Monstrous Regiment

It seems that Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will allow the player to choose between a male and female player character for the campaign, to much celebration from those durned SJWs. But I'm a little more cynical about this.

Consider what Call of Duty's single-player campaign is and has always been about. Its message is clear: a good soldier is a tool, not a person. You are expected to subsume your identity beneath your uniform. You are the property of the United States Government, and you will follow orders. The titular duty of the game trumps who you are.

With that in mind, what does it even mean to have a choice of gender? On the one hand, you're being told that you can choose your identity; on the other, that your identity doesn't even fucking matter. The choice is immediately undermined by the theme of the game.

I don't believe that this is a bad move on the part of Treyarch/Activision; simply a confusing one. It harks back to what I wrote before about the difference between normalisation and humanisation of women. Sure, it's good to have the normalising influence of one of the top-selling video game franchises saying "female characters are playable now - get over it", but it is a franchise that depends on the dehumanisation of its protagonists.

The surface statement - "Women can do whatever men can do" - is certainly a positive one. But it's a statement that feels like it glosses over a lot of gender issues. The subtext to the statement is that being a woman doesn't mean anything. Women are interchangeable with men when they're both nothing more than cogs to be slotted into the military machine. Call of Duty is treating women as people in the same way it treats men as people, which is to say not at all.

I don't want to sound too negative about this. Treyarch have realised that there is no reason the player character shouldn't be female, and have accordingly made that an option. More developers should do that. I celebrate it. But when you look at the reason there's no reason, at why a female character can be included, it gets uncomfortable. Call of Duty is including a female player character not because gender matters, but because it doesn't. And my celebration of that is considerably more muted.

Of course, this is all speculation. I'm assuming Black Ops 3 won't deviate from previous entries in the franchise in other ways. Maybe it will humanise its protagonists more. Maybe it will tell a more personal story. But I doubt it.