Readers discuss why it’s so hard to properly invade the United States
America At War
This week, Drew Toal took us on a tour of an occupied America in his review of Homefront: The Revolution. The game is set in a world where North Korea has somehow become the world’s dominant superpower, and after years of putting up with the United States’ inability to pay back its national debts, North Korea decides to just swoop in and take over. It’s like Wolfenstein: The New Order crossed with Red Dawn, but Wolfman Jew isn’t sure if there’s even a way to make that setup work:
Damn, that plot…it’s idiotic even by the standards of modern shooters. I get that “America under siege” (not to be confused with American Under Siege, where Steven Seagal stuffs Tommy Lee Jones’ head in a microwave) is an exciting and admittedly compelling idea. We’ve been a superpower for so long that the vicarious thrill from an underdog conflict is enticing. But really, why even be a modern war shooter—a genre inherently based in at least some level of fetishistic realism—if you also want to go through these hoops? But fine, I’ll play ball and try to do this right: How would you make a shooter about a vulnerable America?
I guess, for me at least, the notion of America as weak isn’t really due to external problems so much as internal ones, from politicians who openly denigrate their own people to obstructive institutions that hinder the ability to make things potentially better. Because of that, I think that this shooter’s villains shouldn’t be an international force, but one comprised of our worst elements. It should be a violent, widespread faction, perhaps an odd collusion of different fringe groups that have risen up to take over major sections of the country. This would allow you to have more enemy types, create a plot where groups rise and fall over the course of the story, and set up a dichotomy between both the positive and negative aspects of the nation as being comprised of many separate polities.
BurgerOfTheDay has a suggestions, but it seems like the idea of a game about America under siege is simply too risky:
You’d have to do something like a new civil war, unless you went far enough into the future that political conditions in other countries could have changed enough to make them realistic threats.
A new civil war would definitely be too controversial and sensitive for any publisher to spend a lot of money on, but it would have a lot of potential. I’m sure the impulse would be to make it a modernized version of the actual Civil War, but there are a lot of political dynamics that would make it more complicated. This runs the risk of them just turning it into another “evil foreigners” game, but seeing how our allies and enemies react to and take advantage of a civil war in the U.S. would be really interesting.
As for North Korea, DJ JD has a theory on why the game stuck with such a relatively unlikely villain:
I think if you mentally replace “North Korea” with “China,” you’ll have the story they actually wrote. The idea that they might want to sell the game in China someday made the name-change necessary.
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