When Activision's 2020 game Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War allowed players to create a non-binary character for its campaign mode, many celebrated it as a watershed moment for LGBTQ+ representation in gaming. For the first time in the franchise's history, players could choose "they/them" pronouns for their covert operative character. Yet this seemingly progressive step came with a peculiar historical dissonance: the game is set in 1981, during the Reagan administration—an era marked by explicit homophobia and systematic discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals in the military.
This contradiction exemplifies a broader phenomenon in contemporary military video games, where surface-level diversity masks and reinforces deeper systems of power. The integration of marginalized identities into military gaming narratives reveals not just the evolution of video game representation, but how the military-entertainment complex co-opts the language of inclusion to serve imperial objectives.
The New Face of War Games
Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War isn't alone in its awkward embrace of contemporary identity politics. Games across the military shooter genre are racing to foreground marginalized characters:
Battlefield V features playable female resistance fighters and Senegalese colonial troops
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare introduced its first female protagonist, the Urzik militia fighter Farah Karim
Rainbow Six Siege added its first openly gay operator, Flores, complete with backstory about his loving husband
Multiple games now offer female character skins and pride-themed cosmetic items
The gaming press has largely celebrated these additions. When Rainbow Six announced its gay character, PinkNews reported that fans were "here for the queer representation." One player tweeted triumphantly: "The new Rainbow Six operator is canonically married to a man, which means that yes, I win. I finally, after six years, win."
But what exactly are we winning? And more importantly - who benefits from these superficial victories?
The Limits of Representation
Traditional media theory suggests two main arguments for the importance of diverse representation:
Players want to see characters like themselves
Playing as different types of characters helps build empathy and understanding
These arguments assume that controlling a character creates meaningful identification - that players somehow "become" their virtual avatar in ways that transcend passive media consumption.
But military shooters fundamentally undermine this possibility in several ways:
The Empty Avatar
Most representation in these games comes through purely cosmetic "skins" that can be swapped at will. In Call of Duty's multiplayer modes, your character's gender or race has no impact on gameplay. Even dedicated players often choose skins based on rarity or status signaling rather than identification. A misogynist player might happily use a female skin if it demonstrates their skill level or achievement.
The few characters who do get narrative development, like Call of Duty's Farah, are constrained by the genre's mechanics. First-person shooters deliberately limit your view of your character to maintain immersion - you rarely see more than hands holding weapons. The frantic pace and focus on combat leaves little room for meaningful character development or exploration of identity.
As game scholar Adrienne Shaw has shown, players don't automatically identify with characters just because they share demographic traits. The act of play itself often makes players too self-reflexive to engage in deeper identification.
The Tyranny of Genre
Military shooters are built on a shared vocabulary of rules, mechanics, and conventions that inherently reinforce militaristic values regardless of who the player character is. These games measure success through body count and territorial control. Their core loop revolves around domination through superior firepower and technology.
No matter how diverse the character roster becomes, the underlying logic remains the same - might makes right, violence solves problems, and Western military power is the ultimate arbiter of justice.
Even "realistic" military games present a deeply warped version of combat that centres individual heroics over actual military experience. Your kill count in a single mission often exceeds that of even the most prolific real-world soldiers. The tedium, trauma, and moral ambiguity of actual war are carefully filtered out.
The Politics of the "Apolitical"
When confronted about these contradictions, game developers often claim their work is apolitical. Call of Duty's narrative director insists their stories about proxy wars and terrorism aren't political because they don't reference specific real-world governments or events.
This supposed neutrality masks how these games actively reshape history and current events to absolve Western powers. Modern Warfare includes a mission called "Highway of Death" where Russian forces massacre retreating civilians - directly mirroring a real war crime committed by US forces during the Gulf War. By transferring American atrocities onto designated enemies, the games participate in historical revisionism while claiming to be above politics.
The same dynamic applies to their handling of identity. Characters like Farah represent a very specific kind of "acceptable" diversity - one that upholds Western liberal values while fighting alongside American and British forces. She doesn't wear traditional Muslim dress or challenge colonial power structures. She exists to help "liberate" her homeland on Western terms.
The Military-Industrial Complex Goes Woke
This sanitized inclusion reflects broader trends in how military and intelligence institutions market themselves. The CIA now produces recruitment videos highlighting their commitment to intersectional diversity - like the widely-mocked ad featuring a Latina officer proudly declaring "I am a woman of color... I am intersectional... I am unapologetically me."
Defense contractors have similarly embraced progressive language while continuing to profit from war. Raytheon partners with the Girl Scouts to promote STEM education while their weapons kill civilians in Yemen. Lockheed Martin's female CEO gives speeches about women's empowerment while heading the world's largest arms manufacturer.
This isn't new - colonial powers have long used the language of liberation to justify conquest. British consul Lord Cromer cited women's rights to justify colonizing Egypt while simultaneously opposing women's suffrage at home. What's changed is the expansion of this logic to include sexual and gender identity alongside feminism.
Homonationalism and the Rainbow Empire
Scholar Jasbir Puar calls this phenomenon "homonationalism" - how Western states use gay rights as proof of their moral superiority and justification for military intervention. The same dynamic that leads Israel to promote Tel Aviv's gay-friendly culture to deflect from Palestinian occupation now sees rainbow flags draped over drone control stations.
This creates what Puar calls "sexual exceptionalism" - a regulatory script that doesn't just define acceptable queerness but also reinforces racial and national hierarchies. The gay soldier or trans CIA agent becomes possible specifically through the exclusion and demonization of racial and sexual others who "need not apply."
Military games perfectly embody this dynamic. They offer carefully controlled diversity that never challenges underlying power structures. Your character can be gay or non-binary as long as they still faithfully execute American foreign policy. They can be female or non-white as long as they uphold Western military supremacy.
Beyond False Inclusion
None of this means representation doesn't matter. Diverse characters in games can be meaningful and important. But representation without liberation - inclusion that serves to legitimize rather than challenge systems of power - ultimately reinforces the status quo.
The military shooter genre is particularly unsuited for meaningful representation precisely because its core purpose is celebrating and promoting Western military power. No amount of surface-level diversity can change that fundamental dynamic.
What we need instead are games (and other media) that imagine genuine alternatives - that don't just put marginalized faces on imperial violence but question the systems that perpetuate both war and oppression. Games that recognize how militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and discrimination intersect and reinforce each other.
Until then, watching Reagan greenlight war crimes through they/them pronouns will remain a darkly fitting metaphor for how diversity is weaponized in service of empire. The military-entertainment complex may have learned to speak the language of inclusion, but its fundamental message remains unchanged: Western military power is righteous, and violence is the path to justice. We shouldn't mistake better marketing for meaningful progress.
