Visualizing Diversity: A Character Design Tool for Creative Reflection

The paper presents the Diversity Space Tool, a character design aid intended to help game creators reflect on diversity and inclusivity in the characters they build. Motivated by a discussion with a large European studio after a talk on gender-inclusive design, the tool asks users to plot a character's attributes along multiple axes of a radar graph, with the position of each point indicating how far the character departs from a norm defined by first-person shooters. The work began as a pen-and-paper prototype used in workshops with designers from several studios under one parent company, and was later developed into a web-based digital version meant to be used without facilitators.

The digital tool adds secure accounts, a tutorial, saving, comparison, commenting, collaboration modes, and customization options, and it is currently a functional prototype undergoing user testing before public release. Testing involved game design students, game jam participants, and professional designers, with particular attention to "pliability," the quality of invitingly playful interaction, as a desired property of the interface.

The authors identify two central interpretive risks. First, a character may diverge from the norm on several parameters while still reproducing a stereotype, so the design relies on asynchronous commenting and human discussion rather than automated judgments of quality. Second, the enclosed area of the graph is a representation of deviation rather than a measure of diversity, and it can be manipulated by reordering axes; testing showed users often treated larger areas as better and sometimes read the visualization as a quantification, although iterative design shifted emphasis toward using it as a malleable prompt for ideation.

The paper also reflects on the collaboration itself, noting that the academic team's push for more experimental and critical approaches put embedded industry allies, who faced systemic pressures as women in games, at risk, and that this dynamic had to be moderated.