[2019] What still bothers me is how Neeko was called "The first openly LGBTQ character in League" when Varus literally has a music video that talks about how he's gay

So let's say that you're a cat, and you live on a planet of mostly cats. When you turn on the TV there's a bunch of TV shows about cats doing cat stuff. The ads are for litterboxes and catnip. Lots of jokes about having nine lives.

Then suddenly you turn on the TV one day to watch a new show, and one of the side characters is a dog, who experiences the struggles you'd expect in a cat's world - barking is banned, playing fetch is considered distasteful, and going for walkies makes you a target for harassment. "Why does it have to be a dog?" you wonder. "I just want to see characters, I don't care about how hard it is to be a dog. Do dogs really care if they're up there or not? Why don't they just enjoy cat stories? Dogs and cats are both kinds of animals, how different can it be?" You start seeing ads for dog food and tennis balls, and just get pissed off because it's not relevant to you. And to be honest, some dogs probably agree with you, like, "I don't need a token dog on a show to feel like my existence is validated, and I already know where I can get my tennis balls." And that's fine too. But don't make the mistake of thinking that every member of an underrepresented group falls into the same line of thought.

Whenever you are a member of a class that is always represented, it's super easy to not realize how much that can impact the world, and how isolating it can feel to not see yourself represented. On the flip side, it means that when stories are presented that AREN'T your story, it sticks out to you like a sore thumb and can be really jarring. It doesn't have anything to do with you, so why are you looking at it?

But imagine that experience from the other side of the equation. Things aren't quite so stark now, but when I was growing up as a queer woman in a very tiny rural town, I was never exposed to a single example of a romantic relationship between women. I had a bunch of feelings, but no clue how to deal with them. Romantic comedies were full of jokes about how woman be shopping and eating ice cream when they're sad, and men be going to the gym. I had no cues, context, or examples of a healthy relationship between women to show me how it might work or demonstrate that it was even possible. Because the small world I inhabited had no room for a big part of my identity in it, and no way for me to model understanding that part of myself, I had to do a LOT of self-discovery and wrangle a lot of self-loathing. It's not about "wanting to see myself," it's about all of the stuff that seeing yourself DOES for you without you realizing it, especially when you're young and in the process of figuring out who you are.

A number of people are doing a decent job talking about the issue of representation in this thread. There are also much deeper issues at play than representation because whenever the world is built around a particular kind of thing being "normal", and only one type of person is represented in that world, sh*t gets really weird. That's when you get stuff like crash test dummies not accounting for a big variety of kinds of bodies, resulting in disproportionate fatalities in accidents. It's when you get phones that are too big for many women's hands, or automatic photo-sorting algorithms that categorize non-white people as animals.

TL;DR: When the world is literally designed for you, calling out issues for the people it isn't designed for can feel jarring and weird. But for many of the people it isn't designed for, it can make a huge difference.

thank you both. This thread is a challenging mix of opinions, but the only one I really want to challenge is the "who cares?" thing. I think it's important everyone should know there's folks in the industry who have actually experienced this stuff and are actively working through how to deal with things like representation in a way that's driven by empathy and thoughtfulness. Y'all rock, stay strong!

Look up Google Photos + Gorillas for details, it’s a pretty impressively bad oversight!

So: we have a lot of room to grow, and I'm involved in a number of efforts both internally and externally to try to make changes in that arena. In terms of how it's going personally, the past year has been pretty painful, not gonna lie. I deal with it by spending a lot of time thinking about ways to change this stuff.

In terms of coworkers, part of the cascading issues that I mentioned at the end of my post is stuff that goes all the way down what we call the employment "pipeline" in tech and games. That means that recruiting efforts, candidate pools, interview style and structure, hiring practices, and the ways we evaluate pay and title changes are all systems that are at risk of being designed in ways that are disproportionately unfair to some underrepresented groups. Example: if you're an elite company and you source only from Ivy League schools, that means that most likely people who aren't from wealthy families are dramatically underrepresented, among other folks - you inherit the issues that those candidate pools already have from other sources. This is something that Riot is currently working on with stuff like membership in the Reboot Representation Coalition. As an industry, we have a long way to go. It's a huge issue that needs to be tackled, and not just here. But I will say I have a lot of amazing female coworkers who have a great community here, and who are responsible for a ton of really amazing content. I'm really lucky to know them.

In terms of our "customers" (FYI, here we usually refer to y'all as "players" instead of stuff like customers or users), this is definitely an area we have a lot of room to grow in. It's not currently part of my remit to actively work on it, but I do spend a lot of time thinking and talking about ways we can grow. Problem spaces I like to wrap my head around include: when we choose to target certain markets instead of others, which groups of people are we leaving out? If we only survey our current playerbase, then whose opinions and ideas are we missing? What communities could we be missing out on speaking with? It's not just about representation for the sake of agenda / personal belief, at this point it's also about making smart business decisions. You can also find a ton of research about how diverse groups just do a better job of making good products - having only one kind of person means you risk having blind spots in your product and losing out on a potential market, or creating something deeply flawed in a way you didn't catch.

Yeah, I totally agree and could have used a better example (I was being a little tongue in cheek). I don't mean to suggest that kind of depiction is a good model for ANY kind of relationship. In general, media has a lot of room to improve on how they depict relationships between human beings and not glorifying basically stalker behavior.

There have been a few cases beyond Google Images where this happened, and the reason is usually the machine learning algorithms for images. Basically whenever you create an image recognition algorithm, you train it to recognize certain patterns. In this case, they trained the patterns for stuff like "human face" on features, color schemes, and shapes that are typical to caucasian people. Not a result of search algorithms (which do in fact work the way you say they do, and produce a different set of problems) but a result of the images and set of traits that engineers chose to train the computer on.

Nope! I am a ciswoman working out of our LAX office.