I don’t know much about Call of Duty or other violent war video games (I’m much more of an Animal Crossing/Zelda gamer myself), but I do know, even without frequenting those games, there’s a ton of wildly racist and misogynistic shit that often goes down in COD lobbies and in other online gaming communities, with slurs and racist gamer tags fully normalized. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the mass protests that ensued last June, Call of Duty’s developer pledged to crack down on racism in their own gaming communities but offered little detail on how they would accomplish that.
Well, apparently not much has been fixed, because almost a year later, rapper/singer T-Pain, who gave us iconic mid-2000 bops like “Buy U a Drank” and “Bartender,” was recently harassed while playing COD online by a group of racists who yelled “fuck Black Lives Matter” and called the rapper the N-word.
Unfortunately, it seems the only way to shut a bunch of racist gamers up is to completely annihilate them at the game they’re playing, which is exactly what T-Pain did. In a now-viral video posted by T-Pain to his TikTok account and reposted by internet news and commentary Twitter account @defnoodles, the rapper can be seen completely wiping out the team of racists. Again, I don’t exactly know how COD works and regrettably cannot give you a play-by-play here, but you can watch the video below, which includes some solid commentary by T-Pain.
A satisfying conclusion, yes, but still an obvious indicator of the gaming world’s casual (and not-so-casual) racism. Perhaps the incident and T-Pain’s celebrity status will urge developers to actually do something about harassment this time, though it’s highly doubtful.
More Like This
Thanks for reading InsideHook. Sign up for our daily newsletter and be in the know.
