I have to admit, I didn't ever hear about this initiative. It sounds like a bad idea that was founded to fight a terrible collective. So there are no winners there.

I feel that, in gaming, as soon as something pops up that doesn't adhere to some sort of unwritten rule of what games are allowed to be like, up pops the leftie boogieman ideal. The same as when anyone tries to open up dialogue critiquing games, first response is outrage and a hysterical drive to shut down conversation (fun points when you also find said people tend to parrot standard lines of devs creative vision and the freedom of speech get out of jail card). When I see that audience being the one that initiatives like this are (misguidedly) being created to
combat, I pretty much boil it down: here is one group whose general motivation is the betterment of a pastime for all versus one whose general motivation is to shit on other people who they value less. My finger then starts to point less at one than the other.

What was a recent incident. I believe a developer added in a "preferred pronoun" to a game's character creator. This created an absolute SHIT STORM on Steam. Floods of just sub 2 hour reviews negative wah-fests, all decrying some mythical SJW monster. Because of a picklist.

It's because of that community that I started to refer to myself less and less as a gamer, just so happening to be someone who plays games. There is a choice, and it has been presented many times, to shed the image that gamers are adolescent, overgrown man babies who have nothing better to do than throw tantrums on the internet, and it has been rejected. So I had to reject the association.

Since the beginning, games have been popcorn entertainment, they have been political, they have been whatever they have wanted to be. Despite an absolutely dire patch around the first half of the 360/PS3 generation--where all games started to basically become third person shooters from the same mould featuring the same mid-20s rough cut white dude as protag--but that was a blip. Increasingly, games have been moving back towards the time when they were kaleidoscopically diverse and less template demographic driven. Yeah, sometimes missteps happen, but I'd rather that than an attempt to adhere to a strictly narrow spectrum of experiences. Not all games will be for me or about me, but that's ok, there are plenty for all.

RE: women in gaming. I don't have enough experience here. Where I do have that experience is in music, where producers and DJs are regularly decried as requiring ghost producers, advancing up the ladder through sexual favours, through being someone's girlfriend, or some sort of media bias. Questioned and scrutinised because of who they are in a way that a man isn't. The stories are too numerous to dismiss. I don't believe that it is a stretch to apply it the gaming community either. I do remember seeing a gaming reviewer decried for having tackled "a big game" when she awarded it an (apparently terrible) 7/10. How was she allowed to review this, is she even a proper gamer, doesn't she just like joke games instead? It was pretty bizarre to see those are the points of criticism rather than the actual content of the review. Of course nothing is going to get resolved. More energy is put into trying to combat a phantom menace that is going to harm gaming because... somehow trying to make things more positive makes gaming worse. I have no idea.

On the whole, it doesn't seem like big devs give a shit what the rabble are doing. They are continuing the paths they on as they see fit. So hopefully they continue to do so without getting dragged into the mire.