New ‘Call of Duty’ Let's You Play as Black Lady Nazis
The upcoming Call of Duty: World War II has brought up a pressing question in the debate over intersectionality in video games.
Can a game get so politically correct it becomes viscerally offensive?
Apparently those bastards at Sledgehammer Games managed to pull it off by letting you play as black women Nazis in multiplayer mode. This was noticed by gamers and journalists at E3-the world’s largest gaming expo - where the game was available to play.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="
The developer wanted to add diversity by allowing players to customize the character they play in multiplayer. This means you can change the race and gender of your soldier avatar. When playing the game randomly places you on a different team usually Americans or Nazis so sometimes you’re gonna get some pretty ahistorical looking Nazis.
This might be why the multiplayer was scrubbed of all Swastikas on army uniforms and in maps of Berlin.
“We didn’t feel like it was appropriate there ” said Michael Condrey of Sledgehammer Games in a livestream interview. “It’s a dark symbol and we have to be really respectful and mindful of customs and regulations of different territories and we wanted the whole community to play it together. You’ll see it in the campaign in a historical and accurate way but not in multiplayer and zombies.”
So in the mind of Sledgehammer Games black Nazis are not offensive if you remove all the swastikas. Flawless logic.
Part of what makes lots of games enjoyable is a certain degree of fantasy, even in more "realistic" games like the COD series. There's also a significant difference between the feeling of being told a story through the campaign and the feeling of making a name for yourself in PvP.
I think the developers made the right choice here; the story they tell is "historically accurate" in that the uniforms and decorum for each side is accurate (though the events I'm sure are false). In PvP, where players typically are just interested in having a good time, it makes sense that nobody is forced to be on the side of history near-unanimously regarded as evil and worse. It's just side A vs side B. Moreover, PvP is where many players like to customize their character, so I'm sure all the black female gamers out there are appreciative that they can finally see something on the screen that looks like them.
yee man i think your right, it was a lot of text to read tho hahahaha, Respect!
wooow dude this is the stupidest thing ever. I am all for men and women being equal but this is just ridiculous. changing it to benefit a group of sjw's is absurd.
well man, who knows.