The birth of video games was not driven by corporations or political committees but it was forged in university labs, basements, and garages by men pushing the limits of technology and competition. The earliest war games, from Spacewar! to Brothers in Arms, were about challenge, sacrifice, and the brotherhood that exists between men who carry the burden of war. These games honored not just victory, but the emotional and physical weight of combat, things only those willing to bleed for others could understand. But since 2014, the face of war gaming has changed. No longer rooted in truth, the genre has been repainted with the colors of DEI inclusion, corporate identity mandates, and safe-market optics. What once honored the man who died for his brother now flatters the consumer who wants a pink camo skin. This shift isn’t just cosmetic, it’s a moral loss. Its no longer gaming but gayming.
The original war games were unapologetically masculine. Spacewar! (1962), the first real video combat game, was coded by young men at MIT as a duel of reflexes and strategy. Castle Wolfenstein (1981) dropped players into Nazi territory as a lone Allied male soldier, sneaking, surviving, and resisting because that’s what war was. When Brothers in Arms arrived in 2005, it wasn’t flashy, it was reverent. You led a squad of real men, based on actual soldiers, and every death had weight. These games didn’t add female soldiers because they weren’t there. War wasn’t about what looked good, it was about who made it back. This masculine foundation wasn’t exclusion. It was realism. The entire weight of the battlefield rested on male shoulders for 6 [SIXTH] thousands of years, and early war games respected that truth.
But around 2014, the gaming world changed. Following the cultural fallout of Gamergate, developers and studios came under pressure to make games “inclusive.” so called DEI policy. Suddenly, game rosters needed balance not of skill, but identity. Call of Duty: Warzone began featuring female operators on the frontlines, pride flag charms, and trans-themed calling cards. Battlefield V threw realism out the window with prosthetic-armed female snipers in World War II, an era where almost no women fought in such roles. This wasn’t about honoring real women who served in other capacities. It was about appearances, DEI. The stories became softer, the characters more performative. Realism was no longer the priority visibility was. But war, by nature, is not an inclusive space. It is brutal, selective, and male for a reason. To pretend otherwise is not progress and it is DEI wokeism propaganda.
COD Mobile, oddly enough, reveals the truth underneath all this. For years, its most iconic face was not Ghost, Soap, or Price, but Urban Tracker a completely original female operator with no backstory, no historical presence, and no connection to the Call of Duty OG franchise’s roots. She was featured in ads, app store icons, and battle passes. Why? Not because she was a symbol of empowerment, but because she sold well. Male players were more likely to spend thousand of dollars on skins and crates featuring her or any women characters. She was a marketing tool. While the DEI narrative didn’t apply on CODM since Tencent [Timi Studios] develop this game in China with severe rules and ristriction from the CCP but this moves was more about profit. And when Warzone Mobile failed and the franchise faced backlash, the CODM icon was quietly switched to Ghost in 2025. It wasn’t ideology driving the image, it was the market reacting to reality. When fantasy failed, masculinity toyed again.
The inclusion of women in front-line war game roles is often defended as a matter of representation or fairness. But in reality, this practice flattens the profound, unequal burden that men have historically carried into a cheap fantasy of equality. In real wars from ancient civilizations to the world wars of the 20th century, men marched, fought, and died while women stayed behind to tend, raise, and rebuild. This wasn’t oppression; it was a survival order rooted in biology, necessity, and civilization. The physical and psychological demands of war were never something most women wanted or could endure, nor were they asked to except in the rarest, exceptional cases. To now place women as digital front-line avatars in every military scenario is not only historically dishonest, it also desecrates the moral seriousness of war itself. These games no longer ask, “Who will carry the weight?” They ask, “How can we make everyone feel included or how can we makes profit with female characters?” But war, by its very nature, does not include, it wounds, breaks, and selects. Turning it into a platform for symbolic parity instead of gritty realism does not empower women, it diminishes the men who actually bore the burden.
The realities of military service especially in infantry and special operations demolish the idea that men and women are physically equal in combat. U.S. Marine Corps integration testing in 2015 provided the most comprehensive analysis to date. The results were clear: all-male units outperformed mixed-gender units in 69% of tactical tasks, including speed of movement under load, obstacle navigation, and casualty evacuation. Female Marines were six times more likely to be injured, particularly in tasks involving load-bearing or sustained stress. These numbers were so stark that even military leaders sympathetic to integration hesitated to change unit standards. The British Ministry of Defence reported similar findings. In 2016, when the UK lifted its ban on women in combat roles, follow-up testing showed female recruits consistently underperformed in core infantry requirements like loaded marches, fireman’s carry evacuations, and body drag simulations. Injury rates for women entering basic infantry training were 2–3 times higher than for men. In Israel, often held up as a model of “equality,” the truth is less progressive: while women are conscripted, only 3% serve in combat-adjacent units, and most are kept in border patrol or logistical command. The elite units like Sayeret Matkal, Duvdevan, Mossad or Shayetet 13 remain male-only, for one reason: performance. Even the Russian military, where ideology does not pretend to erase biology, keeps combat battalions male-dominated. These facts are not discrimination, they are reality. When war games like Call of Duty insert female operators into every squad as if equality is natural on the battlefield, they are not empowering women, they are insulting the brutal, biological cost men have paid for centuries. Games that once honored that weight have traded it for appearances. And in doing so, they have lost something sacred.
The truth is simple: war games used to reflect the lives of men who fought and died. They were built on grit, sacrifice, and realism. Now they’re platforms for DEI wokeism identity signaling, built to avoid offense, not to honor truth. It’s not that women can’t serve, or shouldn’t play games, of course they can. But the battlefield, real or digital, is not a costume party. It is a place of weight, blood, and brotherhood. And when that reality is replaced with optics, the genre loses its soul. We need less pandering and more truth. Because war ; real or simulated is not for show. It is for those who stand.
Reference
Liu, B., Zhou, K. Z., Zhu, D., & Park, J. (2023). Uncovering gender stereotypes in video game character designs: A multi-modal analysis of Honor of Kings. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.14226
Olsson, M. (2018). A reception analysis of female soldiers in the online discourse of Battlefield V. DiVA Open Digital Repository. Retrieved from https://www.diva-portal.org
Reeve, J. (2018, December 21). How historical accuracy became a euphemism. VICE.
Graft, K. (2018, June 10). “This is not okay”: EA minces no words on backlash against women in Battlefield. GameDeveloper.
Seck, H. H. (2015, September 10). Mixed-gender teams come up short in Marines’ infantry experiment. Marine Corps Times.
Peralta, E. (2015, September 10). Marine Corps study finds all-male combat units faster than mixed units. NPR.
Time Magazine. (2015, September 10). All-male combat troops outperform mixed units. Time.
Cox, M. (2015, October 2). New details question validity of Marine Corps gender-integration study. Military.com.
Task & Purpose. (2015, October). Analysis of full Marine Corps gender study reveals weaknesses in methodology. Task & Purpose.
Time Magazine. (2015, December 3). Sending women to war. Time.
Time Magazine. (2015, December). Secretary of Navy: allowing women in every combat role was overdue. Time.
Time Magazine. (2015, December). More female Marines doesn’t mean a stronger force. Time.
Wikipedia contributors. (2025, Month Day). Gender representation in video games. In Wikipedia. Retrieved Month Day, Year, from URL
Wikipedia contributors. (2025, Month Day). Sexism and video games. In Wikipedia. Retrieved Month Day, Year, from URL
Sarkeesian, A. (2013–2017). Tropes vs. Women in Video Games [YouTube series]. Feminist Frequency.
Vedres, B., & Vasarhelyi, O. (2022). Inclusion unlocks the creative potential of gender diversity in teams. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.08505
Tags
Commentary