Bear with me for a bit while I get to video games. We need a little context here. I remember watching a prime time news show back in 2004 where “well trained” Korean teens exclaimed that the Americans were Nazis, GW Bush was Hitler, and that America must be destroyed to bring about world peace. Ok, so I wasn’t a fan of Bush (the older or the younger), but I did kind of draw the line at calling the man Hitler. As it turned out North Korean children were being mandated to study a (mis)translated version of The Diary of Anne Frank provided by Kim Jong Il’s Department of Education. Frank’s story was being used as a part of the propaganda machine to teach students that they would have to be willing to sacrifice themselves to fight the “American Nazis”.
(2004 CBS Interview with Mike Wallace)
After the death of Kim Jong Il, I think that it is fairly safe to say that it was the hope of most folks that his son, Kim Jong Eun would be a little more…moderate than his father since he had been educated in Switzerland. Now it seems that this may not be the case even in the case of the North Korean propaganda machine. Now, granted, the North Korean propaganda machine is probably moving forward on 90% momentum from the last dictator more that anything else, but I had hoped that it would slow down a bit under Kim Jong Eun.
On Saturday, North Korea released a video on it’s state media/news channel that depicted a teen dreaming of flying around the Earth in a North Korean rocket ship, looking down over a unified Korea, and watching the United States destroyed in a fury of bombs and fire. You know, the stuff every kid dreams of.
A translation of the text over the US scene reads:
“Somewhere in the United States, black clouds of smoke are billowing…It seems that the nest of wickedness is ablaze with the fire started by itself”.
And the video ends with the young man concluding that his dream will
“surely come true…Despite all kinds of attempts by imperialists to isolate and crush us… never will anyone be able to stop the people marching toward a final victory”.
But it turns out that this little vignette drew not on any real scenes of war in the US, but rather footage of US destruction that had been drawn from Infinity Ward/Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011) which was a FPS/war game that is set partially in the United States.
When COD:MW3 was released back in 2011 there was a lot of discussion about where or not war taking place in the city of New York was still too much of a sensitive depiction for a nation that was, in many ways, still reeling from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Fortunately, MW3 came and went with little uproar, but now it seems that it has come back to haunt us yet again. North Korea, with it’s history of misappropriating historical texts has turned to doing the same with entertainment “texts”.
While I have often argued that we must be careful of the ways that racial, sexual, and gender minorities are depicted in games because those depictions could easily be taken as real by gamers who have had little to no real interaction with or exposure to people who come from these minority groups. Now it seems that we have a situation where this has come to fruition in an almost unbelievably ridiculous way. We find a group of impressionable minds who are being exposed to a fictitious video game depiction (and not the game itself) and because of a lack of knowledge of the real state of the United States and the people who live there they believe it. Now, of course this is not absent of other forms of brainwashing, but the idea remains. It’s the same rhetorical strategy that hate groups like the A_ryan (misspelling intentional) Nation use to recruit children and teens via their Flash games (I won’t link to the “resist” site but you can Google it yourself if you would like to see them).
Is it possible that at some point game developers will see the connections between the way that North Korea is using historical and fictional depictions to build perceptions of the “unknown”, the strategies of hate groups, and the way that some gamers, who are ignorant of the the cultures of diverse groups of people, may build their own perceptions of minority folks. While some may argue that this connection is too much of a leap, I can’t help but see them growing stronger day by day.
