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.
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.