Homefront

Homefront is an abhorrent, offensive, putrid piece of trash that has no place anywhere, ever. This might be one of the worst games ever created. What isn’t wrong with it would be a better question than what is correct about it. From the word go, the player is put in the place of a hegemonic power actor, who is also entirely disembodied and disconnected from any sense of the experience. To take this game seriously, an individual would literally have to be insane, as the game itself is insane. Not just from the perspective of race realities, but from those relating to technical problems throughout.

If you’ve ever seen the video, “shoot the hinges,” be prepared for a first-person shooter experience that is extraordinarily familiar. Indeed, the first experience in the game involves the main character being accosted by Korean officers, the officers kindly knocking on the door, eventually getting so angry as to say, “if you don’t open the door, we’ll break it down!” But they don’t. And it’s all a surreal, follow-the-moron trip from there.

There’s plenty of bigotry and racism to go around to be sure. What is perhaps amazing about it is that there is no level of humility in it at all, given that the game is about re-establishing the accepted cultural standard of hegemony, a western power structure under which the dominant race is, as always, white. The enemy race, is, as always, not white, and intentionally made foreign. The player has no frame of reference, and thus, as always, treats the situation in the same way as every other first-person shooter–always charging forward, a dick-waving of unprecedented offensiveness.

What is tragic, criminal about the game is that there will be no lesson learned by the industry at all. These public relation stunts, these “controversial” games are becoming more commonplace every day. There is no principled stance that any company or group of companies will take on such issues, because they are themselves cowards. Performing these acts, for whatever reason, lures in just enough people to somehow make a profit off of ignorance, arrogance, bigotry, and racism, in a combined, compressed manner that is unprecedented.

To describe what is terrible about such a game, such an industry, would take a lifetime. That said, I’m fully committed to taking it apart, bit by bit, piece by piece. Homefront is a game that is the locus of so many of the problems, that it, as a piece of individual media, is impossible to ignore. It is a distended reality of gaming and “gamer” culture, a sore that the industry and willing consumers continue to scratch in some kind of ritual hatred. Every time, some leech is there, waiting to suck up the pus. This process needs to stop. There’s no longer any excuse.

Recommended: No