Another day, another multibillion-dollar corporate giant in the crosshairs of the “anti-woke” right. This time, it’s Activision Blizzard, the fifth-largest video game firm in the world, that aggrieved reactionaries are threatening to boycott.
As with so many of these stories, the inciting “controversy” is ridiculously minor. Nickmercs (real name Nick Kolcheff), a streamer who came up playing games including Activision’s Call of Duty titles and now has millions of subscribers across Twitch and YouTube, earlier this year partnered with the brand to launch his own “skin” in the war-based, first-person shooter franchise — fans could purchase these assets to play the game as his custom character. There are strong opinions in the gaming world about these influencer partnerships, so not everyone was thrilled with the addition. But that’s not even the main story here.
No, the real drama erupted a week after the Nickmercs bundle went on sale, when Kolcheff tweeted in apparent support of anti-LGBTQ protesters who fought LGBTQ supporters in Glendale, California outside a school board meeting about recognizing Pride Month. Replying to Esports broadcaster Chris Puckett, who shared a video of the chaotic brawl and tweeted, “Let people love who they love and live your own life,” Kolcheff wrote: “They should leave little children alone. That’s the real issue.”
By the next day, Activision had removed the Nickmercs products from their stores, and the Call of Duty Twitter account seemed to confirm that the decision was connected to Kolcheff’s comment on the Glendale fracas. The game also reiterated their commitment to Pride Month. (It has featured Pride content for several years.) Activision did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment as to whether the decision to cut ties with Kolcheff was prompted by additional factors.
The same right-wingers who have lately pounced on Bud Light, Disney, Target and Chik-fil-A for efforts at expanding diversity and inclusion fired up the outrage machine to retaliate, with gamers announcing their intent to quit Call of Duty forever. Kolcheff didn’t back down from the tweet, saying on a stream that he thinks LGBTQ identities shouldn’t be discussed in school while arguing that the comment “wasn’t anti-gay.” Another big streamer with a custom CoD bundle, TimTheTatman (real name Timothy Betar), tweeted that Kolcheff was a friend and he therefore wanted his own product removed in solidarity — a request that Activision granted. His post received more than a quarter of a million likes and thousands of supportive comments.
The outrage campaign that quickly took shape around the incident mocked Call of Duty as “Call of Groomers,” alluding to the baseless homophobic and transphobic smear which holds that any discussion of queerness and gender with children is a pretext for pedophiles to prey on them. While not particularly catchy — and despite CoD only grooming kids for military recruitment — the slogan succeeded on Twitter, to the delight of major “anti-woke” influencers.
On first glance, this wave of indignation over a company’s nominal endorsement of Pride is exactly like the dozen or so that preceded it. If there’s an obvious difference, it’s that a violent video game glorifying war has stretched the reactionaries’ already strained definitions of “wokeness” to their absolute breaking point.
But this freaking out that a popular shoot-em-up entertainment has somehow been breached by liberal attitudes of acceptance is also a revealing throwback to the troll movement that opened the floodgates to such crusades almost a decade ago: Gamergate. In 2014 and 2015, male gamers waged relentless misogynistic harassment of women in the industry, using the excuse of a trumped-up media scandal to vent their fury at what they saw as progressive and feminist values in games. Targets were doxxed and threatened with rape and violence as these men lamented the supposed collapse of a purely masculine climate. In those days, the “woke” crowd was maligned as an army of “social justice warriors.”
The recent Call of Duty blowback of course follows the script of the past year’s increasingly extreme anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. However, it also echoes the old Gamergate narrative: a pastime regarded as dude-ish and heteronormative, resistant to any incursion of outsiders, now recognizes a diverse set of fans. You can no longer retreat into the sexless, murderous world of Call of Duty without risking the sight of a rainbow flag and getting incredibly mad that gay people exist — even online, on a virtual battlefield. Worse still, Activision welcomes those customers.
It’s a useful case study in the projection that underlies the past decade of right-wing resentment. For all the times that side claims liberals and leftists need the coddling comfort of “safe spaces” to operate in society, conservatives are the ones predictably incensed by the appearance of anyone else on the cultural territory they claim as their own: beer, big box stores, fast food, amusement parks, and, naturally, video games. The right feels threatened by the knowledge that they have no monopoly over these things — and they threaten “newcomers” in kind.
Moreover, the anti-LGBTQ activists must know this is a fight they can’t really win, except as a small and seething political class that tries to oppress and intimidate the larger, more tolerant whole of the country. Humans continue to defy and surpass traditional norms and categories. Companies, seeking to maximize profit, cater to as many of them as possible. The joke nowadays is that the right is cutting ties with so many brands, they’ll eventually have to go back to sewing their clothes and growing their food. But what the Call of Duty story reveals is that they won’t run out of stuff to protest — they can always start over at the beginning.