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 so many others. The list of games criticised for "being woke" is getting ridiculously long these days, so let's fight.

Because I would really like to see even more gay, trans, coloured, impaired, and whatever you might like people in games. Especially in massive games and franchises like Fortnite, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, League of Legends, and Grand Theft Auto. Those of us who have lived a while remember games during the PlayStation 3/Xbox 360 generation being criticised for having very similar characters. People complained about playing as the average white dude, and some even had problems with a character being too sexy if it was a woman. Top that with all of us knowing where things were going if our character met someone from the opposite gender, and most games started to feel the same. Millions of gamers cried out for change.

Turn the clock forward two decades and social media, forums, and certain "influencers" make it sound like the world's needs and wants have taken a complete 180. Did you notice that two of the games I mentioned in the first paragraph haven't even launched yet? That hasn't stopped some very vocal folks from screaming their hearts out. A black samurai?! Naughty Dog is forcing their woke agenda on us with a female protagonist again?! These can't be great games. They must just be political agendas. A game's social media account can't even mention Black History month without disabling comments, for Pete's sake!

The first game that truly showed me just how bad this can 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 tiniest bit of information. A muscular person with feminine features? It must be a transgender person. No way I'm buying shit like that. 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 if feeling forced and exaggerated by having Mr. Gears of War himself running around picking flowers, flirting with anything that has a pulse, or referring to his sexuality every fifth second. Maybe it's just alluded to once in the entire franchise. Why would that make you hate the entire experience and boycott it? Let's use The Last of Us: Part II as an example again. There is a trans person in the game. It's so quickly mentioned that other reviewers I talked with didn't even notice it, and Naughty Dog even highlights how minor it is by having Abby say "It doesn't matter to me." when the person asks if she has questions about what she just learned. Did that stop forums from being filled with haters lashing out against these five seconds of the game? Of course not. Must have been fun to be a trans person that felt recognised and represented in such a massive game before going online and seeing these kinds of messages...

And here's the kicker that the people who cry woke the most and loudest won't even see because they just read the headline before sending me angry emails and comments: I don't give a poop whether a game has DEI/LGBTQIA+ elements or not. Maybe it's because I've mostly played fairly big and nonprovocative games, but I've barely experienced a game where the inclusion of stuff like this makes me cringe by how unnecessary they felt. That's why I think that both extreme sides of this argument should chill a bit. Those who think they live in hell as soon as there's the tiniest hint of a non-binary or homosexual character in a game should give it a chance before going berserk. If you're the complete opposite and complain every time a game doesn't include what you'd call DEI might also want to have a look in the mirror. Can we just let game developers make the games they want? Whether they want to have a gay character because they are gay themselves or because it makes the story more interesting. Don't yell at the developers that are already under so much pressure for not suddenly adding Blackio to the next Super Mario Bros. game either. Let different games use the wide array 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 a LGBTQIA+ character, and prove that some of the biggest and best games in the world can "be woke".