I've already written plenty about Homefront, and the video game doesn't even come out until next spring. But there seems to be plenty to worry about. The game imagines a geo-political nightmare scenario in which a unified Korea invades and occupies the United States. And you, the gamer, are part of the resistance against the evil Asian invaders.
This recent Kotaku article examines Homefront, and talks about why the game is so unsettling: A Video Game That Dares To Make Americans Angry.
While I appreciate that this game is trying to realistically depict the human cost of war, something that most war video games fail or don't even attempt to do, you can't overlook the blatant fact that Homefront is exploiting American anxieties and fears of foreign powers. Especially when they take the shape of an evil Asian man holding a machine gun. This part, however, was kind of interesting:
I played the beginning of the upcoming first-person shooter Homefront and I felt a burning urge in the game to do right with the trigger of a virtual gun. Homefront is set in a near-future United States that has become occupied by a bellicose unified Korea.
Early on, in what would be cliche in film but feels novel in a game, my character was arrested in his U.S. apartment by Korean occupation police, handcuffed, shoved into a bus and forced to ride past lines of Americans taken prisoner. As the bus rolled past, I saw enemy soldiers roughing up civilians.
And then I heard the pitched, despairing voice of a mother telling her child not to look. To turn away. To not let what was going to happen next be an unforgetable scar. The scene came into view: a child wailing as his parents are lined up against a wall and shot to death.
I wanted to climb out of that bus and take action. Soon, a resistance fighter rammed the bus with a truck, freed my character and handed me a machine gun. For the first time in a war game, I wanted to make the bad guys pay.
Homefront is a game targeted at American anxieties, one primed for jingoism. This is a near-future America crippled by economic downturn and invaded by a surging Asian rival. Its portrayal of the Korean enemy will be tempered, though, Votypka said, by a discovery in the game of an internment camp where Korean Americans are held, a reference to America's treatment of its Japanese citizens during World War II.That sounds like a nice touch -- I'm surprised it even occurred to anyone to include that in the game's narrative -- though it doesn't do much to quell my deep concerns about this game. If anything, this article makes the game sound even worse. In Homefront, you're not just detachedly shooting up the faceless bad guys -- the game is designed to make you upset and angry, and then shoot the bad guys. The evil Asian bad guys.
