It's time (Option to Hide other players Glamour)

[Packetdancer]

Twelve help me, I said I was bowing out on this thread, but I accidentally clicked on it when I meant to click the thread one above it—thanks, mobile browser—and ended up reading this. So I'll weigh in with one thing, albeit probably at my typical Packetdancerish length and verbosity (for which I apologize).

What does "whitewashing" even mean in this context? (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dic...h/whitewashing) How is a toggle that does not affect other people or the game in the enviroment can even be consider whitewashing. Is using the black list whitewashing? Was the game "whitewashed" back in 2.0 when glamour wasn't implemented yet? Are players who are not using glamours "whitewashing"? This makes zero logical sense.

Several of the (many) suggested implementations of glamour removal have involved replacing the character with the default character for their race/background/gender combination. I.e., instead of seeing my character in-game, you would see the default female Highlander character. In several cases—again, see my character—this would be literal whitewashing, and that may be where the objection is being pulled from.

That's also where a lot of my own concern came from, in all honesty; I would find the removal of glamour annoying, inasmuch as (being a woman) I have enough people judging/dictating what I wear in the real world, so to hear that people want the ability to do so in a virtual world just feels a bit exhausting in that sort of "really? We're doing this here, too?" way. But I would find SquareEnix giving people the ability to (effectively) remove all dark-skinned characters from the game by replacing them with the (fair-skinned) racial defaults to be downright chilling, and the fact that it came up as a component of this suggestion several times was honestly what flipped me personally from mild exasperation—I am a healer main, please let me keep my pants, I like pants—to "oh HELLS no" with regards to the entire business.

I recognize that replace-the-characters suggestion was meant at heart to make folks more comfortable inasmuch as the character who could get screenshotted in the unglamoured 'clown pimp' type mismatched gear—which, again, for female healers quite possibly does not include pants—would not be their character but just the default. So yes, it almost certainly came from a well-meaning place, and folks just didn't think about the unintentional side-effect of erasing dark-skinned PCs from the world.

But unintended effects are a thing that happens, and the way those unintended effects are perceived is something to consider. As a relevant example, look at Google's machine learning fiasco from several years back.

Google wanted to work on a model for generalized image classification; you drop an image in, and it can say "awesome, that's probably a bird" or "I think that's a dog" or "that's a banana" or whatever else. The (vastly oversimplified) way in which machine learning works is that you have a giant pile of labeled data (i.e., you know that it's a picture of a bird/dog/banana) and divide it in half. The first half is used to 'train' a model; you throw all the data at it and go "this image is a bird" and "this image is a dog" and so on. When the model is done training, you take the second half and throw it at the model, asking, "What is this?" and then compare what it said ("Dog.") to what the label on the data says ("Bird."). Repeat until the model can tell you what the second half is with a high degree of accuracy.

So, well enough so far. For purposes of training facial recognition, my understanding is that Google decided to use their employee database; it was very large, and each employee record had a face (associated with their badge/ID), and it was data they had free and clear rights to.

So they do all their research and they train their model and release it so that now you can drop an image in and it can figure out what the image might be of... and immediately take a lashing in the press, because it turns out if you drop an image of a darker-skinned person's face into the model, it classifies the image as 'gorilla'. Which comes across... well, let's just go with "not great."

What had happened was that the facial database they used was predominantly white dudes. There was an bias in the dataset which they didn't even notice or think about, and as a result the model had been trained insufficiently; rather than features, it was using skin tone as a classifier between 'human face' and 'gorilla face'.

It was absolutely not their intention to suggest that darker-skinned folks were sub-human, but MAN it was not a good look—and lots of the less savory sorts on the internet also crowed that oh, this was just Google showing them that they were right in their white supremacist ideals... they had such a warm, happy glow to 'know' that Google was on their side at heart.

In the end, Google improved the dataset and re-trained things, but I have no doubt that their PR division felt a little like they'd been punched in the face for a while there.

So when I was speaking earlier in the thread about a feature that strips away identity in the game not coming across well in the press, that's what I meant. SquareEnix could have the best intentions in the world by creating the feature, but if the perception isn't good, it's still negative PR. And I do not personally see a way in which any implementation of a 'remove glamour' feature effectively giving you a button to push to remove all dark-skinned characters from the world—even if that was not the intention—could turn out well in public perception.