Aidan Foster-Carter has a career in consulting awaiting him once he gives up on truth. He should have just penned a cooing paean to Homefront. The only act more illuminating of the human predicament than making Homefront is an earnest rant that will probably sell more games than dissuade – assuming anyone reads it.

Speaking of China, my initial hunch turns out to be correct. If you’re going to play paranoid invasion games, then Beijing would make a less ludicrously implausible foe. Sure enough, that was the original casting. The gaming website Kotaku gave the game away in a revealing article on January 13, 2011. Why the switch? As Kotaku’s paradoxical headline put it: “China Is Both Too Scary and Not Scary Enough To Be Video Game Villains.”[9] More precisely, Homefront needed a scary enemy, a nation that gamers could believe would be capable of invading the United States in a decade or so. Russians? No, too 80s. Chinese? The Chinese seemed like good candidates for this and were initially going to be the … villains. Except [as a THQ executive put it]: “China is like America’s factory …Everything you buy is made in China. It’s all friendly. Everything’s made there, from games, to every toy to everything. So they’re not that scary.”

Well, there’s also the other problem with our un-scary friends across the Pacific. They may not be the kind of guys to laugh off some fun American video game about the Chinese invading and oppressing the U.S. of A. [The THQ executive] recalls getting a word of caution from some of the personnel at his company. “The guys in our Chinese office said: Did you know that everybody on the exec team will be banned from coming into China for the rest of your lives? They were afraid the ministry of culture was going to wipe us out.”

So North Korea it is—and not only for Homefront. Exactly the same has happened with the remake of Red Dawn—only belatedly, and much more expensively. This was filmed in 2009 already, with the PRC replacing the former USSR as the dastardly invaders repelled by mid-Western farm kids. But then somebody got cold feet about how Beijing might react:

As result, the filmmakers now are digitally erasing Chinese flags and military symbols from Red Dawn, substituting dialogue and altering the film to depict much of the invading force as being from North Korea, an isolated country where American media companies have no dollars at stake.[10]

North Korea makes an easy villain, but that’s no excuse. Everything about Homefront sticks in my craw, especially when they have the nerve to claim plausibility for such utter rubbish.

How ironic, that, in a country that boasts of its commercial prowess and freedom of expression as ideological weapons against a Chinese foe it doesn’t understand, Americans shrink from offending Chinese censors! This “Interview with a Central Party Official about Food Shortages in North Korea” is almost as entertaining. I’ve already mocked Homefront. It’s a fitting tribute to American capitalism – that might just prompt a few anemic kids to go east. The game’s shortcomings pale beside the actual security policies of a government trapped in its own newspeak. The game shouldn’t be ridiculed, but rather extolled for the artifact of one company’s mockery of American society’s loving adoration of its own ignorance it truly is.

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Filed under: Korea, Military, Movies/Media, USA Tagged: aidan foster-carter, china, dprk, homefront