Voice Actors Say Only Gay People Can Play Their Games During Pride Month

Video Games

Video game voice actors are having a normal one, specifically three from Valorant and Overwatch 2.  If you haven’t been reminded enough to remember by now, it’s pride month, and shooters seem particularly interested in making their players aware. (I have a theory about this: these games tend to attract masculine gamers.) Activision has rainbow-colored guns and gear for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone, and now, some of the voices of Valorant and Overwatch 2 characters are demanding that only gay people be allowed to play the games for the month of June. Alejandro Antonio Ruiz, who plays a character named Gekko in Valorant, kicked things off by tweeting this on June 1:

🌈✨ you are now required to be lgbt to play valorant. being a straight VAL player is illegal for the next 30 days. 💜🦎#Pride2024 #valorant pic.twitter.com/Z7DfebZIam

— Alejandro Antonio Ruiz (@AlejandroRuizVO) June 1, 2024

His sentiment was echoed in the comments by Isla Campbell, who plays Clove, another character in Valorant:

I agree, It’s the law.

— Isla Campbell 🦋 (@ilerpiler) June 1, 2024

Then, Valeria Rodríguez, who voices a character named Venture in Overwatch 2, shared Ruiz’s post and declared that the same goes for Overwatch:

I’m just gonna copy this and say it’s the same for Overwatch.

Sorry straights 😞 https://t.co/9p3YLfyFw0

— Valeria Rodriguez 🎃👻 (@ElvisBadger) June 1, 2024

As if there were any doubt, when a user said to imagine what would happen if the roles were reversed, Rodríguez dismissed the notion:

Nah

— Valeria Rodriguez (@ElvisBadger) June 3, 2024

Don’t let me keep you in suspense: all three have their pronouns in their X bios, and all three are confusing. Ruiz’s are “he/them” (and he adds “causing may/hem;” the Fonz wishes he were that cool), Campbell’s are “they/them” (and she lists herself as “boyfriend to some, girlfriend to others;” astonishingly, this is the most logical of the three pronoun listings), and Rodríguez’s are “they/he/she” (I’d have thought “they” would have covered them all, but trying to make sense of this stuff is a fool’s errand).

Obviously, this is not an official policy of Valorant or Overwatch; it’s just their wacko voice actors having hissy fits on social media for attention. But I wonder about the wisdom of carrying on like this from a business standpoint; do you think this will make people want to play the games? In a vacuum, it would probably have no effect, and it probably won’t even with the ubiquity of this attitude, but given how much hostility the gaming industry has shown towards anyone who doesn’t want DEI and other woke stuff in the games they play, I can see people reading these posts and leaving the games out of frustration. (Of course, the actors have already been paid all they’ll get, so they probably don’t care if Valorant or Overwatch crashes and burns.) The user’s hypothetical about the roles being reversed is moot because it would never happen; nobody would even want gay people banned from playing a video game, and any who did surely wouldn’t post about it. And I’d venture a guess that the same is true of gay gamers; I guarantee you that most gay people don’t think or behave this way. This is why so many people are opposed to introducing sociopolitical ideology into video games and other forms of entertainment; aside from breaking the immersion, it pits gamers of various backgrounds against each other instead of allowing everyone to enjoy the games as they always have.

Thanks to That Park Place for alerting me to this.