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[IbizaPocholo]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/halo-head-bonnie-ross-diversity-attracts-diversity-60-minutes/

As a female leader in a male-dominated industry, Microsoft's Bonnie Ross recognizes the value of cultivating a diverse staff.

Ross runs 343 Industries, Microsoft's subsidiary studio that manages the Halo video game franchise. She told 60 Minutes that gamers want to immerse themselves in fictional worlds, which often means choosing avatars that look like themselves.

"Across Xbox, we are really deliberate in making sure that we have opportunities for people to play the way they want to play," Ross tells 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. "And that does impact diversity and gender, what you look like, what your skin color is, what size body you have. And we try and make sure that you can play how you want to play."

To achieve that range within the games, Ross says she needs to make sure her staff is also diverse. In the video above, she tells Alfonsi that it's important for women to be on the development side in gaming so they can shape diverse characters and storylines.

Ross also explained how she thinks the first-person shooter game Halo has been impacted now that she runs the show.

"I think diversity does attract diversity," Ross says. "So I think we have a more diverse team than in the past, which I think the team actually really appreciates. And I also think that diverse teams do kind of create a more diverse output, diverse thinking, and innovation on where you're going."

 

[Raph64]

 

[thief183]

mhe... I'd say a man can make product for men, a woman for womans excetera, appealing everyone with the same product is really hard, saying things like this means you already lost some costumer (me for example)

 

[1.21Gigawatts]

One of the main growing areas for the video game industry is expanding its female audience and this requires more female input in leading and senior positions.
Apart from supposedly being a common sense issue, it also makes business sense.

 

[DynamiteCop!]

If there's no difference between men and women and we're equal then why do women need representation?

 

[JimmyRustler]

One of the main growing areas for the video game industry is expanding its female audience and this requires more female input in leading and senior positions.
Apart from supposedly being a common sense issue, it also makes business sense.

Naturally. What eludes me is why, instead of just creating new franchises for the new audience, they are shoehorning it into existing franchises. I mean, if we would have seen declining interest even that would make sense. But for some reason devs seem to be doing this "just because" and then if fans don't like it they are labeled as whatever.

It's so confusing. If this emerging diverse audience is soooooo big and soooooo important why are they so hesitant to make new stuff for them? Perhaps because it's all talk and this new audience isn't as big after all?

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

Instead of escaping into a fantasy world, we expect the fantasy world to mirror ourselves to coddle our fragile egos.

Instead of stepping through the looking glass, we stand in front of it, narcissistically consulting it: "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which developer represents them all?"

"Diversity is important" has been a generic hoo-rah business thing for decades, but these companies seriously believe their revenue will go up when they pander to people who want a mirror reflection of themselves. They are mistaken.

 

[DynamiteCop!]

When will these people understand that bringing a bunch of different people together doesn't make something diverse, it ends up eliminating diversity over time. Segregation and separation is diversity, not a mish-mash which bleaches and removes diversity.

 

[5secondrulesucks]

so im gonna assume she is a white lady

 

[HeresJohnny]

Just make your fucking game and stop being stupid. Your duty is to those who invest in your product, not a bunch of hipsters who don’t play games, only bitch about how unjust they are. The people who you’re pandering to are never going to be happy with anything about Halo... ever.

 

[DynamiteCop!]

Just make your fucking game and stop being stupid. Your duty is to those who invest in your product, not a bunch of hipsters who don’t play games, only bitch about how unjust they are. The people who you’re pandering to are never going to be happy with anything about Halo... ever.

It's like a contest as to who can be the most politically correct. I'm not even joking when I say this, America needs another massive recession or a war. People need to be reminded of what real problems are and not this superficial leftist bullshit.

 

[Saruhashi]

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/halo-head-bonnie-ross-diversity-attracts-diversity-60-minutes/

As a female leader in a male-dominated industry, Microsoft's Bonnie Ross recognizes the value of cultivating a diverse staff.

Ross runs 343 Industries, Microsoft's subsidiary studio that manages the Halo video game franchise. She told 60 Minutes that gamers want to immerse themselves in fictional worlds, which often means choosing avatars that look like themselves.

"Across Xbox, we are really deliberate in making sure that we have opportunities for people to play the way they want to play," Ross tells 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. "And that does impact diversity and gender, what you look like, what your skin color is, what size body you have. And we try and make sure that you can play how you want to play."

To achieve that range within the games, Ross says she needs to make sure her staff is also diverse. In the video above, she tells Alfonsi that it's important for women to be on the development side in gaming so they can shape diverse characters and storylines.

Ross also explained how she thinks the first-person shooter game Halo has been impacted now that she runs the show.

"I think diversity does attract diversity," Ross says. "So I think we have a more diverse team than in the past, which I think the team actually really appreciates. And I also think that diverse teams do kind of create a more diverse output, diverse thinking, and innovation on where you're going."

It would be interesting to see how this manifests in the games themselves.

Looking at 1st party Nintendo content, a lot of it seems to come from teams that are not particularly diverse. As in, it's pretty much all Japanese people working on the games. I think all of their big game directors are Japanese men and, probably not much of a point but still, generally they don't even seem to speak English.

Even so, the diversity of content coming out of Japan from Nintendo has been consistently impressive.

When I see Americans in the videogame industry talk about diversity it always feels to me like they are specifically talking about story and character. With a large focus being placed on the protagonists race and gender.

I mean it's not like she's saying she wants Halo to be this diverse franchise that offers more that simply first person shooters. Just that the more cinematic or story driven parts of the story would feature different genders and races. Which is fine, by the way.

When I hear "play the way you want to play" I am thinking stealth vs all guns blazing, no kill runs vs kill all the enemies, speedruns vs 100% completion.
What she means is "what you look like, what your skin color is, what size body you have".

Thing is that I feel like her vision of diversity should be super easy to achieve. Just when you are designing a game all full customization of the player avatar. Or just actively avoid straight white male protagonists. That doesn't seem harder than designing a game where the player can literally play how they want to play.

I also feel like this attitude of "it's important for women to be on the development side in gaming so they can shape diverse characters and storylines" is somewhat running behind where society is actually at.

Right now there is this great big push to move away from gender norms, gender stereoypes, etc but here we are also saying "we need a woman on the team to give a specific and distinctive female perspective". So, do we want distinct gender roles or not? Mixed messages there.

I want to see how this "diversity" actually influences the game though.
I can't imagine that Halo with a cast of different races, genders and sexualities is going to be all that different as a game.
As a story, sure, that would be interesting to see and I think I'd honestly like to the company just take a massive jump and have a trans-woman lead their game and actually explore issues.

It kind of seems like a marketing exercise the way she frames it. Like, you can customize your avatar so we have diversity, yay us, buy our games.
Yes, that brand new concept of customizing your avatar. FFS.
It's pretty fucking cheeky to refer to that as "diversity" in my opinion.

 

[Ballthyrm]

One of the main growing areas for the video game industry is expanding its female audience and this requires more female input in leading and senior positions.
Apart from supposedly being a common sense issue, it also makes business sense.

Females consumers represent already the majority of people buying games.
This was still accomplished with apparently not enough Female perspective in power.
They can sure expand the female audience for consoles games or PC, but right now the industry already captured them(so it means moving them from their phone to their TV)
Here is ESA 2018 report

As for the senior positions and leading positions that's a problem everywhere, it takes a lot of time to switch even if they recruit only Female devs.
By the time they get the XP necessary to be in position of power , 10-15 year would have passed.
Promoting people just because of their gender would be a disaster.

Creative industries usually are dominated by men even where there is equal "visible representation" (the music industry comes to mind)
It is a cut throat, survival of the fittest playing field. Even with a ton of people in position of power the music industry doesn't have equal representation behind the scene. Hollywood is the same.
Believe it or not, the video game industry does actually a better job than other creative industries.


I have no problem with people bringing their perspective to the table but sometimes the medium itself is not adapted to the audience.
There is probably a good reason why mobile phone lean female and consoles lean male.
It doesn't make it good or bad, put pushing an artificial 50-50 quota to all video game medium seem a dumb goal to me.

 

[Mistershine.]

Naturally. What eludes me is why, instead of just creating new franchises for the new audience, they are shoehorning it into existing franchises. I mean, if we would have seen declining interest even that would make sense. But for some reason devs seem to be doing this "just because" and then if fans don't like it they are labeled as whatever.

It's so confusing. If this emerging diverse audience is soooooo big and soooooo important why are they so hesitant to make new stuff for them? Perhaps because it's all talk and this new audience isn't as big after all?

This. Nurturing a new audience shouldn't be done at the expense of the existing one. What would be the benefit of gaining 1m 'diverse' gamers if it means losing 2m current gamers?

 

[llien]

One of the main growing areas for the video game industry is expanding its female audience and this requires more female input in leading and senior positions.

I recall cognitive dissonance on pre-showergate GAF, when one thread would claim 50% (and more) of gamers are actually women, but the other would insist that we needed more female gamers.

Most women eagerly play games like Sims and don't find games like Starcraft/sports/shooters all that attractive.

Why do we need more people of gender A playing genre B?

Apart from supposedly being a common sense issue, it also makes business sense.

On common sense: in a group of 23 people, what are the chances of at least two having the same birthday?
It's actually 50%. Doesn't sound right, does it?

The issue with the "diversity" approach is that it inevitably pushes for quotas/targets which at the end of the day means hiring for gender/race/nationality over merit, which, my common sense suggests, is hardly a good strategy for achieving anything but certain race/gender/nationality composition of the team.

 

[Sqorin Hammerfarf]

Citation Needed.

 

[Saruhashi]

One of the main growing areas for the video game industry is expanding its female audience and this requires more female input in leading and senior positions.
Apart from supposedly being a common sense issue, it also makes business sense.

It does make business sense, sure.
Are they going about it in a sensible way though?

Look at the disastrous Diablo Immortal announcement as an example.
So they announce "big Diablo news coming up at BlizzCon".
Then they pack a theater full of Diablo fans, that's gonna be big Diablo fans who traveled and paid to be there.
The announcement is basically "hey Diablo fans, we are making a new Diablo game that's not for you but for an all new untapped potential Diablo fanbase".
That's just... so incredibly dumb.

So I guess the question here is how reasonable it is to take an existing game with an existing fanbase that likes probably very specific things about a game and then try to expand that games appeal to incorporate "everyone".

No glowing review or endorsement ever said "you know what I love about Game X, the way it's just so generic and safe and mundane",

I would suggest that expanding the female audience would require a major push to create games that actually appeal to that audience specifically.

My wife has a handful of games she enjoys on PS4. Not enough that she would be willing to go out and actually purchase a PS4. Hell, she didn't even buy the games. I did.

I would say that taking a game that I love, say Bloodborne, and trying to make it appeal to her would result in neither of us buying the game.
She's not going to drop 400 bucks on a console plus 60 bucks on a game that just "kind of" appeals to her and I'm not going to drop 400 bucks on a console that won't have games that specifically appeal to me.

I would think that "common sense" at this point in time is that women are way less likely to spend 100s of dollars on a videogame console.
So you'd need to come up with unique games that appeal to them directly.

Taking a game like Halo and saying "OK, we want to make a game that will induce everyone to buy and XBox" is like spreading yourself way to thin.
Common sense tells me that if the number of players lost from changing the formula is greater than the number of players gained then the whole enterprise is a failure.

How do other industries such as music, movies and books deal with this?
It has always been my impression that they very much have female-focussed content and those things that become massively popular with women tend to be made and marketed specifically for women.
Nobody seems to be looking at books and movies that appeal to men thinking "well this needs to appeal to women too!".

 

[Breakage]

Another example of how identity is at the forefront of everything in the Western world these days.

 

[ruvikx]

If I was in charge of Halo, my first & only concern would be cultivating a competent staff. If they're all white men, so be it. If they're all women & paraplegics, so be it. But when people are hired based upon the assumption their skin color/gender will somehow spontaneously deliver excellence derived from their identity (& not their digital artist skillsets & programming experience), well, hold on to your butts because this ride will get rocky.

In real world terms, Bonnie Ross is saying Halo's dev team won't recruit based great cv's but rather on the gender & race of applicants instead. The question whether that's even morally okay could be posed. It's that moment when the self-anointed "good guys" in the culture war ("diversity is our strength!") cross the line & become the opposite. Also, if women & non-whites need the dev team & games they produce to represent them in terms of their gender & race, then surely the same would apply to... white men as well? Or are white men some sort of exception to this identity rule?

These are questions Bonnie & her friends will never answer.

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

Naturally. What eludes me is why, instead of just creating new franchises for the new audience, they are shoehorning it into existing franchises. I mean, if we would have seen declining interest even that would make sense. But for some reason devs seem to be doing this "just because" and then if fans don't like it they are labeled as whatever.

It's so confusing. If this emerging diverse audience is soooooo big and soooooo important why are they so hesitant to make new stuff for them? Perhaps because it's all talk and this new audience isn't as big after all?

The worst example of that is evil Disney and what they've done to comic book characters - let's make Spiderman black, Wolverine a woman, this character is now gay etc. As a result, no-one bought them.

Just make new characters that are not called the same.

 

[Zaffo]

Halo 3 really was a good videogame.

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

In a way though it would be cool if the main protag in this is a woman with an all female Spartan line up (this is likely what they'll do).

 

[The Bloody-Nine]

I'm glad I'm not a Halo fan because this looks like it's only going to go one way...

 

[Shmunter]

Hire lesser quality candidates just to fill an arbitrary quota. Discriminate against better candidate just because of their gender. End up with a compromised team, serving who? Not the output or end product.

The quota fillers seemingly don’t get the promotions or pay rises because they got their jobs due to quotas, not pure merit. Gender pay gap!

Change my mind.

 

[Damien Crowley]

The worst example of that is evil Disney and what they've done to comic book characters - let's make Spiderman black, Wolverine a woman, this character is now gay etc. As a result, no-one bought them.

Just make new characters that are not called the same.

Did you just diss Miles Morales and X-23 (who are new characters...)?

 

[cireza]

But does it make better games ?

 

[Coulomb_Barrier]

Did you just diss Miles Morales and X-23 (who are new characters...)?

Actually I think Into the Spiderverse is one of the best animations I've seen and Morales is cool. But X-23? Nah, there's nothing that appeals to me about a killer child/teen. It's just fucking stupid.

 

[ROMhack]

I agree with her in theory but stuff like this comes across as damage limitation because an IP like Halo cannot and will not innovate. It will just keep doing exactly the same thing game on game, selling to an ever-diminishing market. It looks good for Bungie Michaelsoft as an attempt to better their image but come on, if they really gave a shit they'd make a new IP with a female lead or something. It doesn't have to cost $200bn to make either.

Paper
Cr a ck s

 

[angelic]

Hire the best, not the most diverse.

 

[Bkdk]

gotta Say Microsoft is pretty smart, if they say hiring the best, no media outlets of forums will bother to post anything, if you say focus on diversity though, press will give them some free advertisements and forums will keep posting them to generate more heated debates.

 

[archangelmorph]

I agree with her in theory but stuff like this comes across as damage limitation because an IP like Halo cannot and will not innovate. It will just keep doing exactly the same thing game on game, selling to an ever-diminishing market. It looks good for Bungie as an attempt to better their image but come on, if they really gave a shit they'd make a new IP with a female lead or something. It doesn't have to cost $200bn to make either.

Paper
Cr a ck s

Bungie don’t have anything to do with Halo anymore

 

[zcaa0g]

Diversity for diversity's sake is disingenuous.

 

[ROMhack]

Bungie don’t have anything to do with Halo anymore

Edited

 

[Arkage]

"And I also think that diverse teams do kind of create a more diverse output, diverse thinking, and innovation on where you're going."

Sounds like a bunch of unquantifiable corporate-speak.

 

[Whitecrow]

'I work at videogames but I say good things about totally unrelated things'

 

[Von Hugh]

DIveRsiTy DIveRsiTy DIveRsiTy

Gaming industry of 2019.

 

[Graciaus]

"Ross runs 343 Industries" I wouldn't be proud of being in charge of ruining a great series. That company needs a complete restructure and re-education on why Halo was king for years.

 

[JordanN]

I've asked this question before but I still feel it's relevant.

When does diversity end?

We're always told "more women in jobs! more POC in jobs! More lgbt! More muslims!" but when exactly does this end?

Do we reach diversity when every job is 50/50? What about diversity at the highest level? There is only one U.S president at a time. Wouldn't diversity mean both a male and female have to be head of state at the same time?

I have serious convictions there will never be a utopian diverse society, and yet it's still being pushed constantly with no end in sight.

 

[LaughingStock]

Identity politics is a cancer that has spread across all of western entertainment. We are doomed.

 

[Afro Republican]

This is old news. The new one talks about her mandating a certain percentage of workers but the interview was taken down


Time magazine will likely include it in their physical release.

 

[Hendrick's]

The more she talks, the more I start worrying about Halo Infinite.

 

[mckmas8808]

One of the main growing areas for the video game industry is expanding its female audience and this requires more female input in leading and senior positions.
Apart from supposedly being a common sense issue, it also makes business sense.

Not sure why this quote hasn't gotten like 20 likes by now.

 

[mckmas8808]

Identity politics is a cancer that has spread across all of western entertainment. We are doomed.

Identity politics have always existed in western entertainment. Just so happens, nowadays the identities just look different.

 

[iconmaster]

That is such good news. It was a lack of diversity that did Andromeda in.

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

If there's no difference between men and women and we're equal then why do women need representation?

 

[mckmas8808]

 

[Simply_Bry]

Ok, so they are deliberately not hiring people from a certain gender and/or skin color (pretty obvious we're talking about white males here) to make the team more diverse? Even if a white male has better qualifications than a black girl applying for the same job? Sounds like racism and sexism to me.

Why are these people so blind to their anti white male policy? Don't they realize they are being racist by trying to not be racist?

 

[AlexxKidd]

Terry Crews as the new Master Chief confirmed?

 

[LaughingStock]

Terry Crews as the new Master Chief confirmed?

I think Terry Crews is "problematic" now.

 

[mcjmetroid]

Ok, so they are deliberately not hiring people from a certain gender and/or skin color (pretty obvious we're talking about white males here) to make the team more diverse? Even if a white male has better qualifications than a black girl applying for the same job? Sounds like racism and sexism to me.

Why are these people so blind to their anti white male policy? Don't they realize they are being racist by trying to not be racist?

I don't know if it goes that far.
I think it would be more like recruiting from different channels from before to source out different talent.
Obviously if it how you say it is it's complete bullshit.