stark digital divide for students during COVID-19 to Western companies enacting overly broad regional blocking in the name of “security,” the digital world never floated freely on a flat plane, untethered from political and geographical boundaries.Yet, talk of a splinternet points to an important question: will the internet be more like one world (with some bumps along the way), or will it have semi-permeable borders that are tricky and expensive — perhaps even impossible — to cross?To know whether (or how) the internet is becoming more fragmented first requires reliable methods for measuring internet fragmentation. The Daylight Security Research Lab has been working on this challenge for over a year with UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.The internet is not a singular technology. It’s an ensemble, cobbled together from a variety of complementary tools and protocols. Each protocol sits on top of the one beneath it, creating "layers" of technologies that, together, we colloquially call “the internet.” In a recent column in the New York Times, for example, Shira Ovide describes fragmentation among companies providing digital services in India. This competition happens at the "content layer," which hosts the applications we interact with.But this content layer locality is only one dimension of fragmentation. “Below” this layer, IPv6, an upgraded internet protocol system — the basic addressing system that allows computers to connect to the internet — rolls out unequally across the world. As older IPv4 addresses (in the style of 127.0.0.1) become increasingly scarce, internet outages could hit countries with low IPv6 penetration. Upgrading to IPv6 requires private- and, in some cases, public-sector investment so this divided access to the internet will break along lines of wealth.“Above” these technical layers, regulations like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Russian data locality laws fragment the internet at the "legal" or "social" layer. Russia’s laws require data about Russians to be stored in Russia and have enabled the Putin regime to disconnect from the wider internet as part of a “preparedness” drill. However, the GDPR has yielded a more subtle, bureaucratic flavor of fragmentation. As of 2018, about a third of major U.S. news sources blocked visitors from Europe to avoid GDPR regulations. While the policy merits of the GDPR can be debated, the regulation has undeniably made national borders matter more for the way data flows throughout the world.Fragmentation can come at any layer of the internet stack. To capture this multifaceted reality, the Daylight Security Research Lab built a dataset to measure internet fragmentation through proxy measures based on four different layers of this stack.Rather than revealing a world moving in one direction from "global" to "fragmented," the research reveals a more complex reality. Internet governance decisions produce diverse types of fragmentation. Some countries may have lots of data locality laws, while their content-layer patterns align with global norms. Other countries may exhibit the opposite pattern.Across the five layers of the stack, the research mapped these fragmentation profiles with surprising results. On the one hand, countries expected to be different were surprisingly similar. Ask what Norway has in common with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Bahrain, and someone might guess, “aside from oil, not much.” However, these very different countries have very similar, country-specific browsing habits, degrees of network non-neutrality (e.g., government or ISP interference) and work on similar infrastructures. While the specific browsing habits are almost certainly different between Norway and Saudi Arabia, the way in which they are different from the supposedly “global” internet is itself similar.On the other hand, similar countries can have a surprisingly different internet. Per popular imagination and some recent reports, China’s model of the internet — one in which blocking is pervasive and centralized— has set a precedent that other Belt & Road countries, like Laos and Indonesia, are following. But the data challenges that assumption. In fact, China stands out from all of the seven Belt & Road countries that were analyzed. China has more data locality laws, a higher degree of content layer locality and significantly higher observed network interference.As the shape of internet governance changes, barriers and enablers to using these services shift as well. It becomes easier to carry out speech, commerce and other digital activities in “blocs” of interoperability, and harder to move across the borders between those blocs. For an app starting today in the United States, it may be easier to block users from EU countries than to learn about and comply with EU regulation. Imagining this small-scale conflict playing out on a larger scale, regulations can (and do) produce fundamentally different experiences on the internet.In the meantime, as you read anecdotes claiming the internet is becoming one way or another, or that changes have some good or bad effect, remember the eternal truth about any complex system: it's complicated.What are we to make of the weird parallels between Norway and Bahrain? And what does this multifaceted reality mean for businesses or policymakers? Our ability to answer these questions is limited by our lack of a common language for discussing the phenomena. To know what’s down the road for the web, we first need to measure it.Nick Merrill directs the Daylight Security Research Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. His research is focused on identifying potential harms of technology, and to help others do the same.

Read more here

0 comments, click here to add the first