Bandai Namco All-In On DEI After Learning About It From Western Media: “I Realized That Not Being Represented May Nullify A Person’s Existence, Even To The Point Of Discrimination”
A Bandai Namco rep has confirmed that after learning about the creativity-killing concept from various Western sources, the Japan-based video game developer is fully dedicated to promoting ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ within their games.
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This turn for the developer of the Tekken, Super Robot Wars, and Pac-Man franchises was revealed courtesy of a presentation given by a representative from their Quality Assurance department, Okuma Mirai, during the 2024 entry of the annual Computer Entertainment Developers Conference (CEDEC), an annual tradeshow in which members of the East Asian video game industry come together to discuss the practical aspects of their respective business operations.
Titled Aiming to be global in “Expression” as well! DE&I Initiatives, the panel, per a recap provided by Japanese video game news outlet 4gamer and machine translated by DeepL, saw Mirai begin by confirming that the supposed reason for the company’s turn to DEI was a desire “to broaden the scope of our content and expose it to a wider variety of game players.”
To this end, the QA rep admitted that in order to expand their operations, they must take into consideration the tastes of their prospective audiences – and what she had learned from her overseas partners was that DEI was one of, if not the biggest hot button issue for Western players.
Curiously, Miura then put forth her working definition of DEI, which described as “a state in which diverse individuals are respected and can demonstrate their abilities in a fair environment and under fair conditions.”
With this in mind, the Bandai Namco rep then argued that while ‘representation’ and ‘diversity’ are not legally mandated in Western media productions, the concepts must still be given proper weight when developing titles for release outside of Asia because their inclusion (no pun intended) would make a given game more attractive to said audience.
In support of her claim, Miura cited an unspecified study from analytics firm Newzoo that found a little over half of British and American respondents considered the concepts of DEI to be generically “important” (though to what, or who, the survey did not specify).
“It is necessary to consider the most important factors in the content,” she said.
Interestingly, Miura further noted that DEI was particularly important to Western players because, according to the same Newzoo survey, they tend to project themselves onto a given video game character far more often than their Eastern counterparts.
Miura next recalled that their experience with DEI began during the development of Blue Protocol, during which a player complained that they did not feel ‘represented’ due to the game’s original lack of black hair styles in its character creator.
“[I realized] That’s what diversity means!” she added. “Not being represented not only means that the demand for self-expression cannot be met, but it also means that we may not be able to imagine the identities of the many players.”
Interestingly, the QA rep also noted that when it came to actually executing ‘DEI’, it is important that developers actually understand the content they’re working with so as to not make the end result feel not only unnatural, but completely hamfisted, and would thus immediately turn off a large portion of potential customers, even those who may support the base effort.
From there, Miura said that after learning about “what diversity means”, she then dedicated herself to learning how to apply the concept to Bandai Namco’s games.
According to 4gamer’s own recap of the event, the rep informed attendees that she did so by “read[ing] as much as she could about DEI news in the international general media and DEI-related articles in the game industry from about 10 years ago to the present”. as well as s
Further, she also studied how her industry peers were attempting to accomplish the same goal and read various written books on the topic.
All of this, Miura said, was in service of her rolling out of Bandai Namco’s new in-house DEI training program, which according to her consisted of four key pillars:
- About Character Hair, which discussed how to properly create more diverse character designs, particularly in regards to their hairstyles.
- Character Gender, wherein it is explained that one’s gender is made up of four parts, including “biological sex,” “gender identity,” “sexual orientation,” and “gender expression”.
- Differences In Culture And Values, which concerns itself with how one should approach differences in regional culture regarding certain actions, images, or words.
- And Accessibility, mainly in regards to making a game ‘useable’ for disabled players.
Bringing the session to a close, Miura ultimately declared that while she still enjoys the very Japanese-specific games of her childhood, she hopes more developers will begin abiding by the concepts of DEI in order to bring their works to even wider audiences.
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