Homefront under the microscope

Currently I've been playing this XBOX 360 game called Homefront. The basic premise is that Kim Jong-Il dies and his son Kim Jon-Un takes control of North Korea then Northern and Southern Korea unite and subsequently invade the United States. You play as a former pilot who gets rescued from the Koreans by a resistance group that is but a shell of the former US military. You fight to sabotage the Koreans and reclaim the United States.

Overall the game humanizes the war experience much more than your typical war game (like Call of Duty). But, it also severely dehumanizes Koreans and portrays them as brutal and savage. There is a constant contrast between the war torn community that America has become and the merciless Koreans. While it is refreshing for a game to finally show a more humanized account of war, it is interesting that this level humanization seems to only appear when the US is attacked.

The fire fights take place in suburbia and in the labor camps that the Koreans set up. This setting is very atypical in war games. Usually they take place in fields and other landscape free of people or civilization. This setting seems more realistic and along with the helpless civilians and babies crying in the background which the player must protect makes the war seem more humanistic and less of a simple killing spree.

The Koreans are depicted basically as Nazis are. There are concentration camps and mass graves. They are bent on world domination. The player witnesses the Koreans kill the two parents of a young boy while he watches and screams. The only thing that seems missing is grotesque experiments on the Americans.

Here is a clip of the beginning of the game, players see the Koreans brutally kill and round up Americans:

Their are two characters who rescue the player from a labor camp and they fight with the player throughout the rest of the game. One of these characters is a female who looks like a Chicana and the other is a white male who appears to be in his fifties. The female's character does not get developed very well. The male seems like the stereotypical uber-macho drill Sargent, his name is Conner. Conner constantly makes references to male genitalia throughout the game. He also has an unwavering hatred for the Koreans.

Homefront capitalizes on American nationalism through depictions of American innocence anOd Korean maleficence. What is most interesting about this game is that it both challenges and reinforces American idealism. On the one hand America has been invaded and that flies in the face of what many Americans believe about their country's power. On the other hand the game reinforces the idea that Americans are the good guys and our enemies are purely evil. This simplistic model is the very foundation of nationalism and outgroup hostility.

This hyper-nationalism is particularly present in post 9/11 America. Positioning the US as victims of the purely evil Koreans is not only harmful to Koreans, it blinds us to our own faults as a nation. While I'd rather not go into the many criticisms our foreign policy welcomes, I'd like to suggest that we should be more introspective about our place as a nation among many others. Games such as Homefront help stimulate an unreflexive mentality, teaching us to simply react to our own interpretation of events without thinking about the effects of our actions and attitudes on others. In short, this game has profound power to teach people to simply emote during conflict, rather than to engage in dialog.

Another profound problem of the game is its caricaturization of Koreans. Stereotypes about North Koreans is bad enough, considering most Americans have never even met someone from North Korea. But, to group in South Koreans, as if they have any affinity to Kim Jun-Il or his son demonstrates profound ignorance and insensitivity. The caricatures of Koreans in the game are akin to Nazis, arguably the most hated group of people today.

This portrayal of Koreans is certainly racist. But, what is more important is the work that this caricature does. Video games are a favorite pastime today with a market that reaches kids and adults. The tones of xenophobia and hyper-nationalism are intensely salient in America today. This game capitalizes on those trends, but it also reinforces them encouraging people to kill virtual Koreans. I'm not arguing against violence in video games, that is a topic for another day. I am saying that perpetuating xenophobia, racism, and hyper-nationalism is harmful, both to our own development and to especially those we cast as outsiders.

The mass graves: