Michael Eriksson
A Swede in Germany
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Diversity and gaming

If we look at settings like online fantasy/role-playing games (or, e.g., the older “Dungeons and Dragons” games), there are clear advantages from diversity.

Why? Because this diversity goes hand in hand with different characters bringing different skills and strengths to a team, and with allowing a corresponding specialization. For instance, instead of having three near-identical team members, each with the same mediocre skills at e.g. fighting, magic, and “thieving”, the team can have one really good fighter, one really good magic user, and one really good thief.


Side-note:

With many variations depending on what types of skills, “character classes”, whatnot, are available in the game at hand—including in terminology used for what amounts to approximately the same thing. (Note that some negative sounding labels, e.g. “thief”, might be more indicative of a skill set than of, say, a moral attitude relative their real-life counterparts.)

For simplicity, I stick with one-of-each, while a more realistic scenario might see a different distribution, e.g. because the relative benefit from a second fighter might be larger than from a second thief.


Many such games also have a “racial” division and this division might well affect how suited a character is for a certain role, e.g. in that a hobbit might be better suited for a career as a thief and a human as a fighter. Ditto a male/female division. (With the reservation that the games that I have played have typically not included any practical differences in character traits based on male/female.)

When we compare this to the faux diversity raised to the skies by today’s Leftists, the faux diversity does not fare well.

Notably, the focus in the games is on something that brings value in real life too—the difference in skills. The “racial” division only has an indirect and secondary influence, while it is seen as a benefit in its own right in faux diversity.


Side-note:

A point where I remain uncertain about the pushers’ true take is to what degree they see e.g. being Black as a truly automatic benefit in its own right and to what degree the benefit relates to history and experiences that would come automatically with being Black (regardless of any and all other factors, say, parental SES and own level of education). The messaging appears to be both inconsistent and confused—possibly, because it is more a matter of agenda-pushing-by-means-of-rhetoric than of a legitimately held opinion.

(With similar claims applying to e.g. sexual orientation, which, however, has never been a factor in any game that I have played and is, therefore, not otherwise mentioned here.)



Side-note:

A confounding factor is that some types of useful-in-real-life diversity, e.g. a difference in opinions and perspectives, does not have a true in-game equivalent. Some differences can be built-in into the gaming mechanisms, but they are usually dwarfed by the differences brought by the real-life players behind the characters. A good non-diversity illustration is intelligence (“non-diversity”, because more intelligence is almost always better, all other factors equal): an in-game trait of “intelligence” might e.g. determine how fast a character gains “experience points”, but it is the intelligence of the human player that determines whether the character is intelligent in a more fundamental sense.


What the game team needs is not a human, an elf, and a hobbit, but a warrior, a mage, and a thief. (Or whatever variations are available and appropriate in the game at hand.) What the real-world team needs is not a Hispanic, a Black, and an Arab, but three persons who bring valuable and complementary skills.

What these skills are, will vary much more than in a typical game, because so many different roles, teams, types of specialization, whatnot, are available in real life. A team of software developers, e.g., might have a very different ideal skill set than a team of lumber jacks, while most teams in a game setting fall into more limited categories—sometimes, even, with an implicit limit to the one category of “adventurers”. At the same time, real-life teams typically have a lesser need for intra-team skill differences, because a separation into roles and responsibilities is more likely to take place between teams. For instance, a team of software developers will rarely see a benefit from recruiting an accountant, for the simple reason that there is typically a separate accounting department to handle accounting-related issues. For the business as a whole, a good accountant can be very valuable; for the team of software developers, he would usually be dead-weight. (An exception is when he is also a good software developer, in which case it is that skill, not skill at accounting, that matters.) Even real diversity, let alone faux diversity, in a real-life team is of less value than in a game.

Looking at “racial” division, the quotes are not added to cater to the Leftist hatred for the idea of race, but because the “races” in games are usually better viewed as species, with biological (or other) differences that vastly exceed those between various human racial, ethnic, whatnot groups. For instance, hobbits are usually seen as shorter than even the shortest real-life human racial/ethnic groups, which are already outliers—and much shorter than, say, the Japanese. (Going by averages. Individual variation can, of course, bring overlap.) That a hobbit might then, by nature, be likely to bring particular value through direct (someone short is needed) or indirect (smaller individuals might make better thieves) diversity is much more plausible than that, say, being Black brings such a benefit. Real-life racial/ethnic diversity is, then, less likely to be advantageous than “racial” diversity within a game.


Side-note:

I pick hobbits and size for the easy illustration. Other “races” might be more similar in height, yet still differ far more than humans, through having a greater or lesser natural ability at magic, being or not being able to breathe under water, being or not being able to fly, or similar. (And, again, with potentially great differences from game to game.)

The term “hobbit’ is also an illustration of odd naming in its own right: a great many games have something that manifestly is a variation of the hobbit-theme, but have often, and inconsistently-with-each-other, opted for a different name, e.g. “halfling”. (There might or might not be a legal reason for this.)


To further reduce any potential value from faux diversity, any practical “division of labor” that even approximates a racial (ditto e.g. sex based) division is anathema to many on the Left, with calls for quotas or whatnot soon following. (Exception: A division or distribution to the advantage of a favored-by-the-Left group is usually tolerated, ignored, or outright welcomed.) Now, differences between human groups are too small relative individual variation to warrant so strong a correspondence between race and occupation/role/whatnot as is found in some games. However, the current Leftist worldview bans virtually any division, even one that is spontaneous and voluntary, compatible with individual variation and individual choice, and found only when looking at aggregates. In this way, whatever actual value could conceivably be found in certain divisions is removed, because hiring, promotions, etc., are deliberately done against any such value, for reasons like “diversity”, “equity”, and “social justice”. A wish for more faux diversity then, if anything, reduces the “fitness for purpose” of the group at hand. (Even aside from the more obvious and likely considerably stronger negative effect from prioritizing individual suitability below faux diversity.)

As an aside, there are cases involving real-life humans where even game-like levels of biological diversity can be reached or exceeded—and where similar or greater benefits can be had. Consider e.g. a ploughman with two oxen, a hunter with a pack of hounds, a falconer with a falcon, and similar constellations. That ploughman might know what and how to plough, but he would take for ever doing it without the oxen, while the oxen might have the strength and endurance but not the knowledge (or, for that matter, the wish)—here we see a truly great benefit from diversity. (With similar remarks for the other cases.)


Addendum:

(2024-12-31)

Less than two weeks after original publication, I am met with news of controversy around “Dungeons and Dragons” through related changes. One is that “races” are to be renamed into “species”, which I would view as a good thing: the term “race[s]” is conventional in similar games but also, cf. above, misleading. Apparently, however, the change has not been made in an attempt to increase precision of language, but in some (at best) misguided belief that the very word “race” would be inherently offensive or otherwise problematic, which does nothing but cater to the so destructive woke/PC/whatnot elements of the Left. (A good change for a poor reason.)


Side-note:

The in-game term might even have been harmful from a real-work perspective, as some might fail to evaluate races and the, much, much smaller, racial differences between humans on their merits by looking at in-game races, say hobbits and humans, and incorrectly rejecting the real-world concept in a blanket manner, because it does not match the in-game concept. Similarly, I have some older text that discusses the potential distortions caused by the English use of “race” for humans and “breed” for e.g. horses, where many other languages use the same word for both (e.g. “ras”, in my native Swedish).


Other changes are potentially more troubling and of a strongly PC and/or “protect the snowflakes” character. Going by news reporting (I have not made an independent review), at least one change or family of changes is directly relevant to this text, namely, that some characteristics, and/or suitability for a particular character class, previously dependent on race/species has been made independent.