Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto should be more woke –

Horizon Forbidden West, The Last of Us: Part II, Baldur’s Gate III, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and many others. The list of games criticized for being “woke” is getting ridiculously long these days, so let’s fight.

Because I would really like to see even more gay, transgender, colored, disabled and whatever you want in games. Especially in huge games and franchises like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, League of Legends and Grand Theft Auto. Those of us who have lived for a while remember games during the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 generation that were criticized for having very similar characters. People complained about playing as the average white guy, and some even had problems with a character being too sexy if it was a woman. On top of that, we all knew where it was going when our character met someone of the opposite sex, and most games began to feel the same way. Millions of gamers were screaming for change.

Turn the clock forward two decades and social media, forums and certain “influencers” make it sound like the needs and wants of the world have taken a complete 180. Have you noticed that two of the games I mentioned in the first paragraph haven’t even launched yet? That hasn’t stopped some very vocal people from screaming their hearts out. A black samurai?! IsNaughty Dog pushing their woke agenda on us again with a female protagonist?! These can’t be great games. They just have to be political agendas. A game’s social media account can’t even mention Black History Month without turning off reactions, for Pete’s sake!

The first game that really showed me how bad this could get was The Last of Us: Part II. Tons of information about it leaked before launch, and parts of the Internet decided to fill in the blanks and draw their own conclusions based on the slightest bit of information. A muscular person with feminine features? It must be a transgender person. No way I buy such shit. In fact, let me warn others about this without even giving the game a chance or checking if my theories are true.

Can any of you with this mindset please explain to me why you have this philosophy? Why would it matter if we suddenly found out that Duke Nukem, Marcus Fenix or a Call of Duty character were bisexual? I’m not talking about feeling forced and exaggerated by Mr. Gears of War himself running around picking flowers, flirting with anything with a pulse, or referencing his sexuality every fifth second. Perhaps it is alluded to only once in the entire franchise. As a result, why hate and boycott the entire experience? Let’s use The Last of Us: Part II as an example again. There is a trans person in the game. It’s mentioned so quickly that other reviewers I spoke with didn’t even notice it, and Naughty Dog even emphasizes how small it is by having Abby say : “I don’t care.” when the person asks if she has any questions about what she just learned. Did that keep forums from being filled with haters lashing out at these five seconds of play? Of course not. It must have been nice to be a trans person who felt recognized and represented in such a huge game before going online and seeing posts like this

And here’s the kicker that the people who wake up most and hardest won’t even see because they just read the headline before sending me angry emails and comments: I don’t care if a game has DEI/LGBTQIA+ elements or not. Maybe it’s because I’ve mostly played fairly great and non-provocative games, but I’ve hardly ever experienced a game where the inclusion of such things made me cringe because of how unnecessary they felt. Therefore, I think both extremes of this argument need to cool down a bit. Those who think they are living in hell as soon as there is even the slightest hint of a non-binary or gay character in a game should give it a chance before they go crazy. If you are the opposite and complain every time a game doesn’t contain what you would call DEI, you might want to look in the mirror too. Can we just let game developers make the games they want? Whether they want a gay character because they themselves are gay or because it makes the story more interesting. Don’t yell at the developers who are already under so much pressure for not suddenly adding Blackio to the next Super Mario Bros. game. Let different games use the wide range of ingredients available to them, and we’ll see if they make the final dish better or not. That’s why I hope GTA VII and/or Call of Duty 2026 will let us play as an LGBTQIA+ character and prove that some of the biggest and best games in the world can be “woke.”