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'Call of Duty' is a first person shooter video game.
Posted on 06/17/2023 5:26:54 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Right-wingers are accusing the war game of going “woke.”
Here at Them, we like to poke fun at the increasingly bonkers boycotts over “woke” capitalism. But it’s starting to get out of hand. How can you engage people who earnestly believe the soyboy agenda has now infected Call of Duty?
Yes, your college roommate’s favorite thing to do instead of washing dishes made headlines last week, following a show of allyship from its publisher, Activision Blizzard. It started when popular Twitch streamer Puckett shared a video on June 7 of anti-LGBTQ+ extremists assaulting counterprotestors outside a school board meeting in Glendale, CA. The LGBTQ+ rights advocates were there to support the school board’s passage of a simple Pride Month resolution, which passed unanimously.
In response to the footage, Nick “Nickmercs” Kolcheff, another Twitch streamer affiliated with the professional gaming team FaZe, replied by spouting anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda.
“They should leave little children alone. That’s the real issue,” Nickmercs wrote on Twitter, apparently referencing the widespread right-wing “groomer” conspiracy theory, which alleges that LGBTQ+ people, and particularly transgender people, are serial sexual abusers. Nickmercs claimed in a follow-up post that “ain’t no hate in this heart,” but that he appreciated those who “understand [his] position as a new father.”
The situation escalated when players of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2 noticed that the Nickmercs in-game character skin, which went on sale in late May, had abruptly been removed from both games’ online stores. “Due to recent events, we have removed the “NICKMERCS Operator” bundle from the Modern Warfare II and Warzone store,” the official Call of Duty Twitter account wrote. “We are focused on celebrating PRIDE with our employees and our community.”
Naturally, all hell immediately began to break loose. Fellow streamer Timothy “TimTheTatMan” Betar asked Activision Blizzard to remove his character skin in solidarity, a request the company honored on June 10. Another streamer close to Nickmercs, Guy “Dr. Disrespect” Beahm announced he would boycott Call of Duty over their response (though Beahm has been banned from Twitch since 2019 for filming inside a convention bathroom).
From there, it was only a hop, skip, and a jump over to the now-predictable right wing propaganda machine. Anti-LGBTQ+ ideologues, including Tim Pool and Chaiya “Libs of TikTok” Raichik, pounced on the opportunity to push a “woke shooting game” narrative, with Pool’s wildly original slogan “Call of Groomers” eking its way onto Twitter’s Trending page last week. (Small wonder; Twitter’s infamous new CEO Elon Musk is a big fan of both Pool and Raichik.)
Protestors clash outside the district offices as Glendale police declare a unlawful assembly as they protest for and against how gender and sexuality identity should be taught to children, and protected in schools during a school board meeting at the Glendale Unified School District offices in Glendale on Tuesday, June 6, 2023.
Accusing Call of Duty — a game that glorifies deadly real-life militarism while its developers somehow insist they’re apolitical — of being “woke” seems absurd in any context, even as conservatives wage their own form of modern warfare against Bud Light, Target, and Chick-Fil-A. But as Miles Klee noted in Rolling Stone this week, this particular reactionary outburst is “a revealing throwback to the troll movement” known as Gamergate, which forged pipelines of online extremism that persist 10 years later. What began as a misogynistic harassment campaign dressed up as a movement for “ethics in journalism” ended up influencing the 2016 U.S. elections in ways much of the political class failed to predict.
Of course, there are few real heroes in this story; although Activision Blizzard is still giving us new pew-pew queers to play in Overwatch 2 (and even removed a cop car from a Pride-themed map), they have still been accused of union-busting anti-labor tactics. In an Inverse report on the company culture, one nonbinary former employee recalled “several coworkers complaining about the ‘SJW’ and the ‘Alphabet people.”
Just like Anheuser-Busch and other large corporations that make small gestures of respect towards LGBTQ+ people, we shouldn’t expect the executives who own Activision Blizzard to act out of any other interest than their own bottom line. But while you shouldn’t rush out to buy Call of Duty just because of this latest fiasco, consider that if you already own it, there’s also never been a better time to be annoyingly gay in online voice chat. Now who identifies as an attack helicopter, nerds?
All this because this guy posted the following: “They should leave little children alone. That’s the real issue”.
How could someone say something so terrible?
The LGBTq etc enforcers have labeled anyone who objects the sexualization of young children as far right extremists, and very dangerous. They oppose Christians in general.
...which was the entirety of the post. At what point that became "anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda" is the real issue here and it is very revealing. The author of this nasty little hit piece needs to explain herself. "Leave children alone" is negative? Is that because she thinks abusing children is pro-LGBTQ+? Apparently so.
“Samantha the Groomer”
Guess I should have known this faggot shit was coming after what COD vanguard did. Blacks and women won the war, Whites are all nazis, the usual tripe.
I’m not sure what a “war game” is. Real time/turn based strategy? Tactical small unit movement? There’s no such genre as a “war game.”
'Call of Duty' is a first person shooter video game.
Tactics II?
>> Wokism is starting to get out of hand
It’s been out of hand for many years
Everything the left touches turns to $hit.
I stick with the legacy Battlefield 1942 and BF Vietnam stand alone ms.
Oh wow I haven’t seen MBT in eons
Gettysburg
Being a bisexual woman who’s been a gamer since the age of four (yeah, Intelevision!), I get annoyed as sh¡t with this PRIDE crap. The gamer who made the post has my support wholeheartedly. Call of Duty is- er... Was one of my favorite franchises, so I won’t be spending any further money on that developer’s content.
I remember being in middle school in the late ‘90’s when it was a gigantic fad for the girls to claim they were bisexual, which really annoyed those of us who actually were. What’s happening now with the tranny fad among kids is the same thing, only way more harmful and being pushed by an ideological legion of pr¡cks and perverts.
Indeed, they should leave the children alone.
"them" (Whoever the Hell that is!)
If I owned the game, I'd burn the disc and/or close the account.
Eff activision AND this a-hole blogger.
Piker. It’s GDW’s “Fire in the East” and “Scorched Earth”. Now, “those are wargames” in my Crocodile Dundee voice. Sadly, long out of print.
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