The Goofy Diversity Of Call Of Duty: Vanguard

Tokenism and historical whitewashing is not social justice.

Call Of Duty: Vanguard and Warzone Pacific bring the long-running shooter franchise back to WWII for the first time since 2017’s Call Of Duty: WWII. Much has changed in the intervening years.

Call Of Duty: WWII was basically modeled after Band Of Brothers. It told the story of a fictional airborne division and a small squad of American soldiers pushing from the beaches of Normandy into the German heartland toward the end of the war.

It was far from perfect, but the story was mostly pretty focused and very personal. Despite its shortcomings, it felt like a story about real people—the kind of people who fought and died in the second Great War. It was about soldiers.

In other words, it was about men.

Other than one mission in which you play as a female French spy, this was a game with predominantly male characters. This is because the vast majority of people who fought in WWII were men.

The game was also about white men, though one character was Jewish. That’s because the American military was segregated during WWII¹. Black troops did fight alongside white troops, but you didn’t start seeing mixed-race squads until later. Specifically, the American military was desegregated on July 26th, 1948 when president Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 which abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin" in the United States Armed Forces.

Interestingly, the US military was less racially segregated during the American Revolutionary War than it was during WWII. Korea was the first war since the American Civil War in which black and white troops fought side by side.

All of this matters because history matters. Yes, I realize that Call of Duty is a fantastical franchise with very flimsy ties to reality. Even so, I think it’s important that video games—even big, dumb games like COD—like all art, tread carefully when recreating history. Call Of Duty: WWII mostly did a pretty good job with this, though there was some controversy around character customization in multiplayer. The Allies and Axis troops could both be women and could both be various races, and people made fun of the fact that you could play as a black female Nazi.

Never fear with Call Of Duty: Vanguard. There are no playable Nazis in multiplayer. There are simply different factions, all of whom are apparently the good guys, because Vanguard has done almost nothing to faithfully represent WWII at all. Despite taking place across several fronts—in Asia, Africa and Europe—the game has almost no grounding in reality.

Unfortunately, instead of simply going full alt-history (think Wolfenstein) Vanguard wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants you to take its goofy campaign seriously and asks us all to pretend that racism didn’t exist in 1945 outside of Nazi Germany.

The core cast of the game is comprised of men and women with a black British officer as the leader of the elite squad—something no black soldiers were afforded in the deeply racist 40s’. The sniper character is a woman, but none of her comrades in arms treat her with even a hint of misogyny, because apparently the Allies were neither racist nor sexist at all. We’ll save all that for the Nazis.

John Walker wrote about this when the game came out and I agree with his take entirely:

Rather than attempt to actually confront any of the relevant issues that would have been faced by anyone at the time, the game instead takes the most pusillanimous route possible. You’ll never believe this, but, right, the Nazis were pretty racist. I know! The game’s cartoon villains snarl their bigotry, while our heroes are all dreadfully offended on behalf of each other. We know the Germans are the baddies, because they’re the naughty racist ones. The very notion would never cross the indefectible minds of any of the Allied characters.

Things venture more daringly when it comes to sexism, because of course they do. The female character, a Russian sniper, gets to say, “Because I’m a WOMAN?!” most of the times she gets a line, and here the game is so brave as to put some of the misogyny into the mouths of her teammates. Sorry, not mouths, mouth. The Australian one. Because we all know they’re a bit like that, eh? Them and their Sheilas. Bunch of drongos.

In its desperate attempts to avoid controversy, the game grabs at armfuls of it, and then defies reality in response. Having a Black British soldier take the lead demands so much interesting commentary, of which there is absolutely none.

This is a very good point. By all means, if you want to have a black British officer in your game, do so. But shouldn’t that be a remarkable fact that demands some sort of explanation? Instead, the game simply gives us a diverse cast and then walks away. There’s more effort to show how anti-Australian British officers were than to confront anything like racism in the Allied forces.

This bothers me because it’s whitewashing history in an effort to appeal to the “woke” crowd. Diversity for diversity’s sake is prized above things like historical accuracy, which doesn’t actually help women or minorities. I’m perfectly fine with the multiplayer content being diverse. How can it not be at this point? Making it a bunch of white dudes would require walking the franchise back several years and would cause major backlash and a public outcry. But I do find it kind of funny to see an image like this one and think to myself “Yeah, this is a WWII game alright.”

Let’s at least be a little aware of our own history in the single-player campaign, however. It is not sexist to portray WWII accurately. Millions upon millions of young men fought and died in that war. If anything, it’s sexist to suggest otherwise, to suggest that women were a major part of the fighting force rather than acknowledge their actual contributions to the war effort, which were numerous. Women sacrificed plenty during WWII and suffered enormously—including the loss of sons and husbands and fathers. In Europe and elsewhere, women suffered just the same as men as their homes were destroyed, their cities occupied. Jewish women and girls died alongside their families in death camps. Invading forces brought with them rape and assault and all the other horrors of war. Women did not avoid suffering in WWII, but only a very small number were in combat. But these games are too afraid to tackle the true suffering women faced.

I just want you to imagine, for a moment, Saving Private Ryan made with this same mentality. The platoon, magically desegregated, led by Denzel Washington instead of Tom Hanks. Ryan played by Julia Roberts instead of Matt Damon.

It would be more diverse, but would that diversity do anything to further the cause of equality or would it simply whitewash the past?

The goofy diversity of Call Of Duty: Vanguard is still better, in many ways, than how things used to be. I recently watched both the old and new Dune movies, and the casting for the new Dune is so much better. I think there are pretty much only white people in the 80s’ adaptation, which is preposterous when you think about how this is a story that takes place on a desert planet.

But I would still prefer to see accurate portrayals of history in games and film and TV rather than these attempts to make historical figures or events more diverse just so whatever corporation behind the product can get on the social justice bandwagon—not that they actually care about any of this shit, mind you. It’s all just self-serving.

Or just straight-up do alt-history. I would have loved it if Vanguard just threw it all out and had us fighting in a fantastical version of the war, with zeppelin battles over a fully occupied Great Britain ten years after the war actually ended, but Sledgehammer and Activision want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want us to take this game seriously, pretend that this is a realistic portrayal of the war, and get brownie points for tokenism.

At least the multiplayer is fun, though!

1. I think a game about a black squad in WWII would be fantastic, by the way. That could really delve not just into the war, but into the struggles faced by black troops specifically. That’s not a story we’ve heard about very much, either. Instead of focusing on diverse casting we should focus on stories told about a diversity of different people, and especially historically under-represented people.