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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh #53: War! Wheee! Wait, What?

I was following the press conferences, announcements and trailers at E3 last week, noting how the vast majority of new games coming out are shooters. First-Person and Third-Person Shooters are the genres that dominate the gaming scene and industry these days, with half of them set in post-apocalyptic settings while the rest have military settings.

The North Koreans invade America? Really?

This is the kind of thing I usually end up having to write notes for if it's a script I'm asked to read. Looking at the plot background provided in that trailer, it's all completely implausible and utterly bollocks on so many levels I barely know where to start. Well, I'll have to somehow. First of all, they assume that the North Korean army would be able to overrun South Korea and Japan, both of which have massive armies and weapons specifically aimed at fighting an invasion from the North Koreans and China. Second, that North Korea would then conquer Southeast Asia – that includes Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore. The first three on the list have massive landmasses and armies. Then there's the biggest plothole of all: that China is silent throughout this venture. There's no mention of them at all. China is no longer communist and now a market economy, and it doesn't serve their interest to let North Korea invade the rest of Asia. They supply North Korea with a lot of their electricity, fuel and food needs, and could easily cut them off if they saw fit, which would put the kibosh on North Korea trying anything at all. And then there's sheer manpower – you'd have to mobilize every man, woman and child in North Korea and you still wouldn't have the numbers high enough to be able to 1) invade the rest of Asia, and then 2) occupy them in order to maintain control of the territory.

And this is before they even manage to leave that continent to invade America.

That's some laziness on the part of the writers, anything to get some kind of frisson out of the gamers. I know the majority of gamers don't care that much about plot or background as long as they can just get on with shooting enemy AI or their friends in multiplayer, but the impulse to create an enemy for America seems to go deeper than just making one up for a game. The impulse goes all the way back to the last century. It seems to be something ingrained in the American psyche since the 1920s: the fear of communist invasion. It's informed movies, comic books and TV shows for decades. The Cold War provided the fuel for the origins of almost all the main Marvel comics characters in the Sixties barring Spider-Man, Thor and the X-Men. Even now, with the Cold War over, there's still a deep suspicion for the Russians and the Chinese, as if Americans suspect they're still communists after all and want to invade America. This has been evident in shows like 24 and games like the CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE series, to the point where the plots become completely incoherent.

I like shooting enemy AIs in the head as much as the next guy, but is it me or are these games all starting to look the same?

Yeah, I get the impulse. For every kid who grew up playing soldiers, who read war comics, getting to play war in a game with top-flight graphics is a no-brainer. In reality, it's not to any country's advantage to militarily invade the United States. Think about it: for Russia, China or North Korea to invade, they have to cross a huge ocean, mobilizing a huge military machine by sea and by air to get to the American continent. There are already US warships and hugely advanced nuclear submarines patrolling the waters and the result would have been a massive air and sea battle that, even if the invaders got through, would have had their numbers drastically culled. It's really not worth their while to lose that many people. And given how much of the US' debt China and Russia currently own, they don't need to invade America to own it. Why would they want to have troops around to occupy America? It's a huge drain on their resources and economy, as America and Britain are finding with Iraq and Afghanistan.

But none of that seems to occur to or bother games designers or screenwriters when they need commies to attack America. I just wish they'd come up with more creative ways. Even when 24 was doing the new Bogeyman-du-jour, Islamist terrorists, they still came back to Russians as the baddies behind everything. If anything, at least BATTLEFIELD: BAD COMPANY 2 had its setting in Europe, where it's more strategically plausible for them over there to be fighting the Russians in some future disagreement.

This is why it's much easier to have aliens from outer space be the enemy in a game or movie. They can have whatever symbolic or allegorical meaning you want or they can have none – you can read the religious zealots who want to wipe out Humanity in HALO as representing Islamofascists or just another mean alien race driven by a xenophobic ideology. if screenwriters and game designers wanted more "realistic" war scenarios, they really should do more reading. Wars between the major nations are less likely to be fought because one side wants to force the other to follow their ideologies now, they'll be more likely to be fought over dwindling resources like fuel and food crops, or because they bear a grudge. They don't hate you for your freedoms, they hate you for your foreign and economic policies that fucked them over, but the latter just doesn't sound as sexy.

If I were an anthropologist from outer space trying to understand the American psyche by studying their pop culture, I might ending concluding that it's an unhealthy and squicky mix of narcissism and persecution complex, a kind of "ZOMG! We're so marvelous that everyone else is envious and wants to kill us!" The Europeans react to this attitude by merely sniffing and going back to their red wine and fois gras, since they know they're the true marvelous ones, not their louche cousins across the pond.

If you had to write a new game or screenplay about war in America, wouldn't it be more plausible to have America's enemies be from within? We're already seeing that in the increasingly rabid far-right who like to talk of killing anyone that disagrees with them, especially "liberals". Those are also the nutters most apt to take up arms. I can foresee a shooter game set in a balkanized America where the player has to shoot a variety of crazed right-wingers, left-wingers and religious zealots in a war between the haves and have-nots, and that would be a lot closer to possible realities. If a foreign power wanted to take over America, wouldn't it be so much easier to buy and own the politicians and rulers rather than waste time and resources sending troops, not to mention that they would also mess up the precious real estate? Or have sleeper agents put hypnotics and psychotropic drugs in the drinking water to dope the citizenry into obedient zombies? And why not take over the media industry while they're at it to print and broadcast propaganda?

Americans have a lot more to worry about than imaginary communists and I wish they would get over it, but maybe the fantasy of fighting identifiable communists is a kind of mental comfort food. It's not the job of the consumers of pop culture, be it movies, TV or games, to be smart about it, but the job of the people creating the pop culture. Instead, they're still entrenched in outdated clichés to diminishing returns, and feeding into the dumbest beliefs while the real enemies are hanging around unnoticed… and unexploited for creating shiny new – and relevant – pop fiction.

Come on, writers – of movies, TV, comics and games – use your damn brains.

Looking for more interesting AIs to shoot at lookitmoves@gmail.com

© Adisakdi Tantimedh

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