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A Plaguing Militainment:

Ideology, Metaphor, and Interpellation in THQ’s Homefront

Brendan G.A. Hughes

Eastern Illinois University

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Copyright Brendan G.A. Hughes 2012

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Abstract

Roger Stahl’s book Militainment, Inc. has set the standard for studying the convergence

of military culture and popular entertainment—otherwise known as militainment. This

concept is easily discernible for rhetorical critics studying discursive texts in the late

twentieth century, particularly after the start of the war on terror. This project examines a

militainment text, the first-person shooter videogame Homefront. Produced by design

company THQ and developed by Kaos studios, this game foreshadows the future of the

United States should Kim Jong-Il’s son succeed in unifying the divided peninsula and the

American superpower crumble. After reviewing relevant literature and outlining three

important questions, the analysis explores avenues of the text in two chapters using

multiple rhetorical theories and related concepts: Louis Althusser’s interpellation,

Kenneth Burke’s identification, Edwin Black’s second persona, and the rhetorical

construction of an evil enemy through the metaphor-lens of plague. After the analysis, six

implications of the project are discussed with emphasis on what Homefront, and

discourses like it, foreshadow for American political discourse. This project concludes by

offering potential avenues for future rhetorical scholarship, and prospective interventions

that are necessary by citizen, scholars, and activists to circumvent the continuing

proliferation and production of non-critical videogame texts.

Keywords: video games, metaphor, militainment, North Korea, interpellation.

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Dedications

This project is dedicated in four parts.

To my parents: Charles and Jeri—without their support, I could not have succeeded

either through my undergraduate or graduate years. I owe you both my successes past,

present, and future. This project is dedicated to your sacrifice and love.

To my grandparents: Kenneth, Francis, and Audrey—who gave my own parents the

opportunities their generation did not have. I know each of you would be so proud of me.

I dedicate this project to their memory.

To my faculty supervisors at EIU: Dr. Richard G. Jones, Jr. and A.J. Walsh—You both

taught me that balancing work, life, and graduate school is possible. A.J., your attitude

always inspired me—don’t ever change. Rich, without your recommendations, guidance,

and friendship, my future might look very different. This project is dedicated to the faith

you both have in me.

To my cohort and classmates: Daniel Douglas, Pauline Matthey, Christopher Wagner,

Saunnie Knotts, Nicole Mangiaracina, Catherine Bocke, Kate Klipp, Jenn Yap, and Jodi

Jackson—You all have the most amazing and diverse minds, opinions, strengths, and

experiences. The past few years with each of you have been a joy, and I wish you all the

best in your future lives and careers. I dedicate this project to our friendship now and in

years to come, even though miles and continents may separate us.

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Acknowledgments

Dr. Marita Gronnvoll: I could not have asked for a better mentor and guide through this

project. Without your patience, advice, and occasional prodding, this project would not

have been possible. Over the past two and half years under your guidance, I have

transitioned from a wide-eyed academic refugee, uncertain about my future, to a

rhetorical scholar moving to the next phase of his education and professional

development. Words can only fail to convey just how thankful I am to work with and

learn from you, so my thanks here will have to suffice—at least until I get to introduce

you for an award in some future year at the Rhetoric Society of America Conference.

Dr. T.M. Linda Scholz: The work I did in your seminar class, exploring how videogames

serve to address a public, was the seed that grew into this project. Your invaluable

insight, offered during my random office visits over the past two years, has been crucial

to my success academically; it will be missed. Also, sitting in your persuasion class, now

two years ago, was the moment I first felt at home in my new discipline. P.S. You are not

alone—I, too, am terrible at first-person shooter videogames.

Dr. David Gracon: Your enthusiasm and insights from outside the rhetorical canon were

a joy and blessing over the past year. Thank you for the lessons on Marxism, as they

appealed to my proletariat soul. I can now no longer look at media the same way after

learning about vertical and horizontal media ownership in your courses—I always find

myself asking “from whom is this message originating?” When I make my first ‘zine, I’ll

be sure to send you a copy.

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Table of Contents ABSTRACT………………………………………………………….………………………………………3

DEDICATIONS…………...………………………………………………………………………………...4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………...…………………...………………….……………………………...5

CHAPTER 1: “HOME IS WHERE THE HEART WAR IS”: INTRODUCING

HOMEFRONT……..………………………………………………………..……………………..7

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...………………………………7

REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE………………………………………………...….………………………..14

Militainment…………………………………………………………………………………………………...14

Metaphor………………………………………………………………………………………………………17

Ideology………………………………………………………………………………………………….........23

Game/Media studies…………………………………………………………………………………………...26

RESEARCH APPROACH AND KEY ASSUMPTIONS……………………………………………………………….29

CONTRIBUTIONS TO SCHOLARLY DISCOURSE……………………………………………………...…………..32

PREVIEW OF CHAPTERS…………………………………………………………………………………………..…35

Chapter 2………………………………………………………………..………………..……………………35

Chapter 3………………………………………………………………………………………………………36

Implications and Discussions………………………………………………………………….….……..…….36

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………………….…………….37

CHAPTER 2: CONSTRUCTING AN EVIL, ASIAN ENEMY AND METAPHORIC

PLAGUE………….………………………………………………………...…………………….40

INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….…………………………..……..40

ENEMY: EVIL ASIAN, DISEASED INSECT…………..……………………………….…………….……………….40

GOOD, HEALTHY, AMERICAN HERO………………………………………….…………………………………..57

DISCUSSION: BETWEEN “GOOD” AND “EVIL” AND METAPHORS OF PLAGUE…………………………….66

CHAPTER 3: AUDIENCE, PERSONA, AND INTERPELLATION…………………...……………..68

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………………..…………….…..68

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE AND TEXT………………………………………………...…………………………..…72

GETTING MTEA-CRITICAL…………………………………………………………………………………………..77

“MAPPING IT ALL ONLINE”: TIMELINE, OCCUPATION MAP, AND WEBSITE……………………………….81

KOTAKU.COM: BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER…………………………………………………...………………89

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS………………………………………………………………………………92

CHAPTER 4: CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATIONS, AND THE FUTURE OF VIDEO GAME

ANALYSIS……………...……………………………………………………..………………….94

INTRODUCTION……...…………………………………………………………………………………….………….94

IDEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF HOMEFRONT’S GAME TEXT:ENEMIES AND METAPHORS…………..96

RECEPTION TEXTS AND IDEOLOGICAL MESSAGES…………………………………………..………………103

WAR GAMES AND RHETORICAL AUDIENCES: WHO PLAYS WHO?................................................................104

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR MILITAINMENT AND VIDEOGAMES………………………………………………...106

WHAT THIS STUDY OFFERS FOR RHETORICAL SCHOLARSHIP……………………………………………..110

POTENTIAL INTERVENTIONS AND FINAL THOUGHTS: WHAT IS A VIDEOGAME?....................................112

WORKS CITED:……………………………………………………………………..…………………..118

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Chapter 1: “Home is Where the Heart War is”: Introducing Homefront

After the end of the last world war, President Eisenhower addressed a deeply

troubling issue: the relationship between the military manufacturing industries and the

governments of the world. He coined this as the “military-industrial complex”

(Eisenhower). He then explained that if this devious relationship went unchecked it

would perpetuate a need for weapons and continue to plunge the world further and further

into armed conflicts between peoples and states. Martin J. Medhurst noted that this term

has lived beyond the president who uttered the phrase and these words have infiltrated the

American political vocabulary at the root (Medhurst 579). Flash forward over fifty years

and there has been very little change in the relationship between the government, the

military contractors, and development industries that create technologies of mass

destruction. Advancements in technology have brought new ways for the military to

bring warfare to the front lines. Unmanned drone planes can fire missiles which are

accurate to within inches of a target, all while being directed by an Air Force pilot from

miles away. However, upon closer examination of this airman, the viewer discovers that

the controller held in his (we assume this is a male soldier in a war zone) hand is eerily

similar to those used and developed by Microsoft for their Xbox game consoles. How

strangely (non)coincidental that the solider is presented with some piece of military

technology he may already recognize from outside the war zone. This simple example

shows how easily scholars and critics can see the diffusion and blurring between military

culture and consumer technology.

This similarity and blurring is not unique to controls for military drones.

Technologies of entertainment and media have been inundated with military themes for a

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very long time. However, in recent years there has been a deep convergence between

popular entertainment and military culture. Specifically coined as “militainment,” this

phenomenon is observable in all forms of popular culture from sports, to television, toys,

and, most spectacularly, videogames. Videogames hold a strange power over the newly

minted “military-industrial-entertainment” complex. Soldiers are pseudo trained in

military combat prior to even enlisting by shooting digital enemies in foreign landscapes

all brought into the home through various means of media communication.

However, this phenomenon is not unique to just bringing training and military

style entertainment into the homes of consumers—it also allows for the delivery of

specific ideologies and the construction of an enemy other. This project will examine the

ideologies present within the first-person shooter (which I will refer to as FPS for the

remainder of this project) videogame Homefront. Released on March 15, 2011, the first

installment of the new series of games sold 375,000 copies in North America, 2.6 million

units shipped in total, and a total sale of 1 million units worldwide by the end of

March— all of this activity provided THQ (the video game production company behind

Homefront) with hope for alleviating a $136.1 million loss from the previous calendar

year (Thorsen). As an FPS title that is placed into the hands of consumers/potential

recruits, Homefront addresses an audience that is ripe for ideological indoctrination by

political messages, recruitment by the Pentagon, and gives economic profit to game

manufacturers. The videogame text uses a specific visual metaphor, that of a plague, to

achieve its ends. This metaphor removes the human context of violence, death, and

combat by equating the enemy to a virus or insect that must be purged or squished at all

costs. Lakoff and Johnson, prominent scholars in the study of metaphors, inform us that

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metaphors are central parts of our mental cognition. Metaphors are so ingrained into our

thinking patterns that often we fail to observe them when they are presented to us. It is

therefore unsurprising that even this metaphor (the enemy is a plague) may seem normal

to consumers of these digital rhetorical artifacts.

Within the very recent “war on terrorism,” metaphors of violence (both civil and

international/political) and videogames have taken the spotlight in our national media and

related avenues of discourse. That such a metaphor frames modern, high-tech warfare as

the necessary purge of an inhuman enemy as a means of entertainment is critically

problematic. Videogames, now more than ever, are a media text that needs to be critically

examined by the academy.

This merger of military culture and entertainment, which allows for the framing

of an enemy as something inhuman, raises several questions that need examination from

a rhetorical perspective. First, it is important to note that videogame texts do not exist in

isolation; they come from somewhere and seek to either recreate or suggest another place

(the battlefield). However, it is important to ask who it is the players and consumers of

Homefront are fighting on this digital battlefield. It is important to ask therefore: “Who is

the evil enemy constructed by the text? How is this enemy rhetorically constructed? And

how does such a construction rhetorically frame the player?” We, as scholars and

consumers, know that what is produced and projected upon game screens is not the actual

warfare going on in the mountains of Afghanistan, or the deserts of Iraq and Libya, but

that design companies seek to create as “real” a world for the player (which includes gory

death scenes and digital images of fictional atrocities) is troubling. At some level, the

players must know that these illusions are also not real, but the messages of possibility

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that the illusions suggest are worth examination. In the case of Homefront, the designers

are substituting the desert and mountainous battlefield of the war on terror for America’s

own backyards: the videogame text addresses a dystopian future in which the United

States, economically crippled, is invaded by a unified, totalitarian Korean state.

Secondly, it is important to ask who are the Pentagon (which funds development

of training programs for their soldiers that become mass-market games) and various game

studios attempting to reach? Who is this audience that is drawn into the game world in

order to consume the political ideologies of the game designer and the studio? Or, more

interestingly, is the audience they are trying to reach even real? And if it is not, what does

that mean? It is important to ask: “Who are the implied audiences for war games, and

does the text create a visual discourse that allows for the potential interpellation of

players into subject positions?” It is important to ask if these gamers and consumers are

being “hailed” by the messages of the design teams and creators that head the

development of these war games. FPS videogames, like Homefront, create a need for

fitting and scholarly discourse about the place of videogame entertainment, laden with

ideological messages, as a form of consumable public address. These artifacts (FPS

videogames) are calling to people to “fight for what they believe in” by enlisting or

otherwise promoting political ideologies of the war on terrorism? Perhaps the

conceptualization of the war on terror begins in the player’s own homes, the minute he or

she turns on a game console and engages an entertainment medium that bombards the

player with a conveniently constructed foreign, other enemy.

Finally, and perhaps obviously, it should be noted that militainment texts

primarily deal with the fighting of enemies who look nothing similar to American forces

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(i.e. not white, or perhaps black). That these texts focus on warfare and not diplomacy is

critical. Most war games and FPS place the player against either a famous villain from

American history in the twentieth century (the Japanese and Nazis of WWII, or Russian

forces from the Cold War) or against facsimiles of the forces of third-world dictators that

would seek only the destruction and humiliation of America and her allies. However, the

most startling option becomes the construction of fictitious enemies (monsters, zombies,

and other denizens of a post-apocalyptic future) who serve as a metaphor for potential

political rivalries to come in the twenty-first century. This is the culminating question in

my reading of Homefront—why is it that consumers and players are being addressed with

a fictional (North) Korean enemy? “What does Homefront, in its complex rhetorical

implications, say about potential future conflicts faced by America—and what solutions

can videogames offer in this situation?”

I will approach these questions from a rhetorical perspective, following the

definitions of rhetoric provided by both Kenneth Burke and Lloyd Bitzer. In A Rhetoric

of Motives, Burke holds that rhetoric is, at its simplest form, “the manipulation of

[human] belief’s for political ends” (Burke 565). The text of Homefront is surely

ideological, as it promotes a neoconservative doomsday scenario; this same scenario,

which places the player against a fictional, future enemy based in a real foreign state, also

makes the discourse of Homefront political in nature. This makes Burke’s definition

appropriate for my analysis. Bitzer argues that rhetoric “comes into existence for the sake

of something beyond itself…in short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality…by the

creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action”

(Bitzer 61). As I am a rhetorician, I am most equipped to perform a rhetorical analysis of

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Homefront—however, I must state that a rhetorical analysis is not the only way in which

to read and critique these texts. Both an examination of the political economy of

videogames and a critical/cultural studies approach would reveal beneficial and related

facets of the Homefront text. Since the money that is gained (through sales or contract

from the pentagon) from videogames dissemination is the primary reason for their

creation, a political economy examination would reveal the troubling web that

videogames weave through our world. Orientalism would provide an excellent lens by

which a critic may view the Homefront text, as the facsimile constructed in the GKR

could be arguably an enemy “Other.” Additionally, an autoethnographic approach might

provide the academy with a first-person account of how a scholar would enter into the

discourse and personally respond to/with his or her interactions with the text. These

would all provide excellent research opportunities for a reading of Homefront, or any FPS

game—but they are simply not the avenues through which I have chosen to take my

reading of this militainment text. My previously stated understanding of rhetoric, as

provided by Burke and Bitzer, provides the best channel for my scholarship in this

project. However, for future research, I may employ a mixed methodology or perhaps

employ alternative means of cross-analysis. I will address this in the conclusions chapter

of this project.

I argue in this project, though the previously stated questions, that Kaos Studios

and John Milius presented a message through the videogame text Homefront. While the

primary message may be to entertain an audience, Milius and the design team at Kaos

created a discourse beyond the text of Homefront, and this discourse seeks to change the

way that players and viewers interact with their reality. These questions, and this topic of

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research, are important for furthering studies in rhetorical criticism for three specific

reasons. First, the concept of militainment has been explored previously by Roger Stahl,

of the University of Georgia, in his book and documentary Militainment, Inc. Stahl’s

work is among the first comprehensive rhetorical analyses of this widespread media

phenomenon. This project seeks to expand upon the foundation that has previously been

laid by Stahl and others. More specifically to the area of study in this project, videogames

are a critical element in the militainment phenomenon. As the videogame industry is a

multi-billion dollar a year enterprise, the ties between military funds and the development

and release of these videogames is important for the examination of the militainment

phenomenon. As stated previously, these games seek to create as real an environment as

possible for their players to be immersed into. However, and secondly, the enemies

created by these texts are not real, nor or are the enemies facsimiles of real peoples—in

my analysis, they are read as the Jungian shadow of our own self-hatred (Keen 19). This

poses a critical problem, as the digital construction of Homefront (as well as many other

FPS videogames) promotes the settling of differences between nations by force and

violent action rather than words. For any who would wish to promote diplomacy and

lasting peace, the realities proposed by such texts are indeed troubling, as they project a

world where violence is the only solution and peaceful discourse has failed.

The implications of militainment texts, such as Homefront, that construct an

enemy that stands in for a real people or nation, are significant. The discourse these texts

have on future development and perceptions within society cannot be understated, as

these texts circulate among the potential young soldiers and voters of today and

tomorrow. When President Eisenhower revealed the foundation of the military-industrial

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complex upon leaving office, many in the United States and around the world took notice

even if for only a brief moment as the horrors of World War Two and the Korean conflict

faded into the twilight of political involvement. Today, at least in a media environment

where war and death appear nightly on the news media, the adding of entertainment

industries to serve as advertisement to the manufacture and promotion of weapon systems

as a means of “protection,” and the recruitment of people to use them, is significant.

However, the construction of an “evil” Asian enemy that foretells a potential future

conflict faced by the United States is an exigence that cannot be ignored. As Bitzer

claims an exigence as “a thing which is other than it should be”—and in this situation, I

must argue that the framing of an Asian state, totaling nearly all of the Pacific Rim, as

the/our enemy is a “defect” in popular culture that needs addressing (Bitzer 63). This

project seeks to not only explore the ideological and metaphoric messages promoted by

the first-person shooter Homefront, but to make known the implications of these

messages to a population that consumes messages of military culture daily as part of their

diet of media entertainment. Wander famously stated that “cries for help deserve more

than appreciation,” and he is correct; but in this case I argue that cries for war demand

answers and the explanation of scholars (Wander 199). The passive consumption of war

as entertainment summons rhetorical critique. This chapter will now explore previous

research on topics of militainment, ideology, reception texts, and metaphor before

mapping out a proposed rhetorical analysis of the media artifacts Homefront and a

defense of such a project.

Review of Relevant Literature

Militainment

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In the aptly titled Militainment, Inc, Roger Stahl describes the merging of military

culture and popular entertainment as a form of recruitment for, and progression of,

militarized conflicts. This merger of warfare as entertainment romanticizes violent war

while also distancing the consumer from the realities of armed, modern conflict and

constructing warfare in ways that are easily sanitized and packaged for consumption in a

capitalistic society. Stahl’s book covers multiple chapters and describes multiple forms of

popular entertainment including movies, television, toys, and most importantly for this

project, videogames. Videogames that describe warfare, either fictionalized or dramatized

renditions of actual combat, are termed “war games” but are never adequately defined by

Stahl. Therefore, I will use the following definition for war games: an entertainment

medium, specifically a video or computer game, which “seeks to recreate the television

war in real time” or create an “interactive war” for the assimilation and entertainment of

the player (Stahl 92).

Stahl explores three concepts, or entertainment areas and functions, of the

militainment phenomenon in videogames: training, battle, and recruitment. Training, or

the development of technology for the use of the military before consumer use, is

revealed to be reversed in videogame militainment. Rather than develop technology

specifically for military training, the same technologies and simulators are developed for

both military purposes and consumer use simultaneously. This allows for side-by-side

models of training new recruits, and ushering in game players who feel that playing

soldier in a videogame is no longer fulfilling.

The second area of analysis, battle, addresses the absence of ethical/critical

questioning of warfare that is removed from videogame design following September 11,

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2001. Logical reasoning and arguments that would prevent the consumption of war

games is silenced instead by an ideology that prefers the use of force over diplomatic

means. The rhetoric of the war on terrorism is one of military force, and not cultural,

diplomatic power. Hallmarked by this concept is the collapse of time between events and

publication of game content related to conflicts across the world. And worse, potential

future conflict is mystically predicted by such war games as if one is looking through a

darkened crystal ball. The political climate of the Korean peninsula changes frequently

and reunification by force is not unquestioned in political circles. Stahl claims that these

games must “mask the absurdity of their construction,” and yet their construction follows

logical, neo-conservative fantasies (98). The recent shelling of Yeongpyeong Island by

North Korea, resulting in a handful of deaths, could have served as the beginning of a

conflict potentially similar to the opening scenes of THQ’s Homefront. If different

choices had been made by both the South Korean military and the United States army

stationed along the DMZ a United Korea could have existed not only in fiction, but in

reality.

Recruitment, the final concept, addresses what may be called “advergames,” or

entertainment media that promote a product, belief, lifestyle, service, or practice in their

message (Stahl 109). Stahl references America’s Army, a top selling FPS game developed

by the United States Army as a recruiting tool. Specifically, military themed advergames

are exceptionally efficient and visible in promoting recruitment to potential soldiers.

However, it is important to note that in the conclusion of Stahl’s chapter, he states that

war games are a primary means by which war is understood and consumed by certain

demographics within our populace as an entertainment medium (112). Scholars must ask

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how videogames can also serve as a metaphor for warfare itself. It is troubling to think

that a player can take a digital reality developed by programmers on computers and

(attempt to) conceptually understand the death, pain, violence, and adrenaline fueled

combat that military soldiers face the world over. In order to fully conceptualize how

these war games have become connected to metaphor and our conceptual frameworks,

works examining metaphor as a human process and as a rhetorical object will now be

addressed.

Metaphor

It is important that I also look into scholarly work that explores the usage of

metaphor not only as a communicative action, but also as the mental constructs that

define our relationships with our world and each other. No scholars have been as

influential or groundbreaking in this area as have Lakoff and Johnson in their seminal

text Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors pervade our lives

in more than a linguistic function; metaphors also define the ways in which we think, act,

and conceive of our world through a cognitive system (3). They begin this examination

with a common metaphor used in society, argument is war. This metaphor does more

than frame the way we as individuals think about arguing points with friends or

classmates, it constructs a model of argumentation that is dangerous and costly, both

personally and mentally, like warfare. There can be winners and losers of argumentation,

much like in warfare. Though argumentation is not war, the metaphor proves greatly

instructional, as Lakoff and Johnson propose “the essence of any metaphor is

understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (5). As such, these

two concepts (argumentation and war) are inextricably bound in our conceptual systems

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to each other: no longer are they experienced separately, but are connected, understood,

and performed with a conceptual and metaphoric connection from one to another. This

bond is called an entailment, the connection between two metaphoric concepts. This

conceptual metaphor has become a dead cliché—it is taken for granted that these two

concepts (argument and war) are now experienced together and cannot be experienced

separate from each other.

Additionally, metaphor usage is bound to deeply ingrained concepts of our

cultures. Lakoff and Johnson state that “it seems that our values are not independent but

must form a coherent system with the metaphorical concepts we live by” (22).

Entailments exist in relationship to the primary metaphoric connection. This connection

strengthens the norm of the mainstream cultural association between the two compared

concepts or objects in discussion. An example: when someone buys a compact car to save

money over time he/she is resisting the bigger is better metaphor but embracing there

will be more in the future, where “more” in this case refers to money rather than

(physically) more car. Though at one time bigger is better may have been a stronger

metaphorical association in the past, in today’s economic climate and “smart” economy, a

dominant value is efficiency, thrift, and money saved in the long-term over flash and

razzle-dazzle now.

Even when morals, virtues, and characteristics are described metaphorically via

group and individual membership, these concepts are strengthened or related back to the

main norm of society. Lakoff and Johnson show how up is good and the future will be

better are related to spirituality and ethical entailments in society. In their example, when

an individual is being ethically and morally good, he or she attains salvation or good

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character (he/she goes up in the world). When he or she dies, then they ascend (even

further up). Our mental concepts are all metaphorically related to one another, and bound

into our social fabric in the ways that we experience one thing in terms of another. Thus,

in an example closely related to the subject of discussion for this project, when in popular

culture, discourses compare love and warfare with the metaphor love is a battlefield, the

rhetors are comparing the pitfalls of relationships with the unpredictability of a modern

militarized confrontation between soldiers.

Homefront uses a visual metaphoric concept of plague that calls on American

cultural and moral associations about purity and cleanliness—both political and physical.

Our society takes the metaphors cleanliness is good and cleanliness equals order equals

good very seriously—so much so that some individuals often are baffled when some

situations actually may call for a little dirt or grime. To provide an anecdotal example,

some cultures, such as Saharan Africa, adaptation to the natural environment prevents

conflict with many predators and problematic aspects of the Saharan lifestyle. Without

dirt and mud to protect one’s feet, the human foot becomes a prime target for ants and

other insects, as a friend of mine discovered while working for a humanitarian mission in

Ghana. In a media example, shows such as Extreme Hoarders or Hoarders: Buried Alive

never explicitly pass judgment onto individuals with a legitimate problem, but instead

frame the individuals as ashamed, in denial, or beyond help—placing them

metaphorically into the realm of unorganized is unclean is impure.

Metaphors have been used to describe multiple varieties of phenomenon and

mental concepts throughout the history of humanity. Lakoff and Johnson note that

metaphors may even serve as “self-fulfilling prophecies” of our expectations and

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understandings of reality (156). However, it is in the everyday nature of the entailments

metaphors contain that the critic must focus his or her attention. What tastes do these

metaphors leave in the back of our mouths? What goes unnoticed or unheeded in our

mental and social constructs framed by metaphors? Previous work in rhetorical criticism

has revealed that metaphors exist within our political and everyday discourses. Metaphors

can be found in areas as far ranging as medical health, social issues, and political policies

abroad.

Gronnvoll and Landau probed the use of metaphors in the field subset that

addresses the rhetoric of science and scientific study. Specifically in “From Viruses to

Russian Roulette to Dance: A Rhetorical Critique and Creation of Genetic Metaphors,”

Gronnvoll and Landau explore the discourse used by lay peoples that addressed

understanding of genetic information and medical preconditions for disease. The

rhetorical analysis revealed three specific metaphors used by lay people to describe their

own genes: disease, fire or bomb, and gambling. This language use removed agency or

responsibility from the interviewees, as each metaphor placed the individual outside the

ability to control his/her lifestyle and thus prevent the onset of diseases caused by genetic

preconditions. The authors then heed the call of Robert Ivie, who stated that metaphors

that fail in their discursive limitations are in need of replacement by critics. Gronnvoll

and Landau propose the replacement of virus and bomb metaphors with the metaphors

band or dance. These metaphors, the authors claim, repositions individuals in a

relationship with their genetic codes. These metaphors also give individuals the mindset

for working with their diet or lifestyles to prevent the onset of genetic conditions which

previous metaphors claimed were inevitable. Gronnvoll and Landau make the strong

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claim that the studying of “real” audiences via reception texts is critically important as

well. In examining the metaphors used by lay people, Gronnvoll and Landau argue that

the metaphors put into discourse by scientists may serve “different epistemological

functions than do metaphors deployed by the lay public” (49). The importance of

studying a lay, consumer audience will be explored more in chapter three.

J. David Cisneros examined the means by which immigrants were redefined from

people seeking a better life and opportunity in the United States and into a form of waste

by the metaphor “immigrants as pollution” prevalent in mass media discourses. Cisneros,

in his article “Contaminated Communities: the Metaphor of “Immigrant as Pollutant” in

Media Representations of Immigration,” addressed visual image depictions of immigrants

as “toxic” using discourses of the 1970 Love Canal controversy as a means of

comparison. Cisneros makes a critical comparison between the protective suits worn by

workers at the Love Canal site to protect them from contaminants and the special

uniforms worn by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in televised news

coverage. These depictions frame the immigrant as something to be contained and moved

away in addition to positioning the viewer on one side of the issue, thus allowing for

identification with the agents and government enforcers. Cisneros also addresses the

visual rhetoric discourse of media broadcasts which frames the immigrant as a danger to

American society at large. These images, Cisneros argues, dehumanize the immigrants

and thus justify the use of force and control by the government in removing these non-

people who are toxic. The metaphors also close off other interpretations of the

immigration debate, interpretations that could promote other responses than isolation and

removal by force. While Cisneros does not provide alternative metaphors that “clean up”

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immigration as a metaphoric toxin, he does call for future research and criticism into the

discourse. The framing of immigrants as “impure” or “pollution” is critically similar to

the portrayal of the Greater Korean Republic forces in Homefront as a plague. The

metaphor of foreign is impure is exceptionally strong in many ideologically powerful

texts—this is a clear tie between politically charged rhetorical texts and the metaphors

that are used to understand and frame them.

Riika Kuusisto takes the realm of political metaphor further and explores the

discourses surrounding the bombing of Kosovo by NATO forces as parts of a “heroic

tale,” a “game,” or a “business deal” that would benefit the NATO forces in future days.

The rhetoric that Kuusisto addresses in her article is extremely political in nature and also

bleeds into the fields of international relations and global military actions. The article

argues that international actions, such as the bombing of Kosovo by NATO, include more

than arms and bombs: words are weapons of rhetorical de-structuring the ways we

understand military action. The metaphors employed by NATO and the united front

framed the dictator of Yugoslavia as villain in a children’s story and that the forces of

NATO were coming to liberate the captured and helpless peoples, as if the forces were

Prince Charming in a children’s fairy tale. This analogy is interesting, and will help in

understanding the heroic framing of the player and protagonist of Homefront in my

analysis. These three articles are excellent examples of rhetorical criticism that have

drawn from the analysis of metaphors held within everyday discourses ranging from talk

of health to the ways cultures wage war (against immigration or foreign dictators).

Additional research has been undertaken to explore the area of metaphor studies

that pertains specifically to visual metaphors and recurring tropes in political

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communication. Paul Frosh discusses in his article, “Framing Pictures; Picturing Frames:

Visual Metaphors in Political Communication Research,” that the means by which visual

images are constructed are based upon political and popular discourses embedded within

a struggle for power. Frosh emphasizes that in political discourses, it is crucial to locate

the textual construction of a frame and the mental construction of its reality. Frosh states

in the conclusion of his article that

(O)ne intriguing consequence of the use of pictures and frames as central tropes in

political communication research is the way that these metaphorical concepts,

designed to designate processes occurring in the “reference world” of scholarly

discourses, seem to accord with the structures and processes of those discourses at

a more abstract conceptual level. (107)

Therefore, the way in which individuals attribute meaning to images is not separate from

the context in which they are viewed, and this is connected to how meaning is further

assigned to the visual images by larger social forces within political communicative

systems. Further research into political communication and metaphor needs to address the

framing of visual imagery in new media to reveal political ideologies and entailments

from metaphors within our conceptual systems. In the text I analyze, political messages

are tied to potential future conflict. What is seen is the furthering of the label “axis of

evil” embedded onto North Korea by turning the Korean state in a viral scourge that may

leap over the ocean and into American homes.

Ideology

In this project, the scholarly works of Sam Keen, Kenneth Burke, Louis

Althusser, and James McDaniel will serve important functions. In Faces of the Enemy,

Sam Keen explores the Jungian dialectic and dichotomy that is constructed in modern

society as the viewer frames and glorifies combat by distancing ourselves from those

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he/she fights. Keen’s exploration of the visual discourses that construct an enemy,

particularly political cartoons, focuses on the Jungian “shadow”—the dark parts of

ourselves that we cannot accept and thus project onto others. This is the first step in

creating an enemy that is acceptable (whom it is ok to hate and desire to destroy) requires

the individual to stop recognizing the other part of the self/enemy dichotomy as human.

Most interestingly, Keen describes the propaganda and artistic description of Asian

enemies as being framed as the “yellow horde” reminiscent of Mongol invasions during

the medieval centuries (26). Through the cartoons and propaganda images that Keen

analyzes, the critic begins to understand the process by which visual imagery of an

enemy distances us from the unacceptable/unknowledgeable human aspects of ourselves

and allows for the projection onto the enemy “shadow.”

This opens our ability to identify with the heroic framing of the individual actor

and player in a video game context. Burke’s theory of identification and the negative are

powerful parts of the ideological analysis that I will employ. Burke argues that the rhetor

may, in taking action to compare him or herself to another, identify with some quality or

characteristic that is possessed or attributed to the other. Though Burke artistically

describes this as “slaying” the other and replacing it with a consubstantial entity that is

related/connected to the other, we can see this as the construction of persuasive bonds

between people or arguments (181). Burke’s negative also serves a strong function here,

as when one states what he or she is/belongs to/identifies with, she/he immediately is also

making it clear what they are not identifying with. In this respect, as Burke argues, the

negative aspects of our reality are hidden behind quasi-positives (Burke 64). Such quasi-

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positives frame the individual in a way that may allow for stronger identification with the

ideological message proposed by the rhetor.

Althusser’s notion of hailing is critical to my analysis of reception texts and the

promotional material of Homefront. Althusser argues in Lenin and Philosophy and Other

Essays that an individual enters into a potentially interpellative moment upon being

“hailed” by state apparatuses. This process, if the individual responds to it, places him/her

into discourse in a subject position which he/she always already possessed. This comes

from Charland’s note that “to be interpellated is to become one of Black’s personae and

be a position in a discourse” (138). This constructs a strong theoretical frame that

combines the theoretical building blocks or Althusser’s hailing and Edwin Black’s

second persona (the implied perfect audience for a discourse).The notion that these

positions are always already part of us is an interesting notion for the ideology of

Homefront. If this is indeed true from a videogame perspective, the ideology of citizen-

soldier may exist in FPS players, and it is merely just waiting for the most opportune

moment or series of moments to manifest. This creates a strong bond with Burke’s

identification, as when a player identifies with the state apparatus that is hailing him or

her—in the case of a FPS title, the American soldier barking orders at our avatar—the

player is more likely to step into the always already subject position that is before him or

her.

Finally, James McDaniel offers an interesting theoretical construction of “evil” in

“Figures of Evil: A Triad of Rhetorical Strategies for Theo-Politics.” In McDaniel’s

article, three different types of evil are seen: evil-in-itself, evil-for-itself, and evil-for-

others. Each of these types of evil respond to a different characteristic or behavior that

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may be undertaken by a force rhetorically constructed theologically and politically as

evil. The first form (evil-in-itself) is that carbonized version of evil that is one-

dimensional in our conception. An individual cannot understand it, and it is irrevocably

corrupted by the evil taint within. Worse, if he/she attempts to understand such an evil, he

or she too will become corrupted by it (McDaniel 541). The second form (evil-for-itself)

is a smarter and more human evil. This is the evil that is understandable, and McDaniel

relates it to Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—he is not exactly bad, he

merely exists in a reality that is exceptionally anti-Semitic and responds calculatedly in

kind. Like any good villain in literature, this form of evil usually possesses a strong

backstory that completes him or her as a well-developed character or force. The final

form of evil (evil-for-others) addresses forces or abstractions that seek to overwhelm an

individual who is lost in the collective evil tide. These are the evils that produce a

“surplus consciousness of awareness, a semiotic overload along which self-consciousness

evaporates into the panoply of perspectives” that the individual may experience

(McDaniel 542). McDaniel addresses that this form of evil is specific to larger cultural

forces that devours an individual’s being when he/she give himself/herself over to the

evil’s influence—progress, God, and Liberalism are but a few of McDaniel’s examples.

Game /Media Studies

Though this project is an effort in rhetorical criticism, it is important to review

(even briefly) some relevant scholarship that examines videogames through media studies

and the new sub-field of game studies. Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig de Peuter

compile various different analytical concepts of videogame analysis in the book Games of

Empire. The text, predominantly examining game production and dissemination through

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lenses of political economy and media critique, allows for a great visualization of the

horizontal and vertical application and usage of power (as a discursive action and

application) in videogames. Most interesting for this analysis is the notion of the

machinic subject and the banal war. The notion of the machinic subject, according to

Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter, is that of “the hard core”—players who play intensively,

have disposable income, are literate to game genres and conventionalities, buy on average

25 games a year, and adopt new consoles shortly after release. These players,

predominantly male, are the key demographic that game designers (for many game

genres) hope to reach as their money is essential to the capitalistic cycle of game design,

publication, proliferation, and profit. Hard core players, Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter

claim, seek to identify with the “man of action” or protagonist of man game titles (81).

This is an important distinction, as the player in Homefront takes the control of a “man of

action” protagonist—Robert Jacobs. Burkean identification plays well with this notion

that the player would connect with controlling a man of action, as through the control of

the protagonist, the “hard core” or even “casual” player may perform actions or see

digital places unimaginable in everyday life.

The notion of banal war is introduced when Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter begin

examining the series of conflicts from the end of the twentieth century to the present day.

The authors argue, building from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of Empire,

that warfare is now no longer the tool used to solve conflict and return the world to

order—instead, war is the new order imposed by Empire upon the world (Dyer-

Witherford and de Peuter 99). As an example, Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter provide the

example of the United States invasion of Iraq to pursue Saddam Hussein for developing

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and proliferating weapons of mass destruction as the military front for maintaining

control and order of Empire during the new age of the Bush administration’s war on

terror. The authors’ claim that the Empire must seek out shadowy foes that are not

defined by borders and that only take up temporary residence or form sleeper cells is

interesting for this analysis. In Homefront, the enemy is an occupation military force, but

the player is the sleeper cell and shadowy resistance—thus potentially reversing the

claims made by Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter for their interpretation of banal warfare.

Future research or alternative readings/analysis of Homefront could explore this

dimension more fully.

I should also briefly mention that any analysis of a videogame is indebted to Ken

S. McAllister’s book Game Work. In this text, a foundational resource for Game Studies,

McAllister provides the definition for a computer game: “any game that requires a

computer to work, including those for desktop machines, consoles, or coin-operated

systems” (vii). Additionally, McAllister also defines for academics a conceptual

definition of a first-person shooter videogame (FPS) as a computer game where “players

‘see’ the world directly through the eyes of their character [first-person perspective] and

progress or achieve goals in the game through the medium of blasting away enemies

using a gun or similar weapon” (xi). Without these two statements, academic scholars

who haven’t played videogames would be left without functioning definitions for a

concept and textual genre that has only recently begun to be taken seriously by scholarly

research. These definitions provide the ability for those on the outside to see into the

world of Game Studies. Also, Rebecca Mileham’s text Power Up, though intentionally a

primer for understanding the scope of the videogame world and genre of games, provides

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an excellent understanding for what has been termed “games of change.” These texts seek

to adjust the way that players interact and see the world around them, and persuade them

to take action or change their attitude about the world in which they live (Mileham 75).

Games such as Darfur is Dying (which allows the player to take control of a refugee boy

who must hide from armed soldiers while searching for water in war-torn Sudan) provide

the player with the ability to see into a world conflict and experience, in some way, the

tension and crisis of others. This concept will be explored in more detail in the conclusion

of this project, as the notion of games of change serve as a rhetorical and player

intervention against tacit consumption of militainment themes and perpetuation of world

conflict.

Research Approach and Key Assumptions

For this thesis project, my proposed research approach is both a rhetorical close

textual reading of Homefront and also a rhetorical criticism of these similar texts. Close

reading as a method will provide me the ability to tease out the ideological messages

contained in Homefront and analyze the construction of an evil enemy from the

designer’s imagination. Michael Leff notes that “texts do not simply yield up their own

rhetorical interpretation. Critics must move from what is given in the text to something

that they themselves produce—an account of the rhetorical dynamics implicit within it”

(Leff 547). The framing of the GKR soldiers as an evil Asian enemy is what Leff would

call “rhetorical action” embodied in a particular discourse—in this case, the

text/discourse studied is the videogame Homefront’s campaign (547). In performing this

close reading, I will be able to provide a “judgment at some level of abstraction” about

the ideological entailments of the Homefront text (547). Arguably, videogames serve as a

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form of public address: a producer (game design labels with military and other private

funding) presents an audience with a consumable message of entertainment in the format

of a digitally interactive videogame medium. However, it is that these war games also

serve as advertisement for the military lifestyle which proves potentially problematic, as

previously noted by Stahl’s claim that these war games are both medium and metaphor

for society’s postmodern construction of warfare.

After teasing out the ideological entailments, I can next critique both the realities

constructed and messages of these war games as fragmented texts full of potential

“hailing” that may invite an audience into specific subject positions, particularly that of

citizen-soldier. This combines the work of Charland and McGee, as Homefront is a

popular culture text. McGee notes that no text is finished or complete, and that all

“discourses presuppose taken-for granted cultural imperatives; all of culture is implicated

in every instance of discourse” (281). As Charland notes, “interpellation occurs the

moment we enter into a rhetorical situation, or when the individual recognizes and

acknowledges being addressed” (138). This recognition of acceptance of being addressed

has a consequence for rhetoric, Charland argues, because it allows for a form of “self-

understanding” (or identification) which can form the basis for a persuasive appeal. This

interpellation arises from Althusser’s philosophy that “all ideologies hail concrete (real)

individuals as concrete subjects” (173). This research project explores the ability for

someone to be hailed by an ideology, enter discourse, but I question the

acknowledgement of an address and persuasive appeal by consumers of war game

messages.

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Charland acknowledges Althusser’s identification of the central process to

producing ideologies: constituting subjects in discourse. Charland holds Althusser’s

interpellation as the process by which the subject becomes the individual who

“simultaneously speaks and initiates action in discourse (subject to a verb) and in the

world (a speaker and social agent)” (133).1 Drawing upon Burke’s identification and

claims, Charland theorizes that individuals are constituted into the characteristics for

persuasion prior to the persuasive act. The constitution of these characteristics is aimed,

in Charland’s argument, toward the subject as audience who is always aready

“constituted with an identity and an ideology” (134). As “the interpellated subject

participates in the discourse that addresses him (sic)” the larger question of this project is

to explore the modern nature of how videogames place subjects into interpellative

discourse through playable texts (Charland 138).

As rhetorical critics, it is imperative that we scholars address the presupposition

of a particular ideology into/onto members of society. Examining these rhetorically

constructed audiences and how individuals addressed by the medium of war games are

potentially interpellated into a subject position of citizen-soldier raises questions of

agency (for both rhetorically constructed and actual audiences), resistance, and the

implications of such “hailing” messages. If an implied audience is being hailed by war

games, this problematizes the current military-industrial-entertainment complex

dramatically: if just one person could be interpellated by this medium, it is possible for

any individual exposed to the medium of war games to become interpellated into the

subject position of citizen-soldier. Also, unlike the situation that Althusser describes, a

1 Charland references Kaja Silverman’s The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press,

1983: 43-53, 126-131) as a source for more explanation about discourse-based theories of the subject.

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videogame is a string of visual discourses in which the player must act or make choices.

The discourse proposed by the text does not easily fit into the described interpellative

interactions described by Althusser.

However, this research approach is not without key academic assumptions of the

text that I propose to analyze. For this research, I am assuming that videogames like

Homefront could and do have a rhetorically constructed audience that may be revealed

through the examination of ideological messages within the digital text. Also, following

the understanding that a text may be polysemic, or have multiple meanings and

interpretations for different people in a postmodern society, I am assuming in this project

that my reading of Homefront is only one means by which to interpret FPS games and the

surrounding discourses—not the only way. This is to say that a different perspective or

rhetorical framing could examine the same reception texts, analyze the same rhetorically

constructed audience, play the same videogame, and attempt to explain visual metaphors

contained therein and arrive at arguably different conclusions. This assumption is not

meant to demean my critical eye as a rhetorical critic; it merely places me as a researcher

in this postmodern, poststructuralist age of rhetorical study.

Contributions to Scholarly Discourse

As stated previously, this thesis project seeks to examine three specific research

questions. By answering these questions, certain implications about one fragment of the

larger militainment phenomenon can be examined. Additionally, these implications may

be then tied to larger social issues and tropes that exist within society. By answering these

questions, I seek to contribute to knowledge that has already been established within the

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discipline of Communication Studies and expand rhetorical understanding of new media

and militainment.

With question one (“Who is the evil enemy constructed by the text? How is this

enemy rhetorically constructed? And how does such a construction rhetorically frame the

player?”) I seek to tease out ideological constructions and frameworks in game texts and

their construction of the enemy that a player must destroy. The metaphor of plague is

problematic as it merges notions of impurity with a human enemy—rendering the

opponent inhuman and needing of extermination. Answering this question will illuminate

the space between the designer’s metaphor for justification of extermination of the enemy

(what else do people do with insects and viruses?) and the actual reality of politics and

society. It is imperative that I examine the ideological constructions of this text that frame

American military action (either preventative or retaliatory) as “heroic” while the enemy

as less-than-human.

By exploring question one, these discoveries will provide a structure for the

analysis of gamers as a rhetorically constructed audience in question two (“Who are the

implied audiences for war games, and does the text create a visual discourse that allows

for the potential interpellation of players into subject positions?”) using second persona

theory and the exploration of the rhetorical construction of potential ideological

audiences, particularly that of resistance fighter or citizen-soldier. Black argues that “a

critic can see in the auditor implied by a discourse a model of what the rhetor would have

his real audience become” (Black 113). It is therefore possible that the ideological

messages contained within war games provide a model for an implied citizen-soldier

audience. Answering the first two questions expands knowledge of videogames as a

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rhetorical text in new media studies and expands the micro-field of game studies.

Additionally, these questions address the very real rhetorical implications of war games

and the militainment phenomenon addressed by Stahl in his book and documentaries.

Answering these two questions furthers the scholarly discourse about the rhetoric of the

war on terrorism as it continues to expand and evolve in the twenty-first century; and yet,

nowhere else does this rhetoric evolve faster, further, and continue to interpellate an

audience of potential consumers in earlier age brackets than through the videogame

market. With videogames being a growing sphere of rhetorical and academic study, this

project will add to the scholarly conversation of videogames.

By bringing question three (“What does Homefront, in its complex rhetorical

implications, say about potential future conflicts faced by America—and what solutions

can videogames offer in this situation?”) rhetorics of conflict and discourses of peace

specific to the war on terrorism are addressed. These rhetorics are prevalent in

videogames prior to and following September 11, 2001. However, following that date,

the usage of non-Western combatants (either real or fictionalized) as the enemy has

become more rhetorically precarious. As Stahl previously noted, American society has

become less critical about why players must shoot-to-kill the enemy in these playable

media texts, and if these texts are seeking to create a real environment for

players/trainees, scholars must explore what the implications of this absence of critical

ethical questioning could mean. Question three specifically expands discourse of

geopolitics and conflict. Furthermore, it explores how new media converges along with

ideological and political tensions within society. Additionally, this question allows for a

critic to offer interventions into the discourse: what can we, as active consumers and

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participants in a civil society, do to slow or pull apart the unquestioned merger of popular

military and military culture? The situation is not hopeless, and there are many options at

hand—I will relate a few at the end of this project and provide some examples of

interventions.

Having explained the contribution to knowledge provided by these questions and

what I plan to explore in this thesis project, it is now appropriate to plan out a blueprint

for this project and lay down the foundations of two analytical chapters addressing

ideology, metaphor, and interpellation of audiences, and one final chapter of implications

and future potential research.

Preview of Chapters

This project will progress in three parts consisting of two chapters of analysis and

one section of conclusions and implications—in addition to proposals for future potential

research.

Analysis Chapter Two

Chapter two will address the ideology present in Homefront through a critique and

close reading. Specifically, the construction of the enemy through the metaphor of plague

in the campaign content of Homefront sets the tone for the next chapter, which addresses

reception texts of those who have played through the campaign. The text, a recent FPS

game released for next generation consoles and computer game systems, can produce

extremely detailed and realistic graphical renditions of terrains and places resembling

combat sites—a key aspect of the collapse of distance and our civil reality vis-à-vis

militainment. As such, the visual metaphoric nature of this game content (plague) needs

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to be explored alongside the verbal and textual ideology being presented to the audience

by the game designers. Specifically, this chapter will address research question one.

Analysis Chapter Three

Chapter three will expand upon the ideological implications of the campaign

mode by leaving the close textual analysis of videogame campaigns and bringing in a

fragmented text constructed of promotional material and a form of public discourse

termed “reception texts”—discursive content created by game players. This chapter

argues that the promotional material and game content, as a public address discourse,

function as a means by which an audience may be effectively “hailed” into an ideological

subject position. The promotion of the games and the discourses of fans and developers

contain ideological fragments that can be tied to larger social forces and themes. This

chapter will also seek to explore the possibility of a second persona construction in the

videogame form of public address. It is possible that there may be an audience implied by

the developers of videogames like Homefront, and this can be seen by focusing a critical

lens on the ideological commitments of this fragmented text. This chapter will primarily

address research question two.

Implications and Discussion Chapter

The final chapter will take the conclusions that have been teased out in the

analysis chapters and expound upon the troubling potential consequences of the

militainment phenomenon and its implications to civil society. This chapter will begin by

restating and expounding upon the conclusions that were reached through the close

analysis of the plague metaphor and the ideological messages found in the close reading

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of Homefront. Next, the chapter will address the conclusions reached through the analysis

of promotional materials and reception texts.

This chapter will then transition into a section that seeks to answer research

question three based upon the conclusions that have been reached and expounded upon

through the analysis chapters. I ask, with the rhetoric of the war on terrorism focused

mainly on constructing an enemy other that may descend upon the American public at

any moment, what is the role of videogames, the metaphor and medium through which a

player may see and understand warfare, in constructing this enemy? How might scholars

and citizens view videogames differently, and is there another way to frame conflict

between nations in a videogame context, or even in a game context?

After addressing the conclusions and implications of the two analytical chapters

and expounding upon the relevant areas of question three, this chapter will conclude by

stating areas that were revealed through research that also cry out for research and study.

Additional research into videogames is necessary as there seems to be no ending to the

production and consumption of these war games. If society cannot put the genie back into

the bottle, we must then understand what potential messages it may bring us.

Conclusion

Having established why an examination of the phenomenon of militainment in

popular culture, specifically through the medium of videogames, is important, the only

step left is to begin. This introduction first explored the exigency for a rhetorical thesis

that analyzes the militainment phenomenon as part of the military-industrial-

entertainment complex, particularly as videogames have been described as a dominant

metaphor for FPS player’s understanding of militarized conflict. It cannot be understated

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the importance of scholarly explorations of how postmodern society understands warfare

through videogames. This project will specifically focus on the ideological entailments of

the game Homefront as it explores a close reading of the campaign game text and the

reception texts and promotional materials that potentially place players into a subject

position.

This introduction has stated two research questions that show ideological

messages may interpellate individuals into the subject position of citizen-soldiers, and

how the usage of the metaphor plague transforms a fictional enemy into a convenient

insectoid life form or virus ripe extermination. Also, one question addresses what

implications of FPS videogame discourses, like Homefront, have on geopolitical

understanding of conflict in an increasingly interdependent economic reality. These

questions all address the postmodern text that is a war game, a playable text within the

militainment phenomenon that seeks to both entertain and assimilate the audience into the

discourses of the “war on terrorism.”

The militainment phenomenon is not going away anytime soon. With the release

of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the ability of videogame designers to claim the

ability to create as real an environment for their players as possible is still shocking at

first blush and then stunning as they actually follow through and deliver what can only be

described as the most digitally tangible terrains and battle sequences. This is taken even

further by THQ’s Homefront, the text analyzed here. Not only is the game visually

stunning, but it suggests something unsettling and startling for a consumer audience—the

end of the United States of America. That such a discourse is consumable is shocking,

but that it is turned into a FPS title that banks on patriotism and ideological framing of

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Koreans as the enemy is significant. War games continue to break sales and development

records as the lines between the battlefields of insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq and

digital representations of battlegrounds between game avatars merge and blur into

unrecognizable patterns. This is truly the age of digital entertainment and warfare

merging. The real question becomes, then, what can scholars and critics do to trouble the

prevalent ideologies that frame such conflicts?

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Chapter 2: Constructing an Evil, Asian Enemy and Metaphoric Plague

Today’s media saturated society is bombarded with messages at every moment of

our waking lives and the residues of these images seep into our individual and social

subconscious, thus infecting even our social perceptions and interactions. But these

messages are not always direct or clearly packaged for presentation. Some fly under our

radar and stick to the back of our minds and influence us in subtle ways. Many mediated

messages are so packed with ideological fragments and baggage that we cannot simply

perceive all the parts at once. Instead, our heads are full of abstract concepts made up of

multiple linguistic pieces of understanding and meaning. These make up what Lakoff and

Johnson call our “conceptual system,” which shapes the ways we perceive, the means by

which we move around our world and how we related to other people (Lakoff and

Johnson, 3). Their focus is on metaphor, what some may believe to be mere

embellishment in the English language is actually a complex series of layers and

relationships that structure our world, our relationships, and our thoughts. One of the

most import things that Lakoff and Johnson tell us, though, is this direct claim: metaphor

pervades every part of our daily lives (Lakoff and Johnson, 3).

Once the linguistic curtain has been lifted and the metaphorical nature in our lives

is revealed, metaphors are everywhere: in the newspaper, on our children’s cereal boxes,

on billboards, and on the television. There is no place in our lives that metaphor does not

reach or touch, render and reshape. Thus, Roger Stahl’s argument that videogames, a

medium of entertainment which rapidly advanced alongside military technologies, have

become both the medium and metaphor through which FPS players understand war

and/or warfare reveals a troubling relationship and important question: the player must

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ask themself which he or she comprehends first, battlefield or battle-simulation (Stahl

92)?

Previous scholarship has addressed, primarily, the role of videogames in

construction of lived realities and the relationship between videogames and military

recruitment. I argue in this project that videogames serve as a platform for public address,

though specifically an address one purchases and consumes in a way not traditionally

perceived as “public address.” But, I believe that as a consumable medium for messages

by the designers, producers, and artists, videogames do address publics. A growing

literature has also begun to analyze videogames for larger messages and rhetorical

messages contained within, and this analytical chapter seeks to add to that literature of

analysis.

In this chapter I will address the powerful metaphor within the videogame text

Homefront that seeks to frame warfare through the lens of a disease. Specifically, a

metaphor that frames the invading Korean army as less than human: a plague of insects,

an Asian “bug,” which must be eradicated. Though Homefront is a rich text for analysis

from multiple perspectives, which promotes a polysemic reading of the text, I argue,

using rhetorical theory and previous rhetorical scholarship, that this metaphor of plague

or disease is a prevalent and subtle theme in the gameworld developed by THQ and John

Milius, and thus it adds to the complex conceptual system through which the player

understands warfare through the medium of videogames. This chapter also follows

previous research showing the rhetorical construction/dehumanization of the enemy

through metaphor into something which may be destroyed.

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In this chapter, I will analyze the rhetorical constructions of the Greater Korean

Republic’s forces in Homefront as an evil horde of insects bringing disease and war to be

challenged by righteous heroes and paragons of health. The guiding rhetorical questions

of this chapter are: Who is the evil enemy constructed by the text? How is this enemy

rhetorically constructed? And how does such a construction rhetorically frame the

player? This chapter will first analyze the framing of the enemy as evil, racialized, and

made less than human (insectoid). The chapter will then transition into examining the

other half of the duality presented in the framing of the resistance soldiers as good

opposing evil, healthy confronting disease, and human killing non-human (man squishing

bug). In conclusion, this chapter will present implications and promote discussion, a

preview of what will be explored in detail in the final chapter of this project.

Enemy: Evil, Asian, Diseased Insect

The enemy faced in the game Homefront is predominantly the soldiers of the

Greater Korean Republic, the fictitious superpower and antagonist of the text. The only

exception to this comes in one mission in Utah, where the player faces a group of

survivalists who make the GKR soldiers appear almost civilized. However, even in this

exception, the soldiers of the GKR are ever-present in the occupied United States areas

that the player sees in the campaign setting, this making the assertion that they are insects

all the more important. These soldiers are constructed as the enemy of the player in

several different ways; specifically they are depicted as being evil and Asian through a

metaphor of plague. First, this portion of my analysis will explore the creation of the

enemy as a combination of evil and specifically what is entailed by the Asian nature of

this enemy. Second, this section of my analysis will determine what kind of enemy is

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constructed by the text. Lastly, this section will explore the metaphor of plague (both

insect and disease elements) of the visual portrayal of the GKR soldiers.

First, the GKR soldiers are depicted through action and visual evidence of

extreme violence and atrocity to be nothing less than what could be considered evil. But

what is evil? As James McDaniel notes: “how we do, and don’t, speak about evil

matters” (McDaniel 539). Though McDaniel focused on postmodern terrorism, when

compared to the scope of the fictitious invasion of Homefront seems like a small issue,

his perceptions on the three natures of evil prove to be remarkably pertinent to the

depictions of the GKR soldiers. McDaniel argued that describing something as evil in a

political arena is an appropriation of a theological term, thus making any assertion of

political evil a theo-political issue. McDaniel described evil well: it is a “theo-political

term” which political rhetors and society at large use in discourse to describe conduct and

ideas that are malevolent in nature in the field of geopolitics, which is backed by theology

and hatred (McDaniel 539).

In this project, I will explore the creation and rhetorical construction of the enemy

other as evil during the campaign section of Homefront. This construction begins in the

opening section of the game, where the protagonist only briefly controls Robert Jacobs

before losing control and being forced to witness the absolute rape and pillage of

Montrose, Colorado at the hands of the Greater Korean Republic army. This section

constructs what Burke would call identification, a key part of Burke’s theory of

persuasion, and allow the player to empathize with the resistance movement. Burke’s

identification seeks to create a common bond between the rhetor and the audience by

claiming how the two are alike or how they feel similarly about a subject, thus persuading

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the audience member to feel as the rhetor does (Burke 579-580). In this instance, the

viewer is shown the destruction of an American city by foreign hands—main street USA

under military assault by soldiers from across the seas. This visual message feeds what

Keen describes as the psychology of enmity, the mental drive to warfare that

dehumanizes and constructs the enemies of homo hostilis (what Keen calls the

warmongering modern man) and perpetuates armed conflict (91). Keen’s Faces of the

Enemy explores the construction of an enemy other as constructed and analyzed by

military training and propaganda from both a Soviet and American perspective; as such,

his insights are integral to my analysis.

Robert Ivie and Oscar Giner have a very interesting way of describing the conflict

against an enemy constructed as evil: “To kill the foreign devil-enemy is to reaffirm the

nation’s special virtue as a chosen people destined to overcome malevolence and violence

so that civilization may prevail” (581). Though religion, specifically God, is rarely

referenced in Homefront, it is clear that this enemy is constructed as not like us. The only

church seen is a bombed-out, ramshackle husk in a Utah survivalist camp that is turned

into a base by a crazed militia. The absence of faith, something near and dear to the

American heart, as Keen states, is a quick way to remove human qualities from the

enemy and turn them into something that is easily dispatched (27). This follows the theo-

political nature of McDaniel’s argument that the construction of evil via discourse cannot

be separated from both realms of politics and theology.

McDaniel’s analysis of evil, the triad, comes in three parts: evil-in-itself, evil-for-

itself, and evil for others. As McDaniel’s theory examines how evil is constructed

through depiction of the enemy or malevolent forces, his theory is appropriate for

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analysis of the text of Homefront. In this analysis, the first is most important for

repetition. Evil-in-itself functions much in the same way that Keen describes in Faces of

the Enemy, the blank slate upon which we project our “shadow” in order to create a

perfect enemy that is easy to hate and purge an unwanted quality from ourselves. The

second of McDaniel’s triad is evil-for-itself, or an evil that is rational, that can be

understood and may also promote identification with the audience. This is not to say that

the individual or antagonistic force is moral, but that we may empathetically relate to this

evil as humans and rational thinkers. The final of McDaniel’s triad is evil for others, or

the evil that destroys self-hood in its semiotic overload of awareness—the destruction of

self-hood by the crushing power of larger-than-life forces (McDaniel 542). This form of

evil is abstract in nature and not always visible. It is, as McDaniel noted, a force that just

“happens.” Upon collision with one of a force following this principle, the individual

becomes part of the tide, lost in the sea of the evil force. The destruction of individuality

creates the space and potential for the perpetuation of immoral acts because it abolishes

internally the inner dialogue that mediates morality and conscience.

In this text, the viewer primarily sees the usage of two of these evils: the blatant

construction of the GKR soldier as evil-in-itself and the projection of what may happen in

a society when evil for others becomes the dominant moral trope of a society. The second

of McDaniel’s tropes, evil-for-itself, is conveniently absent in the campaign text of

Homefront. As stated previously, the Jungian style “blank slate” upon which we project

our shadow, the polar opposite of our collective (perfect) self is the primary means of

constructing the GKR military force and occupation as evil. The players see the GKR

military performing atrocities: dumping bodies, shooting indiscriminately, executions, the

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disappearance of American citizens, the looting and burning of a city, and the crimes go

on. These are not the actions of the American military, at least not the actions that many

American citizens perceive our military to perform (such questions and actions will be

explored further later), thus making the GKR evil by occupying the space society has

determined to be our shadow: an amorphous evil that does not care about individual

rights, freedom, self-determination, and private property. Secondly, the viewer sees the

construction of an evil which has embraced the third part of McDaniel’s triad of evil, evil

for others. This notion of evil plays into the conceptualization of the enemy as an

amorphous, faceless, horde of beings who have given up their self-determination and

individual awareness for a sense of greater group morality and purpose—that of the

Greater Korean Republic and Kim Jong-Un. This constructs the enemy as being exactly

the opposite of individualist American mass culture, and will be explored below in the

description of the Asian qualities of the enemy and the analysis of the plague metaphor.

Most interestingly in this text is the lack of the second type of evil in McDaniel’s

triad: evil-in-itself, or the rational evil, the evil an individual understands and can feel for

after a fashion. In any good drama or story, the villain always comes from somewhere or

has some backstory or reason for why she/he behaves in such a way. McDaniel describes

Shylock in Shakespeare’s the Merchant of Venice, who responds to anti-Semitism with

logical arguments that portray his actions, though evil and malevolent in nature, as

rational and possessing personal thought and decision. In ancient Greek tragedy, Medea

(in the drama of the same name) also fits McDaniel’s second form of evil as she is a

woman wronged by both her husband (who has married another woman for political

power) and her adoptive nation (which has labeled her an outcast and pariah). As

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protagonist and villain, her rationalization and emotional dialogue creates in the audience

identification, via Burke, which justifies the act of infanticide she commits by murdering

her two sons, while also eliciting revulsion and pity. By destroying the coupling of her

flesh and her husbands, she severs her connection to him and may leave—agency via

infanticide. These two examples from drama are not isolated; such depictions of evil-in-

itself, the self-possessed evil that has its own motivations and rationalized logic, is a

cornerstone of good entertainment in media and arts going back centuries. That such a

form of “well rounded villain” is missing from Homefront also raises interesting

implications about the nature of the enemy constructed by Milius and THQ. This will be

further explained in the conclusion of this chapter and expounded upon in the conclusion

of this project.

Second, this section must dissect for analysis what is offered by the text for the

racialized component of the enemy constructed by THQ and Milius. In the original film

Red Dawn, the enemy faced by the United States and the democratic world is the USSR

and its Communist allies. However, this enemy is no longer available to the creators with

the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the USSR. The closest thing to the

perfect communist enemy today is the Marxist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a

near-totalitarian, impoverished military state ruled by a family dictatorship and only

miles away from three of the world largest and most influential economies and

governments (China, Japan, and the Republic of Korea).

Most simply, the choice of portraying the enemy in Homefront as the fictitious

successor to the North Korean state is one of political practicality. It is clear to see the

rhetorical connection between the promotion of Homefront’s enemy and the statement of

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President George W. Bush that our enemies are comprised of an “axis of evil” which

includes North Korea (Bush). By focusing the attention of the conflict away from a

Russian or Soviet enemy and onto the fictitious future successor to the DPRK (or North

Korea), Milius and THQ enter into dangerous rhetorical territory: the discourse of an

Asian enemy. That propaganda has been used to depict the peoples of Asian nations as

enemies before is not news, but that a videogame may tread into this discursive territory

is problematic (this will be analyzed in chapter three).

The Asian nature of the enemy is made clear early in the beginning of the game,

during the introduction: the player sees the words “Asian bird flu kills millions” and then

a message claiming that the future US was not prepared for something of this magnitude.

The irony of this statement is interesting. Popular media has long speculated that the next

major pandemic will come from Asian poultry farming, but there is no Asian monopoly

on influenza or factory farming of poultry. The next major bird flu could just as easily

come from factory farms in Europe or North America. However, the viewer assumes, that

just like the SARS panic, the next medical panic will be distinctively “Asian.” This feeds

the paranoia and fear that Keen and Steuter and Wills explore in Faces of the Enemy and

At War with Metaphor. This precedent of naming the enemy as Asian and possessing

Asian qualities is followed throughout the game: the soldiers are heard shouting in

Korean during combat (which the player cannot understand, unless the player is Korean

or speaks the Korean language—this constructs the enemy as foreign or other), the flags

of the GKR bearing the white star of the North Korean state are everywhere, and signs

are displayed with both Korean and English language and wording on them (somewhat of

a standard in Asia, as English is a business language the world over spoken by millions as

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a second language). These factors show that, not only the occupied United States, but the

enemy has Asian qualities about them.

This construction of the occupation forces as both Evil and Asian leads now into

the analysis of the art form that allows the GKR and the digital illusion woven by THQ

and Milius to be considered an enemy—propaganda. Steuter and Wills describe

propaganda as the “fuel which feeds the Machinery of war” (17). I argue this videogame

may also serve as a form of militainment propaganda, specifically that it creates an

enemy that has been historically fought before, draws inspiration from previous conflict

propaganda, and previews potential future military and economic conflict. Most

specifically, the purpose of propaganda is to gather our emotions, our illogical responses

to stimuli, as a pathos appeal to garner support for warfare or policy. Steuter and Will

write in At War with Metaphor that propaganda is

the mechanism by which governments persuade the public of the evil of the

enemy and the justness of its own cause. When propaganda spreads through

public discourse, flowing from government spokespeople through the news media

to the internet and television, re-articulated by news anchors and columnists,

bloggers and talk show hosts, it inevitably influences public opinion. (18, italics

added for emphasis)

From a rhetorical perspective, I can see the danger of the videogame text

Homefront as propaganda: the designers have constructed an evil enemy that the player

must fight because it is his/her just cause as righteous person to defend him/herself and

the nation. The discourse constructed and perpetuated by many through patterns and

repetitions of communicative acts on every level (from government to reporter to citizen-

blogger) perpetuates this construction and reinforces the political message of the

propaganda—meaning that videogames, as potential forms of public address and

propaganda serve to influence democratic society at the public, consumer level.

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There is no shortage of war posters and cartoons that follow this argument and

serve as evidence for this claim. There is, in fact, a wealth of propaganda images and

artwork from the twentieth century for analysis by scholars of war and visual culture.

Using a Jungian psychoanalytic lens, Keen reveals that what we actually construct as an

enemy is an illusion: the “shadow” of our selves projected onto the other culture and

people. We hate in others what we refuse to acknowledge about ourselves, and in doing

so, we seek to purge that unwanted and unacknowledged part of ourselves through the

suffering of others (Keen 19). Doing so, we believe would allow ourselves to evolve to a

higher form of being, and perpetuate our moral superiority as victor and blessed by the

gods—returning again to McDaniel’s theological and political marriage of the enemy as

evil (Keen 66-67). Keen’s belief that society must heal the distance between our shadow

and our active selves, termed metanoia, is interesting when considered in the context of

an ideological and militaristic conflict between the successor-state to North Korea and the

United States. Both Keen and McDaniel’s conceptualizations are strengthened by

Burke’s conceptualization of the scapegoat: that coincidental construction on which

individuals or groups may build their status as victim (Burke, 121, 125). Much like the

Jungian shadow and the theological evil faced by the hero, Burke argues that when drama

leads to conflict, any two sides with a similar enemy will construct a perfect scapegoat

onto which their blame or evils may be placed—thus making the victim just and heroic in

his/her actions. I will return to this in the final section of this chapter.

Steuter and Wills argue that propaganda serves functions of Edward Said’s

influential theory of Orientalism, or that the West habitually creates stereotypes and

lenses by which to view the non-Western world. This also allows for the West to talk

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about the non-West in Western terms, to control it through discourse, and thus shape the

way it is discussed in history and public opinion (Steuter and Wills 24).The repetitive

theme of the Orientalist lenses aimed at the East is that non-Western men are violent and

savage while non-Western women are sexualized and desired. This explains the curious

lack of Korean and Asian women in the campaign setting—the designers may not have

desired for the player to view the Asian women as a sexual object, and not confuse them

with another facet of the enemy force. Steuter and Wills make an aside about Said’s

theory that the nations described by the non-West “cover an immense territory and

encompasses many countries” (25, italics added for emphasis). This leads to the

realization that the United States has fallen into the world of the non-West in the

propaganda text of Homefront, and the discomfort experienced by the player is not

merely because democratic citizens are no longer free. The discomfort grows from the

realization that American society is experiencing firsthand living through a lens which

had collectively viewed the rest of the non-Western world.

After I have examined the visual discourse within Homefront for its construction

of evil and the Asian qualities of the enemy it has constructed via a visual entertainment

propaganda medium, I will finally approach the lynch-pin of the construction, the central

metaphor that ties this whole construction of the enemy in Homefront together—the

notion of a plague, or a cloud of diseased insects swarming over America. As stated

previously, metaphors pervade every aspect of our lives and form the conceptual systems

by which we perceive the world around us and interact within it. Viewing the GKR

soldiers in Homefront as evil and Asian is made even more startling by the metaphor of

plague. The notion of the soldiers being the diabolically evil and malevolent projection of

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our shadow self (McDaniel’s evil-in-itself), a self-less, institutionalized horde which

invades without question (McDaniel’s evil for others), and a non-Western or Asian

construction of a foreign/alien enemy is enough justification for the American player to

destroy the GKR soldiers. Such a notion fails, however, without consideration of the

plague metaphor employed by Milius and the writing staff at Kaos—the metaphor allows

for the transmutation of the enemy from a racial “Other” that is malevolent into a non-

human entity which may be dramatically and ruthlessly dispatched without question.

Simply, by being framed as a “bug” or “disease” by the plague metaphor, the player is

doing his/her duty as citizens to wipe out the infection and pestilence that grips the

country. It has become the player’s patriotic duty to shoot and kill, spray and swat, for the

good of democracy.

Keen states “it is not a person we kill, but an idea. The art of propaganda is to

create a portrait that incarnates the idea of what we wish to destroy so we will react rather

than think, and automatically focus our free-floating hostility, indistinct frustrations, and

unnamed fears” (25-26).So what idea is the propaganda of Homefront constructing? The

metaphor of plague is constructed of two parts: that of insect and that of disease. The

insect metaphor paints the GKR as less than human beings. Covered head to foot in green

or brownish military uniforms that cover all parts of their bodies, the GKR soldiers

appear to be wearing the chitin-like exoskeleton of some insect or alien creature.

Additionally, many soldiers wear helmets or visors that increase the size of their head

comparable to their bodies (making them appear more inhuman) while also suggesting

the compound eyes of insects and plague-vermin. Bugs are not party to human emotion,

they do not have the ties of family and culture that human society creates. As insects,

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monstrous and inhuman, it is unsurprising that a viewer’s initial response to the GKR

soldier is to squish—to shoot. The goal of the propaganda message of Homefront’s

metaphor is to promote a reaction: to shoot and kill the enemy (the Asian) as easily as if

he was a bug.

This is enabled by the power of the metaphor over the human psyche. Made of

two parts, tenor and vehicle, the metaphors that influence our lives routinely shape the

way in which we may understand one thing in terms of another—allowing for one

concept to stand in for a separate concept. The tenor, in this case the idea of a disease or

bug, is the primary focus of the metaphorical concept. The vehicle, the GKR soldiers and

army, is the way in which a player sees and begins to understand the complex

relationship between the two. In this metaphor, the plague must be wiped out (through

eradication and vaccination) by the destruction of the GKR military. When shooting a

GKR soldier, the digital representation of the screen before the player, the mental link

between the humanoid shape and the concept of vermin or pests or a disease shots down

any moral processing about committing the deed. The player then pulls the trigger,

swatting the fly that buzzes around his or her ears.

The imagery of a fly over a corpse is intensified by the portrayal of black jets and

helicopters buzzing over the burned and wounded cities of Montrose, Colorado and San

Francisco. Dark against the skies of the fallen cities, the noise of their engines and

propellers is the droning buzz of a pest that will not leave—the dark chorus of cicadas or

malevolent chirruping of locusts as they devour the crops of a nation and leave only a

barren waste behind.

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As Sam Keen astutely noted, “when Western nations go to war against Asians,

they usually portray them as faceless hordes” (26). The dehumanization of the “enemy”

in Homefront is so total, that the only words with which to describe the Asian

(supposedly Korean) adversary is through the metaphor of plague, a disease ridden

swarm of bugs descending upon a people and nation—a biblical pestilence that has

landed unwelcomed and uninvited upon the shores of an already crippled United States.

The soldiers faced by Jacobs and the resistance are the “faceless horde” as described by

Keen, and then some. This metaphor of a disease, that the Korean soldiers are a plague of

insects, is the powerful tool by which the creators of the text have dehumanized their

enemy.

The GKR soldiers are visually constructed as insects through the artistic labor of

the designers. Their green-brown, exoskeleton-like body armor subtly resembles that of a

multi-armed insect. The visors that conceal nearly the entire face, save for the lips and

mouth, of most soldiers makes for the imagery of a fly swarming over an infected wound

or a mosquito sucking at the life-blood of the dying American state. The sounds of

Korean language being shouted in combat while attempting to shoot/swat away an

offending squad/swarm reminds one of a cloud of gnats or an offending handful of

mosquitoes.

This metaphor of disease and pestilence is only furthered by the decrepit nature of

the surroundings of Colorado, Utah, and California that the player sees in the game.

Within the first few minutes of gameplay and exposure to the setting in Homefront, the

player/witness sees piles of bodies, the creation of mass graves, an execution, and a city

that has suffered not only economic hardship but the ravages of modern warfare. An

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image of destruction, violence, and death, the horror of an insectoid Korean plague which

first spread through Asia before invading the weakened body of the American state. This

depiction of a diseased wasteland furthers the logical rationalization of the “unclean” and

diseased nature of the American nation under the occupation of an alien other.

During the trailer of the game, the player is informed that an American health

system, already taxed by the supply losses brought about by peak oil prices (apparently

twenty dollars a gallon), was not prepared for the death toll brought on by an “Asian Bird

Flu epidemic.” Supposedly, the Center for Disease Control and Secretary of Health and

Human services of the futuristic America-in-decline had “never seen anything like this”

(though history proves this to be untrue with the Spanish Flu pandemic following World

War One). It is this phrase, “we’ve never seen anything like this,” which becomes

problematic. Hofstadter notes of paranoia, and its coupling with politics, by claiming that

it “has been linked with movements of suspicious discontent and whose content remains

much the same even when it is adopted by men of distinctly different purposes”

(Hofstadter 6). Simply, there are complications when one is addressing a matter of public

and national health, but the overtones given are more fitting of a political office or forum

and not the clinic or laboratory where the answer may actually lie. Though the secretary

of health and human services is a public official appointed by the president and approved

by congress, he or she is still the nation’s chief advocate for health and safety. What the

player sees in this instance is a brief glimmer of the paranoid fear of something foreign

and alien that has infiltrated the nation’s “immune system” and left it weakened. The

unsettling part of this moment is the assignment of blame to the metaphoric plague, both

disease and invading horde, and away from society’s own responsibility.

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Sam Keen notes that the creation of an enemy is rested squarely in our own

paranoia—we create in our enemy the dark interpretation of our own flaws and evils.

Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the

characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by

selective reception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative

aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created…We

remember only the evidence that confirms our prejudice. (19, my italics for

emphasis)

The unsettling irony of Homefront is that the enemy is constructed as an all-consuming

insect horde that devours half of the American nation in order to devour its resources—

the same corporate and neocolonial process that American late capitalism has been doing

to the third world and other weaker nations for decades. The designers have constructed

an enemy to do unto us (Americans) as our government has done unto others countless

times before, a reality all but potentially lost on the player. In short, our own

responsibility for the persecution and occupation of the nation is left unaddressed and

unfinished. But I must ask why; why has this avenue been left unexplored by the game

creators? Perhaps it is the nature of the medium, a first person shooter in the age of

militainment seeks to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all. Self-reflexivity is a

luxury one does not possess when your nation is overrun by a diseased horde of bugs. Or,

perhaps, there is a more telling reason. McDaniel’s second form of evil, evil-for-itself,

would occupy that space where the creators would acknowledge their self-reflexive and

critical selves. To construct an enemy or villain as strong as Shylock or as crafty as

Medea would require the gift of human logic and depth to the character or force,

something that addresses the wrongs or failures of outside forces and influences that lead

to a specific pattern of behavior. Evil does not exist in a vacuum and enemies are not

made in isolation. A specific series of acts and actions, discourses and decisions, leads

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down a path to conflict, and the absence of McDaniel’s second evil shows a clear lack of

this acknowledgment.

What I have explored in this section is the construction of an enemy. Through the

creation of something both Evil and Asian the enemy may be viewed through a lens of

propaganda as something that must be fought and resisted. However, this construction of

the GKR occupation in Homefront as the enemy force is complicated further by the

metaphor of plague. This metaphor posits that the moral duty of the American people is

to stop such a cloud of destruction by any means necessary, and that the player should

feel no guilt over such actions because the enemy is no longer human. It is in this last

piece, scholars and critics may see the power of the videogame medium to contain such a

sophisticated, and yet simply conceived, visual message comprised of the tropes of

Orientalism and paranoia already common in political discourse and foreign policy. The

power of such a message to address and create publics and audiences of players will be

discussed in the next chapter. However, I must now turn my attention to the other side of

the duality: the “heroic” aspects of the player and the protagonist characters.

Good, Healthy, American Hero

After exploring the ways in which the enemy is constructed, this section will

analyze the other half of the game’s ethical dialectic: the American hero, portrayed as

good and healthy in a world that has been economically disempowered and left politically

impotent. This section will first focus on the ways in which “good” is constructed as

absolutely opposed to the “evil” of our Jungian shadow (Sam Keen will continue to prove

invaluable). Briefly, the analysis will progress to examine how the hero is portrayed as

the paragon of physical and moral health and opposite the diseased husk and parasite that

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is the American wasteland and GKR force. Finally, the analysis will conclude with how

the protagonist and supporting characters are developed and constructed to be more than

just good opposing evil; they are, in essence, constructed to be heroic figures in

America’s dystopian future.

Of particular interest is the metaphor of the nation as sickly and diseased, as if the

body politic in America (a metaphor for the country’s physical body) has been infected

by some parasite that needs to be exterminated and excised. The country is literally split

in half by the Mississippi, an irradiated and deadly wound in the national body.

Ironically, it is the “left” half which is invaded, while the right is unheard from— perhaps

a potential jab at the political left for being physically weak to resist invasion. With the

decision making Washington D.C. separated from the occupied section of the nation, the

image suggested is that of a head unable to control or communicate with a diseased body.

Though it is not stated outright, the player is left to assume that the American government

east of the irradiated Mississippi has succumbed to the invasion forces, as no official

military resistance or response was offered after the invasion.

Another interesting factor is the game’s location in relation to a national “body.”

The game takes place in what may be described as the “heart,” heartland, or central place

of the American states. That such a place has been overtaken by a plague is troubling;

when the heart fails, medically there is nearly nothing one can do. This brings to mind

the lack of military skirmishes described during the march to the heart of Baghdad

following the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The question on many media lips at that moment

was “where is the elite guard?” This is paralleled by the viewer of this text, who wonders

why only after a handful of years the remnants of the American military are attempting to

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wage war against the invaders. If the GKR invasion is a real plague that has descended

upon the American nation, it may only be assumed, then, that the regular anti-viral

(diplomacy) normally applied to a potential political disease has failed. A more direct and

forceful approach is therefore needed to free the heart of the nation as the head has no

means by which to save the separated half of its body. That the resistance has managed to

gain a toe-hold against the GKR, and that survivalist camps like those in Utah exist,

shows that the national body is not yet fully out of commission—a few white blood cells

still carry on the fight against the plague that the vaccine of diplomacy failed to prevent.

The game raises the interesting question “What does it mean to be American

during an occupation?” This raises questions of patriotism, resistance, acceptance, and

the value of human life. However, only half of the equation is addressed. Players and

viewers are led to believe that the occupation is wrong, and that the American nation will

return to the way it used to be if the citizens can only unite and fight off this menace.

Recall, however, in the opening trailer that the American dollar is dead, gas is $20 a

gallon, and the American public has no electricity or national health system of which to

speak. What could be worse, other than death? The methods by which the Koreans are

occupying are brutal, yes, and they fulfill the necessary requirements of a construction of

evil. But this is a shallow evil, and evil that is not fully explored or revealed in the text.

When faced with hunger, starvation, unease, and the death of their country, would

some people not welcome the conquerors with open arms? Would this not be the second

form of evil, the evil that individuals agree with or understand? An individual may hate it

and not enjoy it, but he or she would accept and understand why it is happening. History

provides multiple examples of the conquering army being welcomed into the new nation,

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as they were the source for many resources and services lost or denied during the

oppressive conditions of war. The end of such warfare would normally mean a return to

some (new) form of “normalcy.” It is the lack of an American normalcy (such as

shopping and capitalism) that leads to the resentment and hatred aimed at the Koreans. In

a society where citizens and consumers often conflate capitalism, democracy, and the

first world, the United States has fallen into “filth” and “disrepair” during occupation. It

is left as the corpse of the once brilliant nation, now pestered by flies and disease until a

vaccine can be provided. The real question becomes how this vaccine is applied, and

from where the vaccine is sourced. The answer seems to be resistance and violence.

The answer to the question “What is the best option under the occupation of the

GKR for an American citizen” seems to be the simplest: fight. The players are

propositioned with a conflict and membership in the resistance they did not ask for; as

Connor states “there is Korean blood on your hands; you’re in the resistance now.”

However, it is the framing of the resistance as a good thing and force of righteousness

that is most troubling from the lens of a critical scholar, and more problematic that this

notion may remain unquestioned by a general player audience/public. In Homefront, the

player sees the concept of good equated with the concept of defiance. To combat and

resist the occupation, the rules and standards employed under normal rules of

engagement must be overlooked and the resistance must stand in moral opposition to the

evil it faces. Though the mere construction of the enemy as evil, whom the player fights

because she/he has no choice, places the player on the side of good, how is this concept

visually constructed within the game?

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Unfortunately, there is far less visual evidence to construct what the player, or

even critics and scholars, may normally perceive to be good in this game text—the forces

of evil depicted in Homefront have nearly and completely annihilated any remnants of the

American morality and good of society. However, three specific examples exist to

support the construction of good: the character Boone, the resistance stronghold of Oasis,

and the representation of the Golden Gate Bridge in the campaign’s conclusion. Each of

these representations and depictions help piece together the last remaining shards of

positive morality available in the text.

First, the leader of the Montrose resistance cell, Boone Carlson, is perhaps one of

the few shining examples of moral dignity and integrity left in the occupied city of

Montrose, Colorado. A 39 year old African-American male, former family man, and

Montrose county police officer, Boone was held in an occupation work camp before

escaping. This also adds to the heroic aspects of his character, as Boone has shown he is

immune or resistant to the disease brought by the GKR—unlike the bodies and dead

citizens the player sees in the opening sequence. He then organized the Montrose cell of

the resistance, recruited the other characters and survivors, and organized the resistance

mission to rescue Robert Jacobs (the player). Being the oldest of the cell, he serves a

function as parent and father figure to many of the surviving members of the resistance.

He built the base of the Montrose resistance, which he named Oasis, out of post-peak-oil

(the name given to the era after $20 gas—the peak and decline of oil as commodity and

fuel) technology and hid it in the suburban sprawl of Colorado. In Oasis, Boone hopes to

continue to grow his “little slice of America.” The focus on Boone’s leadership roles, and

his employment as an enforcer of the bygone laws of the American civil society, are

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central in constructing his representation as good. Keen notes that propaganda often

serves to not only construct the enemy as evil, but also the warrior that fights as good or

righteous and the opposite of the (international) criminals and outlaws faced by the

warring nation (51). Boone’s role as a police officer, the enforcer of law and order, falls

into the propaganda that perpetuates the construction of morality in Homefront.

This leads to the second construction of good, which exists in the game’s early

chapters. This good place is Oasis, the home base of the resistance movement in

Montrose. This setting, a transition between the heavy paces of combat in other areas, is a

strange interlude. Plants grow in small greenhouses to feed the resistance movement

(perhaps even feeding the health of the resistance—isn’t homegrown food better than

created junk?). Here, even the lighting is different. Upon first waking, the player is

confronted with rays of sunshine and the innocent drawings of children. Unlike the

previous time, when Jacobs is awoken by the pounding of soldiers at his door, the

fatherly Boone wakes him and tells him to follow him through their home. Shafts of light

permeate the area, bringing an almost celestial and heaven-like quality to the rebel base.

This is strange, as the place is hidden by layers and layers of camouflage netting, which

would normally obscure lighting. The rays of light provide a vast contrast to the world

outside the camouflage and canopy. Here, as Boone believes, everything has returned to

almost normal. But what is “normal?” A scholar of gender would be immediately critical

of the division of labor constructed in the Oasis compound: after the destruction of

American society, the first thing reconstructed are standard gender roles. Women are seen

cooking, caring for children, or gardening while men repair machinery and tend the

animals in the small pen. Despite the fact that the player sees Rihanna in a combat role in

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the opening mission, upon entering Oasis the player sees that this is out of desperate

pragmatism, an abnormal situation, and not egalitarianism and gender equality. Women,

it seems, belong in the traditional domestic sphere in this “little slice of America” Boone

rebuilt. Additionally, a small command center is populated by Boone and the other

fighters, all of whom perform heroic masculinity, as will be detailed below. The

implications for this depiction of good are problematic, as this is the “small slice of

America” that the viewer and Boone wishes to start over—a seed to plant in the new

American garden. As a form of propaganda, this game also seeks to persuade the

audience that part of the reason to resist and fight the occupation is for the people “back

home,” in this case the feminine gender left in the kitchen or with the children.

Propaganda often depicts enemies as those who brutalize their neighbor and enforces

their will on their people and neighbors using tyranny, while the good (re: American)

people stand for justice and civil rights (Keen 51). The irony is not lost, then, that the

Women’s Rights movement seems to have slipped the public memory of the survivors, as

if feminism had died along with the American state.

However, both these examples, Boone and Oasis, are not long for the (game)

world. Both are destroyed near the end of the first section of the game: Boone is shot and

Oasis burned to the ground by the GKR army, who had known of its location the whole

time. This failure of good to stand against the evil of the enemy is problematic, as it

contradicts the common theme of moral purity as superiority in contemporary society.

Instead, the player is left with a rag-tag group of underdogs who must now move,

leaderless and with a half-conceived skeleton of a plan, across the United States to

California and the final example of good in the game: the Golden Gate Bridge.

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This final example is interesting as it stands opposite of the third depiction of evil

described by McDaniel. Rather than evil for others, I believe the Golden Gate Bridge is

“Good for others.” While the last piece of McDaniel’s triad promotes the abolishment of

self-critique for evil actions, the bridge promotes the opposite in the storyline: it allows

for the player and individual to view the actions taken throughout the campaign as

important and a piece of the greater good Homefront constructs. It therefore serves as a

space in which the force of good may execute its actions and exist—by removing the

stain of occupation and retaking the architectural marvel. After a rendezvous with the

remaining pieces of the American military, the player makes a last-ditch effort with the

U.S. Army to secure the bridge as a military stop-gap. Visually, the bridge is unchanged.

No banners fly from its tall towers and no visual differences are apparent, as if the giant

structure remains untouched by decades of American decline. At the end of this

confrontation, in which the player is backed-up by the American army, in addition to the

last three members of the resistance, the campaign culminates in the first major victory

for the American people since occupation.

Next, the visual text of Homefront does much to construct the notion that the

player and the protagonist characters are healthy and heroic. The enemy of Homefront is

portrayed as plague, and the characters that comprise the protagonist force are depicted as

exactly the opposite: paragons of physical health. All are brimming with vitality and

muscle, with bulges everywhere. As if the media were not already saturated with images

promoting ideal body size and construction, it is interesting to see such depictions would

survive even the demise of the American state. Is it not ironically convenient, also, that

the one female character in the game possesses the ideal body image for an “athletic”

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woman whom male and presumed heterosexual players would not mind watching. Also,

while slightly unwashed, the four members do not seem to have been missing meals, nor

need a haircut or major other grooming and superficial maintenance activity. This does

nothing but add to the romanticized glow of the protagonist forces as paragons of virtue.

The protagonist forces are also represented as Keen’s notion of the hero, who

seeks to “evolve to a higher life form through combat,” in this case, that evolution is from

citizen to prisoner to resistance fighter and finally legend. The epitome of heroic actions

is within the final moments of the campaign, where Connor (a no-nonsense militant)

sacrifices himself as a marker for a bombing run by U.S. military jets. Keen notes that “in

the heat of battle, men may often forget their tiny egos and sacrifice themselves for the

ones they love” (68-69). Connor does just this; he sacrifices himself for what he loved—

battle, the act of fighting. In his biography on the website, Connor is described as a

militant who enjoys the resistance. This clearly places Connor under the banner of

potential hero in the resistance “game” the player is fighting. His last act of heroism

performs the act of sacrifice and redemption, through which Connor passes into heroic

legend—not asking for fame, glory, or personal acclaim.

The construction of the player and the resistance as the good, healthy hero is

problematic as it finalizes the duality constructed by the designs of Kaos and Milius in

the game text. Such representations within Homefront leave to interpretation an in-

between space or of rationalized action. Additionally, this posits that such an occupation

would not be something to negotiate with and that players must, as good Americans,

resist the evil plague that descends upon our shores. This chapter will now conclude with

a brief discussion and some implications which will be explored more in the final chapter

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of this project. Additionally, this discussion will preview why this depiction of both evil

and good, along with a metaphor of plague is integral to understanding not only the next

chapter of this project, but also the entailments of Homefront and the problems of

propaganda discourses which reach a wide variety of publics.

Discussion: Between “Good” and “Evil” and Metaphors of Plague

This chapter has analyzed the campaign setting of the war game and militainment

text Homefront. In this chapter I have explored the means by which the enemy is

constructed as evil and represented as an Asian menace through means of a propaganda

mass media, which opens the study of videogames for further study as potential forms

and discursive space for consumable propaganda messages. This chapter then examined

the metaphor of plague, the combination of disease and insects, which dehumanized the

GKR military occupation as something to resist and fight without consideration for

human life and value, as if they were a virus or bug to be exterminated. The chapter then

briefly explored the depictions of what little good can be viewed in the campaign setting

of Homefront—specifically, the depictions of a healthy hero that opposes the Asian evil

of the GKR forces.

There are multiple implications for what one may consider good and evil. There

are also many complications with following a metaphor of plague, particularly when it is

applied to an enemy that is constructed using racial overtones and presented in a

videogame medium. In the final chapter of this project, I will return to multiple

entailments and political implications of the analysis and the issues addressed in this

chapter. Of particular interest are the abandoned spaces in between good and evil as

projected by the Homefront text and the entailments of viewing a fictitious, enemy other

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as a disease or bug which may be destroyed without care. However, it is also important to

know just to whom this discourse is being broadcast and what can critics and scholars

guess is the ideological subject position of the audience? This will be the focus of the

next chapter of this project.

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Chapter 3: Audience Persona and Interpellation

In the previous chapter, I approached the internal discourse of Homefront from an

ideological and metaphoric perspective. As a text, Homefront is rich in its dystopian

setting, and provides potentially endless avenues for rhetorical or media analysis—most

definitely beyond the scope of this project. Considering the future of the franchise, there

is only more analysis possible, as a sequel is scheduled for release in either late 2013 or

early 2014. What is clear, though, is that Homefront is perhaps one of the most bizarre

and fascinating pieces of videogame discourse in recent years. With that, this chapter will

continue down avenues of ideological examination.

Previously, the visual content was explored for metaphoric and ideological

elements that constructed the enemy and protagonists in specific ways. Yet, these are

fictions—there is no real Greater Korean Republic, and Robert Jacobs is no more real

than the lumberjack Paul Bunion, perhaps a modern turn or representation of the heroic

giant of American myth. What is real are the reviews, articles, news reports, and

advertisements that promote this videogame. These reception texts, or discourses that talk

about a rhetorical discourse, provides analytical content that exists outside of the game—

thus, discourse feeds discourse and provides more text for analysis. It is important to

examine how real people respond and talk about Homefront—whether they are average

players or reviewers. Gronnvoll and Landau argue that it is important to understand the

metaphors used by “real” audiences in their analysis of genetic discourse among lay

people, as this allows scientists and scholars to understand how people are using and

understanding scientific terms in daily usage (48). Gronnvoll and Landau draw their

argument for studying real audiences from the work of Samuel Becker. Becker argued

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that although mass media scholars had long ago abandoned the conceptualization of the

audience of a message as a homogenous horde, many scholars still conceived the

audience this way (41). This fails to make sense of the various nuances of the audience

members, particularly how involved with a message or text some audience members may

be. Following Becker, Gronnvoll, and Landau’s examples, I believe that it is important to

analyze the texts offered by a real audience that offers their opinions on the text of

Homefront. Additionally, Ramsay, Achter, and Condit argue that uses of audience studies

“assume that the receivers of a message are segmented into various groups and that

different groups will have different responses to a text” (5). Though it could be argued

that some players represent only the highly-motivated minority (such as those who post

on websites and forums), it is nonetheless crucial to examine real discourses offering a

wide range of player responses. In this analysis, these responses are found online through

the website metacritic.com. Just as Gronnvoll and Landau argued that studying the

metaphor use by lay people helped fill a gap in the understanding of genetic discourse

among lay people, my research will help fill a hole in the rhetorical construction of

rhetorical persona and Burkean identification responses to said personae—two of the

potential audience segments that Ramsay, Achter, and Condit mention. Additionally, this

project will help reveal the variance in audience demographics that Becker argued is

essential in developing “critical abstractions” that help understand, describe, and critique

modern communication phenomenon (41).

Also important in this critique are promotional materials attempting to sell a

product with an ideological message. The promotional material is just as important in the

creation of a rhetorical persona as an audience text. In this chapter, I will examine the

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ways in which the advertisers attempt to promote the text for consumption, and I will also

reflect upon the ways that a player, or players, accept or reject game content. However, to

clarify, of particular interest to this chapter is the discourse of the advertisements and

promotional material—specifically game trailers, commercials and the website promoting

the game. These texts craft an ideological representation of what the ideal member of the

audience should “look like” or who should be listening or watching this message

delivered. This representation has been described by Edwin Black as the second

persona—an ideological construction, the ideal audience for a discourse or address (112).

This persona reveals the ideological implications of an address or message, and allows

for critical reflection and judgment of the addresser. And yet, not all personae are real.

The “shadow audience” that serves as the second persona may be nothing but an illusion,

itself a fiction constructed by the rhetor to justify an ideological goal or message.

Whether or not the text constructs and addresses a false or artificial persona, there

is always the real audience—the consumers who buy and play Homefront and are

exposed to the dystopian narrative of John Milius and the designers at THQ and Kaos

studios. In this chapter, the text for my analysis will be expanded beyond the bound

content of the game Homefront—I will now amplify the affected space into the digital

and print realms in order to question who the text is addressing. This audience is

discursively constructed using choices made by the designers and advertisers who create

promotional material and the website in order to appeal to an audience—an ideological

second persona. By studying real audiences, as stated earlier, the connection between the

identification of the audience with the Jacobs persona constructed by the game text (and

promoted in the timeline and occupation map) can be examined. While not everyone who

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plays Homefront may share the ideological commitments that are revealed in this

analysis, those of Milius and the design team, it is important to note that through

reception texts it can be argued that some do (and some do not).

In my research of this project, I began to notice a difference between

advertisements, promotional material, and the way in which consumers discussed the

game. Where advertisements promoted themes of violence and patriotism, the

metacritic.com comments prompted discussion of technical merit and creativity by

designers for ease of combat and playability—paying less attention to the death and

destruction than to the response of their controllers. This reaction is itself problematic

from multiple perspectives. I have coined this as the “big split” in game promotion and

reception—the separation and space between what is said about Homefront by designers

and what is offered by players. Though not all reception texts praised the often bloody

and uncritical messages of the three games, very few offered any sort of reflection upon

the themes of extreme patriotism and blind do-or-die order following that was presented.

Between the message and ideological package presented by the design company and the

reception offered by these magazines, there is created a discursive field in which the

players and the implied audience comingle and may respond to each other. In this space,

there is an ideological “shadow audience” that must be found and explored, as that

presentation constructs or reveals a subject-position into which a specific audience

member or player could potentially be “hailed” or interpellated into, as Althusser noted

(Althusser 172).

Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to ask the question: who are the implied

audiences for war games, and does the text create a visual discourse that allows for the

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potential interpellation of players into subject positions? This chapter will explore how a

player, who finds him or herself always already in a subject position, may potentially

respond to this message. By asking this question, I lay a critical foundation for

illuminating the implications of videogame texts, polysemy, militainment, and war games

in general. Perhaps there are even constitutive elements of videogame narratives, which

paradoxically allow for the internalization of metanarratives even as they are vocally

shaken off or ignored. This leads us to the important question, which will be addressed in

the final chapter of this project: “Why is the digital representation of a resistance

movement set in an alien, dystopian, and totalitarian occupied future United States fun?”

Though this question may not be answered simply, I will provide elements of the answer

in this chapter’s analysis. So this question must remain in the back of the critic’s mind as

the lens focuses on the text and analysis provided.

Critical Perspective and Text

As this is a critical and rhetorical critique of a discursive media text, I have used

these theories to construct a critical perspective, or lens, by which I have analyzed this

“text:” Black’s second persona, Burke’s negative, and Althusser’s interpellation. Black’s

second persona is a means by which the ideological characteristics of an implied

audience may be made manifest in rhetorical criticism (112, 118-119). Much about this

rhetorical theory has already been discussed in the previous section of this chapter, but

this method is important for this analysis and lens because it allows for both an

examination of the persona constructed by the advertisers and promotional material, an

assumed patriotic and reactionary cabal; this also allows for the recognition of the player

audience through their own discourse—what persona do the reception texts construct?

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This furthers the “Big Split” found in previous research, and it allows for the rhetorical

critic to analyze the space between these two responses to discursive texts that support or

surround Homefront.

Burke’s negative allows for the individual to identify (to be persuaded) with a

discursive text by claiming they are not one thing, but are in fact another—stating what

we are not clearly separates what we are from what we rebuke, opening a space for

discourse between the two extremes. Burke notes that we can label something for what it

may be, but we could always go on endlessly for the rest of our lives labeling what

something is not—and this may be done with people or ourselves as well (63). Burke

even argues that in order to use language at all, there is an implied negative usage—as the

word for something clearly identifies to us what something is not (65). This facet of the

lens I construct is particular to the advertisements and promotional material, as the player

is dialogically responsive to these images and texts. The player must respond to the

images of the United States being occupied by the GKR forces. Even in the tag-line of

the game, “home is where the heart war is,” the player responds to the image presented:

the American male, presumably Robert Jacobs, blindfolded by the North Korean red star.

Burke’s negative fits into situations like this one by prompting the player to identify with

the resistance and the theme of the text by thinking/feeling/symbolically acting in

accordance to their thoughts “I am NOT blindfolded, so I can still resist” This irony, that

the player believes himself to not be blindfolded, may be questioned—what is a

blindfold? Is an ideology not some form of blindfold that obscures some vision and

allows only certain pieces or spots of light into view? This will be explored in the

conclusions and implications.

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Finally, Althusser’s interpellation posits that a player always already possesses

the subject positions that a message addresses. However, it is unlikely that the player or

audience member is aware of these discourses or positioning. Althusser’s use of a

policeman “hailing” a citizen on the street, thus making the person someone of interest,

falls interestingly into this lens (Althusser 174). When the player acknowledges the

message of a game text, that he or she must fight the GKR soldiers as part of the

resistance “because there is Korean blood on his or her hands,” he or she becomes

Althusser’s citizen responding to the call of the policeman—the player has been

interpellated into the subject position of patriotic freedom-fighter. This becomes

problematic as the situational text is fictitious—there is no real invasion or danger or

occupation, but this may be unimportant to the player. When a game changes the way in

which a player understands, interacts with, or views their world, the change is just as

internal as if it had occurred outside the confines of a game text – such texts are called a

“games of change” (Mileham 75). Games of change seek to educate players about

problems or issues in a new light, and being exposed to them has meant, usually, that a

player may become a more “well-rounded individual and has a better understanding of

critical world issues” (75). However, when combined with the ideological messages of

the game text and the interpellation of subject positioning by Althusser, this leads to the

player internalizing the role of citizen-soldier and the blurring of the line between

fictitious warfare and real, civil society.

Jasinkski and Mercieca expand upon Charland’s constitutive model (which relies

upon interpellative hailing) of discourses by claiming that a rhetorical text has the ability

to shape both the interior and exterior of a discourse—or both the internal

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conceptualizations of the identities and the outward expression of action and change

(Jasinski and Mercieca 315-316). In their reading of Charland, Jasinski and Mercieca

believe that Charland constructed a narrative that bound the readers and writers of the

Québécois White Paper were only shaped internally in their communal and social

identities. However, Jasinkski and Mercieca also note that James Boyd White makes the

claim that a narrative text may speak to an individual in a way of creating a relationship

with him or her—an intensely similar connection to Burke’s identification. The authors

note that it is important to trace the “reception, circulation, and articulation” of a text in

order to trace the exterior of a discourses reach, and see how a constitutive invitation is

realized and a constitutive legacy may be established (333). This “rhetoric of exteriors”

creates a theoretical link between Burke and Althusser (By way of Charland, Black,

Jasinkski and Mercieca) that allows for the revealing of potential identification via the

articulation of themes and ideas in discourse circulated by players and critics.

To summarize, though the use of this lens, I reveal the discursive positioning of

players into the subject position of citizen-soldier or resistance fighter, an ideological

construction of the designers and advertisers from the personae constructed through the

discourse. Using Burke’s negative, by showing what role the player might fill and might

not fill in the game discourse, the text troubles the construction of the heroic and patriotic

elements contained. Additionally, the text examined is that of a real audience, whose

importance in examining I stated previously. By examining a real audience, this analysis

may reveal the ways in which a discourse may be recognized and realized or not in the

reception and articulation of textual, narrative identification by the players to the text.

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The text analyzed in this chapter is constructed in multiple parts: First, textual

pieces from reviews and commentary from professional, specialized magazines that cater

to videogame players and amateur reviews from players themselves. These are taken

from the website metacritic.com, which consolidates the commentary and reviews from

all parts of the internet to provide a mass score of the game for easy review by those

interested. Specifically, the agglomeration of reviews for the PC version of Homefront

contained 36 professional reviews and 171 player reviews—a total of over 200 reviews.

Metacritic also takes the ratings assigned by the reviews and creates a mathematical

composite score for the game. While the professionals gave the game a score of 7 out of

10, the players were less pleased and gave Homefront a 5.6 out of 10. This difference in

opinion will be explored in detail below.

Additionally, the text for this chapter includes the game website, which shows

the timeline of the occupation. On the timeline, specific events are presented using real

life clips and actors, and this presents a message for the players to take into consideration

when being introduced to the game. This material constructs the setting of the game

before the opening credits and cinematic sequence addressed in chapter two. Though

much of the information is the same, the timeline entices the potential player to either

learn more or to walk away, serving as part of the “hailing” function of the text.

Additionally, pieces of the text examined will be the promotional trailers, a type of

commercial or advertisement that teases the audience with specific information about the

game setting and entices the player to learn more. Finally, specific articles from the blog

Kotaku.com, which specifically appeals to gamers, will be included in the text as an

acknowledgement of the discursive field space between the two differing personas.

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Getting Meta-Critical

The analysis will begin by exploring the reviews on metrictic.com, as they

provide the largest section of the text, and this allows for the easiest introduction to the

two personas developed here: I call them the “Jacobs persona” and the “skeptic persona;”

the first audience accepting the message and responding enthusiastically, and the second

resisting the message proposed. This section of the text also allows for some Burkean

usage of the negative, and introduces the potential interpellation of players—but also

problematizes this perception as well.

As stated above, the website metacritic.com has, specifically for the PC version of

Homefront, 200 reviews in which players and professionals state their opinions on the

game. In order to leave a review, a player need only make a profile on metacritic to log

in, but the critic reviews are written by professionals attached to the gaming industries

publications around the world (from the U.S. and U.K. to Denmark, Russia, and beyond).

The professionals were more unified in their response to the game, with 33 giving

Homefront either positive or mixed reviews, while 3 gave it negative reviews

(metacritic.com). In the professional reviews, the commentary ranged from positive,

acknowledging some flaws, to outright tarring and feathering of THQ and Kaos Studios.

Mark Smith, writing for gamechronicles.com, gave the highest review and astutely notes

[A]s the title indicates, Homefront shines, by bringing the war home. The US has

been involved in some sort of war for as long as I can remember, but most citizens

go about their daily business and never think about it unless you are glued to the

news or have a family member serving overseas. But what happens when tanks

start rolling down your neighborhood – enemy tanks, and jets scream across the

skies, and the men are taken from their homes and put into containment areas or

when parents are executed on the street in front of their children? (“Game

Chronicles Review,” italics added for emphasis)

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Smith is tapping into the reactionary and patriotic root of the persona constructed:

the citizen soldier who must respond to the crisis with force and heroism. I will call this

persona the “Jacobs persona,” as it seeks to place the player into the pilot seat that Robert

Jacobs, the game’s protagonist, occupies during the campaign—placing the player at the

heart of the adventure. Such an individual would therefore be more than willing to fight

for his country and would see this as a duty that must be done. Smith also touches upon

the reality of living in a militainment society, but gets it somewhat wrong. He claims that

people go about their “daily business” without thinking about warfare unless they are

glued to the television or have a family member in service. This ignores the reality that

many people live everyday inundated in military culture as entertainment and this

permeates not just the news, but media programming and Hollywood as well. Smith ends

his review by stating that Homefront is “immersive” and has an “emotional campaign”

(gamechronicles.com).

However, Rory Manion at GameSpy had the opposite opinion. Manion argued

that Homefront wasn’t just bad, it “sucked”—but that this wasn’t specific to Homefront,

many FPS games are suffering from the same problems:

Homefront is a modern (by which I mean "oppressively linear and highly

scripted") FPS stripped of all pretense; glaring flaws remain out in the open,

unhidden by the clever craftsmanship that saves similarly structured games like

Medal of Honor. Homefront is the logical conclusion of the rapidly tiring Call of

Duty-clone formula: The drama is more overly dramatic, the scripting more

opaque and easily broken, the idea-swiping more blatant, the storyline more

absurd, and the expectations of player ability lower than ever. (“Homefront

Review,” italics added for emphasis)

Manion provides the other half of the quality opinion about the game and the

genre it occupies, and attacks Kaos studios for marketing to the “lowest common

denominator” (Manion). That a difference exists between two specific reviews, where

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one claims that people simply do not notice war as entertainment and the other where the

formula for FPS videogames is running thin, supports the “Jacobs” and “skeptic” persona

construction. Specifically, Smith’s comments place the reader into the “what would you

do if…” situation of the Jacobs persona while Manion promotes a message that

constructs the player base as skeptics of the message Kaos and Milius construct.

However, not all reviewers fall so easily into one message or the other. Many

admit that the game’s technical design is flawed and imperfect, but they either praise the

storyline and fictitious game world or critique it mercilessly. Martin Gaston of

videogamer.com states that the scenario at the opening of the game is “wafer thin” and

lacks “any discernible weight or significance.” Matt Bertz of Game Informer makes the

note that the emotional scenes that first drag you into the game become scarcer as the

campaign continues. He also notes that much of what players seem to be fighting to

protect are simply Hooters and White Castle restaurants. What all these critiques focus

on, specifically, is not the spectacle of the GKR invading the United States, but is instead

the technical gameplay. Though a few of the reviews, specifically Smith, praise the story

and call it emotional and immersing, most reviewers gloss over the story or only give it a

cursory glance and feed the multi-player and single-player technical details. This is a

central part of the “skeptic” persona. The skeptic rejects the emotional and spectacle

based appeal of the message and instead simply wants to blow things up or shoot digital

people. The multi-player mode is the home of the skeptic, while the campaign is the

domain of the Jacobs persona. In multi-player mode, the story means very little as all the

player needs to do is complete objectives shoot the other players, and then rinse and

repeat for points. However, the Jacobs character exists only in the single-player campaign

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mode. This feeds the heroic depiction of Jacobs and adds to the persona constructed via

this discourse.

However, as tactful as the professional reviewers are (as it is their job, and

someone is watching/editing them) the players were ruthless in their critique. Most

notable, the average player either praised or hated the game. Much like the professional

reviews, specifically mentioned were the technical merits (or lack thereof) of the title and

multi-player content. The campaign and setting were only mentioned in passing in many

articles, and those that did mention them were either accepting of the different themes

Homefront offered, or just didn’t seem bothered to examine or explain them—simply,

they took the themes for granted. This is the main flaw of the skeptic persona, and it will

be discussed in length in the concluding chapter.

The players give the real meat for analysis in this section of the text. Reviewer

Sup299 states “But what they did do well with the [single player mode], was to make the

player feel something and not just be killing the enemies because you were told to, but

because you were fighting for your land, and defending American citizens”

(metacritic.com, italics added for emphasis). Comments like this not only feed the Jacobs

persona, but also touch upon Burke’s negative and the subject positions that Althusser

claims individuals all possess (Althusser 173). Sup299 states that players wish to “feel

something” when they play these games, and that we players NOT killing simply because

he/she wants to, but because he/she MUST for the American people who cannot fight for

themselves. This also plants the player into the role of defender; the game essentially

“hails” the player to fight for his land and his people against the GKR forces. Such a

claim also excuses the concept of killing for pleasure. The player may claim that she or

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he HAD to kill the hordes of GKR soldiers, because it was a question of survival and

patriotism; this completely elides the potential of players killing the enemy other for

pleasure. Player and reviewer Knoxeh makes the distinction between the story and

gameplay clear by stating that “although the story is very good… the story and the actual

single player gameplay are completely different.” Comments such as these make plain

that while some players do enjoy a good story, what they prefer is the gameplay—the act

of shooting other players or digital characters. For Knoxeh, the story was good but what

bothered him was the nature of the “ buggy” gameplay, which prevented real enjoyment.

Clearly, the dominant persona in this part of the text is the skeptic. However, this is not

the case for the next part of the text. Online, the website and the timeline present the

audience a very different picture from the reviews and the critics.

“Mapping It All Online”: Timeline, Occupation Map, and Website

The online presence of Homefront is found at www.homefront-game.com. This

website provides mundane information, like price and some light informative reading

(such as character background) in addition to promoting game events and competition on

the multi-player mode. There is also a media section that contains multiple videos for the

player to watch, including promotional trailers and comments from developers. However,

where the real unique and fascinating/bizarre content is are the two spots: the timeline

and the “inside the occupation” map. While the critic and player reviews mostly

supported the skeptic persona, these textual pieces uniformly support the Jacobs persona,

and provide strong evidence for the Burkean negative and the subject positions

mentioned by Althusser.

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Burke’s identification plays a major role in the rhetorical significance of this

timeline as the wall and message places the player as not the specific Americans

depicted, but for a small twist of fate the individual observing these possible future

moments in time could be him or her, and this connects the player by showing how he or

she is no longer divided from these fictitious people and are instead similar to them

(Burke 171). Althusser’s theory of interpellation of the individual into subject positions

also is important in these artifacts. For the timeline, the viewer has the invitation to

observe the content and gradually, as the years pass, enter into the subject position of a

potential resistance fighter. This experience culminates after the EMP attack that cripples

the United States power grid, and describes the nuclear annihilation of Salt Lake City and

Las Vegas. The timeline powerfully ends with the words “This is our fight,” calling to the

player to take arms against the GKR. I would refer to this potential as a process of

“gradual hailing,” or several small interpellative moments that occur over a series of

events or period of time, rather than the immediate interpellative discourse described by

Althusser (171-175).

Perhaps the most unique part of the website are the “Inside the Occupation” and

“Occupation Timeline” sections which outline the way the United States looks as an

occupied nation and how the occupation came to be, respectively. The occupation map

was released as part of the promotional time-period before the release of Homefront on

March 15, 2011. Subsequently, the map was taken down post release and has only

recently been returned to the website. The timeline was added post release and shows the

gradual downfall of the United States post-peak-oil. Both sections read of desperation,

hardship, struggle, and the failure of government to protect citizens and a nation from

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economic distress. Most interesting about the timeline and occupation map are the artful

propaganda images and the usage of real actors in video clips to convey specific drama or

tension in areas or periods of the occupation. Such detail is notably lacking in the game

text, as noted by the players and reviewers, which makes the existence of this artistic

detail all the more critical and poignant.

Both of these artifacts grasp hard at the viewer’s ability to identify, or not

identify, with the depiction of the America under occupation. The player can view images

and video clips on the timeline that begins in 2010 and ends in 2027. The timeline is a

series of years and dates, painted in red spray paint on a cement wall and illuminated by a

dim electric bulb or by candle light. This imagery plays well into the dystopian narrative

and collapsed economic nature of the setting. However, it also allows for persuasion

through a Burkean lens by placing the individual in a rhetorical moment where they could

view, over time, the situation of these futuristic Americans and come to identify with and

understand the situation from their perspective (170). The timeline starts with the historic

sinking of the Chun-Un, and Hillary Clinton’s press speech, but then takes off into 2011

and 2012 with the death of Kim Jong-Il and the ascension of his son, Kim Jong-Un to the

head of state. Critical moments in the timeline are posted along with details including

news clips and words sprayed behind or beside them in paint. Video clips from the

opening section of the game are included, but not in all sections. Specifically, there are

important moments such as the fall of the United Nations and the decline of China that

are not given much, or any, comment or recognition.

In the slide for 2016, the viewer sees a moment with the state of Texas has

passing a partial-sovereignty act, and only individuals with a Texas ID may pass across

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the border. Confrontations along the Arkansas and Texas border have resulted in the

shooting deaths of multiple people, most recently 10 from Chicago. This fictional act of

mass murder prompts conflict between Texas and Illinois, with the state legislature of

Illinois threatening military action. Milius’ creative hint at previous conflict between

states during the Civil War is ghostly evident in this moment; a stark neoconservative

element that sounds like viewers are reading from the conspiracy theories that Hofstadter

wrote inspired multiple “witch hunts” and reactionary acts throughout American history

(9, 15-16).

In the timeline, after 2021 the viewer sees no more clips or pieces of the opening

cinematic of the game. Instead, viewers are shown fewer pieces and parts of the situation

of the United States. In 2025, the data explodes with the clip of a news broadcast stating

the GKR military has landed in the United States. The last slide with a date, 2027, shows

the Occupation map, and the words: “Labor Camps, Mass Graves, Starvation, Public

Execution, Stand Up.” The final slide after this, date unknown, says in large red letters

“This is our fight.”

For the Occupation map, viewers see the United States divided at the Mississippi.

This provides the imagery for the metaphor concept of “Body as Nation” referenced in

chapter two. Althusser’s hailing becomes more important for this specific artifact, as

many of the sections contain video clips enacted by actual actors, and not digital

representations enacted or cut from the main game. Four examples stand out: a suicide

bomber, a collection of vignettes, a video of a hostage Korean soldier, and a scene shot

inside an Iowa schoolhouse. The first, third, and last videos are depicted on film, and the

second as voices over imagery.

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The first video is shot in shaky, home video footage. James, a former accountant

gives his story: he has a child and, the day prior, his wife killed herself and 19 other KPA

soldiers by walking into a Korean patrol with a live grenade. His next statements are

exceptionally disturbing, powerful, and rhetorically significant:

Tomorrow I’m going to blow myself up and take as many with me as I can...I

know some people are going to say I’m crazy for doing what I’m doing but I’m

not…I’m just a guy…I…I’ve never fired a gun in my life . I’d be shot before I got

ten feet….with this (the camera moves to show an explosive vest) I can make a

statement. With this I can make them pause, and think about what they do to us. It

is not ok to round us up like animals, it’s not ok to kill us and dump our bodies in

the bay, it’s not ok... it’s not ok to kill a five year old boy. It’s our home, and

tomorrow they’ll know.

We assume that the boy James is referring to is his son. His mentioning that the

KPA soldiers are killing people and throwing their bodies into the bay, as well as his

powerful claim to be a “regular guy” and even a liberal, is a strong appeal for

identification (Burke 180). Both James and the player have a similar goal, the route the

Korean occupation from the United States of America. James’ story makes the player feel

for his plight. Themes of family and loss and sacrifice pull at viewer’s heartstrings and

viewers identify with this poor, wounded and grieving man. Burke notes that people in

common conflict are drawn out of division and into unity, and thus end up being together

in their goals (182). It is through this notion, alongside patriotism and the reactionary

defense of homeland (James even supports this assertion by reminding the player this is

“our home”), necessary and unconventional means are adopted—suicide bombing. That

such an act, common in some parts of the Middle East against United States and Israeli

military and civilians, is appropriated for use against the constructed and fictional enemy

is problematic. Dominant media discourses regularly frame Middle Eastern suicide

bombers as barbaric or cowards, yet James the American is portrayed as a hero. When the

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tables are turned and the times are tough, apparently the American definitions of

pragmatic and heroic are skewed and shaded by patriotic desperation (according to the

designers). Althusser’s assertion that individual actors can be interpellated as concrete

subjects is also influential here, as the ideologies manifest in this testament. Althusser

notes that constitutions of subjects may exist is double, so both as game-player and

resistance fighter, based on ideologies that exist and function as material forms of these

ideological though processes (171).

The second video is a collection of stories from people forced into labor at shale

mines in the Midwest. The video opens by describing these people traveling to the mines

cramped in cargo crates on trains for days on end. The first narrative, from a woman

named Simone, is about her last memory of her children and their looks of fear and

uncertainty. The second from a man named Chris, who “was a civil engineer” for years in

his hometown. He then claims that he can see the structural damage in the mines better

than the Korean soldiers and that a single explosive device could bring a whole mine

down. The third from a woman named Lindsay, whose visage appears much older than

the 46 years she is described as being. She claims that the GKR occupation forced the

entire population of Midland, Texas to leave the city and work coal mines in Oklahoma.

They didn’t make them drive or get in transport—they walked, and everyday more people

died on the march to Oklahoma. Mary, a teenager in the next vignette, says she misses

her father and the times they would head to the shore and gather crab. She has no idea

where he is or when was the last time she saw him. David, the final vignette states, about

his “freedom” prior to the occupation: “if we ever get it back, I’m not taking it for

granted again… freedom, God, freedom means more to me now than it ever did. And

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when we kick those sons of bitches out and get our country back, I’m going to kiss the

ground and raise the flag every single day of my god damned life.” This video shows

standard gender roles in addition to reinforcing the identification of Burke. The male

characters, Chris and David, are shown as active and resistant characters who wish to

fight or damage the enemy while the rest of the characters, Simone, Lindsay, and Mary,

are all depicted as passive victims. This follows gender norming in the United States and

Western cultures that focuses on masculinity as active, violent, and patriarchal while

women and femininity is considered weak or passive or motherly.

The third video is equally disturbing as the first video. In this scene, the first

image is a screen with a “stars and stripes” circular logo bearing the words “New

Shepard’s Rangers” and the worlds “Fighting back against the enemy in Montana” at the

top of the screen. The captured Korean soldier is shown at gunpoint in front of American

militiamen wearing cloth masks. He gives his name and states he was captured by “brave

American freedom fighters” and that his mission was to secure shale mines and to detain

thousands of slaves against their will. After a choppy moment, he states that he knows

that what the GKR is doing is wrong and that he is wrong for following Kim Jong-Un.

After a quick intake of breath and a panicked tone, he states he wishes to help America

and that America is great. However, the viewer is unsure of his sincerity: has he really

defected, or is he simply about to be executed and reading from a script? While any

rhetorical critic and critical individual who promote democratic societies would chafe at

these depictions, I see for a moment that “Shadow” that Keen states individuals place

onto others (19). Take with the first video’s suicide vest, this video shows for the smallest

of minutes that what the American media has demonized and attacked insurgencies and

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terrorists for, suicide bombing and video beheading or torture, is a potential American

resistance act—the average American consumer-citizen is capable of very dark and evil

things! However, this is not the way in which the clip frames the scene. While we are

shown a militia acting to protect themselves against the enemy, the two men stand in

front of an American flag. Though the viewer may feel a sense of division by the

methods invoked by the militants, he or she is still drawn and connected to them by the

flag (Burke 171). The Militia’s goals become the player or viewers—the destruction of

the Korean enemy.

The scene shot inside the Iowa schoolhouse has grainy film, reminiscent of WWII

film brought from the front lines. The students are all blond haired and blue-eyed

Caucasian American; all are also wearing a sash depicting the star of North Korea. After

being prompted by the Caucasian teacher, they stand and face the GKR flag, and state

thus: “I pledge allegiance to the liberated states of America, one nation under Kim Jong-

Un, where every man is equal and everyone is working toward the betterment of us all.

All praise and service to the brilliant comrade, Kim Jong-Un.” It is interesting that the

designers chose children who are all blond to be in this scene, as it links and compares

the project to the German eugenics program of WWII. Corey and Nakayama made the

astute observation that the American media and society is fiercely guarding of blondness

possessed by the ideal American image (Corey and Nakayama, 60, 63). Here, the viewer

sees a childlike representation of that ideal turned into something from a paranoid,

neoconservative nightmare. The school room itself has become a place of propaganda in

this scene. This moment is a great tie into the game world, as there is a moment in one

mission where you find yourself inside a school, lined with desks, and abandoned.

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Perhaps it is this moment where the viewers’ hearts are pulled, yet again, by the depiction

of society’s most vulnerable of resources, children, at the whim of the enemy.

The ideological and reactionary messages of these videos are intense, and I do not

describe all of them here. Another showed the bombing of Salt Lake City, which is

referenced in the timeline alongside Las Vegas as being “no more.” Another showed a

home invasion by GKR forces that ended with gunfire. Additionally, these videos are

supported by images, propaganda leaflets, and news articles that sit alongside the videos.

Taken together, these videos and timeline are a great and powerful ideological tool inside

the design mind of John Milius and the game creators at Kaos and THQ. It is interesting

to note that these videos showed the use of human actors, and aside from the opening

cinematic, they are the only videos that do so. All other parts of the game text and

promotional material are either still images constructed of stock or staged footage or are

digitally rendered. For these moments, watching the videos places the viewer into visual

discourse, and he or she responds—though maybe emotionally and not verbally. The

implications of a personal, emotional reaction to the hailing and interpellation of these

individuals will be addressed in the final chapter of this project.

Kotaku.com: Bringing it all Together

The blog Kotaku.com, owned by and part of the Gawker network of websites,

serves as a news website that caters to the needs of videogamers. Providing everything

from an avenue for reviews, to news and promotional information, to release dates,

Kotaku serves as a hub for all things videogaming on the internet. It is not surprising that

Homefront leaves a presence at Kotaku—this presence also takes a political stance or is

one of the few instances where critical issues are addressed by the reviewer, rather than

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being glossed over and swept under the rug. In the search engine on the website, entering

in the word “Homefront” yields approximately one hundred and forty results. Most

interestingly, Kotaku was perhaps one of the most open (semi-professional) outlets to

criticize not only the game but THQ for its publishing of the title: “it was a short, linear,

boring and occasionally stupid/insulting game. The gulf between the amount of

marketing behind the game and its eventual quality perhaps best sums up THQ's

problems of late; namely, you can't just throw money at bad games and hope that'll make

them better” (Plunkett, “From Bad to Worse”). Kotaku notes in this article and many

more that, as brilliant as the creative ideas of John Milius and as terrifying as the

creations and performances of the promotional team on the Occupation map, the game

was just terrible in its campaign and is, as gamers say, a sucky flop.

Among these articles are several that, in addition to generally either panning the

game, or critiquing it, address the cross-overs between reality, politics, and the

videogame space. As these articles address the real world implications of merging a

neoconservative, resistance-dream reality with gameplay, it provides an excellent lens

into ways that the dominant narrative of Homefront is either critiqued or rejected, thus

conflicting Althusser’s interpellation into subject positions of resistance. While one

article claimed that the game sought to “make players angry,” the anger was quickly

replaced by boredom and then dissatisfaction (Totilo, “A Video Game that Dares”).

Homefront successfully engaged the pathos of the audience in the opening mission and

early chapters. Near the culmination of the storyline outside Montrose, Colorado, this

critic and many other players felt the action just faded away—as if the creative team had

run out of money or time to create an active story. It really is hard to top surviving a

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white phosphorus attack and then hiding in a pile of dead bodies hastily buried in a high

school ball diamond.

It is in this reality, that I argue one may be presented with a visual discourse and

placed into a subject position earlier, but not be cemented into this position in the long

run. The implication for interpellation, as argued by Althusser, is that individuals are

always already part of these rhetorically constructed, socially salient situational

perspectives (Althusser 171-175). And yet, when these situations are presented digitally,

the players are not always convinced—they resist the interpellation into the position of

citizen-gamer-soldier. However, as I argue with the usage of Burke’s identification and

the negative and Black’s second persona, that if individuals perhaps find themselves

agreeing with the Jacobs persona (the persona that seeks to fight the occupation, who

“gets angry” at what he/she sees) and if they breach the division of fiction versus reality

to identify with the fictitious people of Occupied America, perhaps then these subject

positions begin to stick and cement into ideological positionalities with lasting meaning

and affect. I am not arguing that it happens in every case, or that all three of these

theoretical connections are required in every case. Instead I argue there exists a complex

relationship of co-existing rhetorical theories in one discourse and meta-text that players

and gamers interact with.

Kotaku is also the source of much blurring between the reality of the real world

and the inspiration and rhetorical construction of Homefront. There are two specific

instances where these implications are important, and they will be addressed in the final

chapter of this project. Kotaku teases with a blog post about the real inspiration behind

the enemy of Homefront: they were originally supposed to be Chinese and not Korean

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(Totilo, “China”). This, taken along with the general absence of China’s mention in game

material and the only depiction of China being a flag on the timeline, open a great deal

for ideological discussion in the final chapter.

Also, Kotaku breaks into the political realm by revealing/announcing who John

Milius is and what he believes as a designer. Kotaku.com admits that the trailer and the

content play on our collective paranoia: “plays on paranoia — fears both real and

imaged” (Ashcraft, “Meet the Man”). Additionally, it is referenced that Milius is a NRA

member and the creator of Red Dawn, the film depiction of World War III, set in the

United States after invasion by the Soviet Union and her allies. Specifically depicted is

guerrilla warfare between the powerful Soviet Union and plucky teenagers in Colorado.

So, neoconservative military fantasy is not unheard of from Milius entirely. Milius

critiques the younger generation of writers today and states that they have no sense of

honor. That this rhetorical text is written by a screenwriter with a known history of

paranoia-based titles does not surprise, but it does paint some interesting implications for

this text. Milius claims that it is not he who has changed by transitioning to the platform

of videogames from Hollywood, but instead it is the nature of film and videogames that

has transitioned. Perhaps, in videogames, Milius believes that he can find that audience

that once absorbed the paranoia-based discourses of Hollywood in Apocalypse Now or

Red Dawn without question: the audience that still believed in the Cold War mentality

that a clear evil enemy existed “out there” and that it was our duty to go find them. This

will be explored for its rhetorical implications in the final chapter of this project.

Implications and Conclusion

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In this chapter, I analyzed reception texts, metacritic.com and kotaku.com, and

promotional content, specifically videos found on the timeline and “inside the

occupation” sections of the videogame website, for Homefront to reveal the construction

of two second personas: the Jacobs persona that actively indulges the game’s message

and promotes a patriotic and nationalistic message, while the skeptic persona

rejects/ignores nearly all the messages of the game setting and focuses specifically upon

gameplay and technical content. This analysis supported previous research that,

additionally, promotional material (such as game “teasers” and promotional materials)

and the website were analyzed for their support but showed a distinct separation between

the players and the promotional teams (“the big split”). Additionally, this chapter

revealed the interpellative power of digital texts through the use if Burke’s identification

and the negative. The final conclusion being that there is a potential possibility for those

who identify with or adopt temporarily the Jacobs persona, though maybe not completely,

may be placed into a digital and visual discursive interaction where they are interpellated

at most, or perhaps just find themselves subject to, the positionality of citizen-soldier.

So, what does this all mean? What are the implications of this complex nature of

rhetorical theories and actions? How does this change or affect rhetorical theory,

militainment, videogames, or the nature of media discourse? Questions such as these, as

well as major implications addressed throughout this chapter will be addressed in the

next, and final chapter of this project.

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Chapter 4: Conclusions, Implications, and the Future of Rhetorical Videogame

Analysis

In this thesis project, I have first briefly outlined specific moments in previous

scholarship of the militainment concept, rhetorical metaphor theory and criticism,

ideological analysis and criticism and finally upon videogames as texts for analysis. In

the previous two chapters, I have completed two analyses. First, I focused on the

videogame Homefront as an ideological playable text, rife with psychoanalytic

constructions of evil and the enemy other. From this construction and analysis, I was able

to explore the metaphor of a plague. I examined how this metaphor completely

dehumanizes the enemy, a digital representation of a North Korean soldier, in the game

text for “extermination.” This metaphor also constructed a visual discourse that placed

the national “body” at risk from a disease that must be eradicated by those with special

means. This construction of an evil, enemy “other” additionally revealed the player and

the resistance forces in a heroic, healthy, and American/masculine dichotomy—a

perspective that critically differed from the enemy because it does not acknowledge the

potential for human qualities in GKR soldiers.

Second, I opened the world of Homefront outward, and pulled in textual

information from the internet in order to explore the ideological construction of

Homefront outside the text and playable game world—specifically through the website

hosted and designed by Kaos studios and THQ. Two specific areas of emphasis here were

the timeline and the map that takes one inside a fictional occupation of the United States.

From these two digital spaces, glimpses inside the imagination of John Milius can be

seen—from the inciting incident of Kim Jong Il’s (fictional) death to the hypothetical

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invasion and aftermath of the U.S. by a unified and militarily powerful Korean state. In

the post-apocalyptic and dystopian future described by the occupation map, the most

disturbing information and portrayal of the resistance and survivors was seen: people

locked in crates and shipped as slaves, blond haired and blue eyed children pledging

allegiance to the Korean flag, the bombing and destruction of Salt Lake City, and the last

confession of a liberal man who wanted to walk into a Korean patrol wearing an armed

and primed explosive vest. And yet, the internet text does not end here. On the website

metacritic.com, a compilation of reviews (a form of reception text) gave the opinions of

professional videogame critics in addition to players. While some players adopted the

Jacobs persona and enjoyed/played through the resistance storyline as an immersive

experience, many simply glossed over the details as buggy, simple, lateral, or

uncomplicated. The second group instead either enjoyed the multi-player mode or really

trashed the gameplay entirely. It is important to note that, though this persona given by

the collective group response was called the “skeptic,” these players did not outright

reject the ideological world constructed by Milius and Kaos—leaving the ideological

construction of Milius to be less problematic that bad coding. That an ideologically

disturbing game world could be a hook for players to consume the message of Milius and

THQ, yet go unmentioned by these players is decisively problematic. Finally, the second

chapter explored how some in the game world saw right through the various threads that

Milius wove together to create the story. Kotaku.com’s staff of bloggers provided

excellent feedback as a final reception text that showed the beginning of critical thought

aimed at militainment game texts. That these discursive elements exist on an internet site

owned by Gawker is rhetorically significant, and needs further examination.

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In this final chapter, I aim to tie together most of the loose strings this project has

pulled from the militainment fabric by asking the following questions: What does

Homefront, in its complex rhetorical implications, say about potential future conflicts

faced by America—and what solutions can videogames (or games in general) offer in this

situation? Homefront serves as a wonderful text for rhetorical analysis for multiple

reasons—only a few of which I explored in this project. As I hold all texts to be

polysemic, open to multiple meanings and interpretations, there are potentially and

literally endless alternative readings, playings, and interpretations of this game text that

exist for scholarly study and public enjoyment. Particularly, scholars in the fields of

rhetoric, media studies, game studies, cultural/critical studies, and political science can

benefit from reading this project and experiencing the playable text that is contained in

Homefront and other games like it. In the final pages of this project, I will briefly lay out

six implications that I, a critical rhetorician, feel this text brings to the above mentioned

fields of the academy. These six areas are: the ideological implications of Milius’s text,

the role of reception text’s framing the reception or rejection of ideological messages, the

rhetorical construction of audiences through war games, the implications for videogames

which have now “used up” many of the militainment tropes so popular prior to the end of

the 2000’s, how the previous implications affect rhetorical theory and scholarship, and

finally what members of the academy may do in order to bring attention to these

implications What scholarship may be possible after the culmination of this research, or

ways to change the way we as scholars and citizens use/view videogame texts? After

expounding upon these six points, I will offer some final remarks.

Ideological Implications of Homefront’s Game Text: Enemies and Metaphors

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Much of chapter two of this project addressed the neoconservative dream world

that is Homefront’s occupied U.S.A. This ideology is manifested through the discursive

creation and manipulation of extreme patriotism, the construction of evil, and the

extensive visual and rhetorical construction of the metaphor plague. In this first section, I

will concisely wrap up the ideological implications of the game text of Homefront and

tease from both the metaphor of plague and the rhetorical construction of the enemy a

larger political and social problem that is imminent in American and Western society:

how, in a globalized and interdependent economic reality, can social actors construct as

an enemy the very Asian peoples and nations responsible for either the production of

much of our goods, products, and innovating technology? It is interesting that I have used

the phrase “social actors” in this question, as normally society does not consider

videogame designers and developers as social actors or parts of political or ideological

movements—and yet, as critics of rhetorical texts and media, members of the academy

are well aware that those who work in popular culture are far from innocent. And yet, in

the text of Homefront, I have shown the creation of an evil enemy and the dissemination

of this message to a mass audience (made of multiple segments) who (may) consumes the

message of the text (and may or may not agree). If that does not make Milius and his co-

designers at Kaos studios social actors, then perhaps scholars and critics need to continue

the debate about whom society look to for reframing social opinions and discourses.

In the first chapter of this project, I drew heavily from James McDaniel’s theo-

political evil as a construction of three parts: evil-in-itself, evil-for-itself, and evil-for-

others. While it could be argued that all three evils were present in the opening

“prologue” of Homefront., after the opening section the second form of evil, evil-for-

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itself, mysteriously vanishes from the game and is not seen again. The only arguable

moment when this form of evil is visible in the entire game is the confrontation between

Jacobs and the Korean general in his home—minutes after the game is started. Perhaps

this is because the player is treated to a rare moment when the enemy is, literally, in the

player’s face and thus the player is able to see his face (unhidden by bug-masks or large

goggles) in return.

This form of evil, evil-for-itself, is the “human” side of an evil force, that piece

with which individuals can talk and understand—the side of the conflict that, save a few

important choices and actions, American players could occupy as the “enemy.” This form

of evil also posits that the other side (that of the enemy) may see in the protagonist, or

heroic frame, the same or a similar evil that is cast upon themselves. Essentially, this

form of theo-political evil follows, as Keen notes, the Jungian shadow that projects our

most despised qualities onto the enemy or evil other in order to then exterminate or purge

said undesirable qualities. Burke referred to this process as scapegoating, and believed it

integral to the everyday drama of human life. It should also be mentioned that in literary

and entertainment spheres, this form of evil is necessary for creating the perfect foil for

the protagonist—essentially, the second form of McDaniel’s evil is needed for creating

good conflict, drama, and catharsis in the writing of plays, novels, screenplays, and even

in framing documentary accounts of conflict. It is understandably necessary, then, that

such a form of evil is needed in the development of a good videogame as well. And yet,

this form of evil is inexplicably absent. Why?

Perhaps, as the second form of evil requires that the player understand the point of

view of the enemy and know from where their positions come, it is not in the best

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interests of the designers and their funders to make these positions understandable. Milius

himself claimed in an interview that he missed the good old days where we “knew who

the enemies were” and when everything was easy to understand for writing a movie script

(Kotaku, “Meet the Man”). Additionally, Stahl notes that videogames are a primary

recruitment tool, if not also the most cost-effective one, for the Pentagon and the

American military-industrial complex (Stahl, 109). The American military machine

would not benefit in the slightest by framing the enemy as someone with whom players

could talk in order to reach a solution to their problems. Diplomacy is the business of

ambassadors and politicians—not soldiers and generals.

Or maybe the second form of evil is omitted from this text because there is

legitimate historical reasoning for North Korea to be understandably mad at the United

States. Such information is not common knowledge for a reason—it frames the United

States as opportunistic, paranoid, and previews military and political state-building

policies that would be commonplace for decades to come. Not only has the United States

(in recent memory) framed North Korea as one of the “sponsors of terrorism” and a part

of the “axis of evil,” but (in less recent memory) American forces invaded their peninsula

and interjected in the formation of socialist state— actions directly against the will of the

Korean people. Following the surrender of the Japanese empire and the end of Japan’s

colonization of the Korean peninsula, the Korean people began to organize themselves

into a government of people’s committees—modeled after the Soviets on their northern

border. The United States political machine concerned that a barrier was needed between

the growing communist presence of Russia, interceded in the southern part of the nation

and (violently) set up a demi-fascist/free-market system that supported American policy.

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This was the spark for the first division of the peninsula and the Korean War, and then

the continued division of the peninsula today.

This would be the historical context for the erasure of the second form of evil in

Homefront’s text: Why is North Korea invading us? Because American forces invaded

them first long ago and few in the U.S.A. remember! But this answer is too simple, too

easy to explain in a modern context, and it simply does not paint the whole picture. While

the Asian element of the enemy is of specific interest to chapter two of this project and

the game text itself, the pan-Asian enemy constructed is not complete. In fact, there is a

massive, gaping hole in its construction—a China shaped hole.

In the game text, both in the preview before game play, the discourse of the

characters, and the found news-clippings, there is no mention of China. Period. It is as if

China ceased to exist after 2012 in Milius’s game. That the rising superpower of the 21st

century is removed from the game discourse is interesting and problematic from a

political and critical perspective. There is, however, one tiny crack in this construction.

On the timeline leading up to the present day in the game, the player/viewer may see a

Chinese flag defaced with a giant, black X on the slide for the year 2016. For this, there is

no explanation, and the viewer/critic is left only to guess at its meaning. However, in a

Kotaku.com blog posting, an interesting story is revealed. According to one source, the

original enemy for Homefront was supposed to be the Chinese. However, as the economy

of the United States and the Chinese People’s Republic is daily growing more

interdependent, even as their governments become less tolerant of the other’s actions,

China did not make for a “scary enough” enemy. Everything was “made there” so they

cannot be that scary. Additionally, the creative team at THQ was worried that they would

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be barred from the People’s Republic for life—essentially blacking-out a potential

booming consumer market from their products. It was only then natural to move the

enemy next-door to the rogue state with which Americans are already, technically, still at

war.

And yet, this too does not seem to be the whole story. Chapter two addressed the

use of the plague metaphor to construct an insectoid, bug-like, dehumanized enemy that

was everywhere and that must be stopped at all cost. This metaphor also portrayed the

occupation as a form of disease: something that ails the American body politic which

must be cleansed, cured, and vaccinated against. In this metaphor is the accidental

brilliance of THQ and Kaos’s strategic erasure of China from Homefront: it can be seen,

through the metaphor of plague, that China never really stopped being the enemy THQ

presents. Though suggested and covert, this implication is backed by the analysis of the

chapter and the political reality in which players and critics live. The plague metaphor

pre-supposes that the virus or disease that ails a group, nation, or people is everywhere

and may not always be visible. In Edwin Black’s pivotal article of “The Second Persona,”

Black reveals the metaphor of communism as cancer to show how ideological messages

may resonate to a specifically constructed audience. This metaphor feeds on extreme

paranoia, and as seen from Keen and Hofstadter’s work which reveals the dangerous and

paranoid call and need for action, so that an extreme “medicine” to cure/expel the enemy

force may be used: a nuclear solution.

Though such a solution is not present in Homefront, and American politicians

have not reached such a position in political discourses with China, the metaphor of

plague may be paralleled between our lived reality and the game world. In Homefront,

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viewers see a nation occupied by the enemy forces of an invading state, a sickly

government and people prone to the whims of an invading virus. In our world, the

American manufacturing sector has withered and our service economy is dependent upon

the mass-labor of the People’s Republic—and the products made across the ocean are

everywhere here. Much like in Black’s essay, where the paranoia of communism as

cancer grows because this cancer exists just beneath the surface of the skin, so too does

the economic virus of Chinese labor. On the backs and boxes of our consumer products,

in the clothes we wear, and the food we eat, parts and pieces from our daily lives come

from across the Pacific Ocean and into/on our bodies. The neoconservative paranoia that

fears the cancer of communism is little different than the paranoia that calls for a return

of “Made in the USA” at any cost and not for toxic products from China.

At this point, I have no further insight into the covert construction of China as the

shadow enemy in Homefront. The designers admit that they, at first, wish that China was

the enemy players faced but that this was not smart economically. In a growing political

discourse, there is an increasing call for China to be viewed as America’s inevitable

enemy—that one day the old economic empire and the new economic superpowers will

clash. I have attempted to argue, through this implication section, that American society

perhaps has already come to the first sounding of war drums, and I am not the first to do

so. Stephen John Hartnett notes in his article “Google and the ‘Twisted Cyber Spy’

Affair” that the rhetoric of global, open, and free markets will march on to the detriment

of civil and human rights—despite the repetitive cries that the opening of borders and the

freeing of information will eventually lead to war (Hartnett 422). Hartnett’s analysis of

the recent debacle between the People’s Republic, Google, and the United States

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following a hacking incident at Google, in addition to the awarding of the 2010 Nobel

Peace Prize to Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, shows that recent events have only further

strained relationships between the People’s Republic, the West, and the West’s

technological and corporate organs. Though I cannot foresee how soon, or if, the clash

between the two powers may come, I cannot un-see the powerful metaphoric trope

paralleling the rise of the GKR in Homefront and the economic rise of China over the last

four decades. However, it is critical to mention that the inevitable clash warned of by the

neoconservative elites of American political discourse is beginning to subtly manifest

itself inside the popular entertainment media of our age: the videogame. Such an

implication cannot be ignored by future scholarship.

Reception Texts and Ideological Messages

The third chapter of this project addressed a unique discursive element of

videogame and rhetorical phenomenon: reception texts, or discourse that discusses a

rhetorical or discursive phenomenon. Much like the ideological implications of the game

text itself, the discursive elements of the reviews at metacritic.com leave this critic with

some important questions in regards to the skeptic persona: Why did those who adopted

the skeptic position, or whom projected the non-acceptance of the ideological message

offered by Milius and THQ in their playing of the Homefront interactive text, not also

critique or condemn the neoconservative rhetorical construction of the occupation? Why

did these players simply “go with the flow” of the militainment river and not see that

something, clearly, was wrong in discursive artifact being offered to them by THQ and

Kaos? These are two very large threads that this section will hopefully attempt to briefly

tie together.

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What an observant critic of these texts may notice, when taking into consideration

the scholarship of Stahl in the militainment phenomenon, is that the merger of the

military culture and entertainment mediums is now so commonplace that it is rarely

questioned. In fact, the military presence inside our daily lives is now a taken-for-granted

assertion of the political system—we as citizens know that the military protects us, and

during the war on terror we must be able to see it in action both on television and in other

media to reinforce (for some) feelings of safety. As such, it is not surprising that the

ideological message of Milius and the designers is glossed over by the player: it doesn’t

really matter, such an invasion could never happen—and if such a thing did happen, the

military would eventually rebuff the attack, just like players begin to see in the game.

Such a malaise is problematic, as it does not allow for critical thinking on the part of the

player. And while the shock value of the advertisement and game text draws the player in

to consume the message and text, the player is placed in a moment of choice: accept or

reject the gameworld and its metaphoric entailments. From the previous stated comments

on metacritic.com, it appears that the overwhelming response was the rejection of the

gameworld and no questions were asked about what the suggested turn in American

history might reflect about the entertainment industry’s addiction to the paranoid. .

War Games and Rhetorical Audiences: Who Plays Who?

Most interestingly, in the third chapter, the discursive creation of two distinct

personas, based on the theory of Edwin Black, was addressed. The ideological message

created by the promotional material on the website appealed to a specific audience of

players or individuals, and the reception texts seemed to invoke an entirely different or,

alternatively, rhetorically salient audience. These “Jacobs” and “Skeptic” personas

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framed the game differently. In this section, I briefly explore the possibility that one,

both, or neither of the two audiences may actually exist, the complications if they do, and

what that means for society.

Let us first believe momentarily that both the skeptic and Jacobs personas actually

exist as real people. Such a construction is believable. There are always people who will

rush to defend their country or resist the occupation of their home state by an invader

(and who would not, of course). However, there will always be people who either take

the messages presented to them with a grain of salt, or whom simply ignore the larger

political messages and implications proposed to them, or merely just wish to live their

lives and keep their heads down.

While the Jacobs persona would be the ideal audience for Homefront, it appears

that many players and critics did not echo the message of the persona. In fact, multiple

players, and commenters on the critic site metacritic.com, who may have originally found

the content appealing were turned off by the gameplay of the text. Much like Edwin

Black’s ideological audience perfect for the communism as cancer metaphor, the

audience who identifies with the Jacobs persona may have individual people who exist,

but it is not a complete unit of people the same way that an ideologically aligned voter-

bloc exists. The skeptic persona, however, can be seen in parts of the discourse circulated

by the game critics and by average players of Homefront. In terms of actual numbers, the

adopters of the skeptic persona outnumber those who draw on the Jacobs Persona. But,

why is this significant? Much like Black’s essay, I can assume that the rhetor (in this case

Milius and THQ) is attempting to reach out to a public and stroke certain strings in their

hearts. The Jacobs persona makes for the audience most likely to be touched and pulled

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to a defensive fury by the Korean invasion of the United States. That this audience is

severely under-populated and sparse shows exactly how far from the dominant cultural

thought and understanding of society Milius has taken the text of Homefront. From this, I

can see that Milius’ attempt to find in gamers the audience he lost in Hollywood has not

failed, but it did not have the desired effect either. Future research exploring Homefront II

might elucidate how Milius took the lessons learned from Homefront’s panning and lack

of critical reception into account for the new game text.

From this implication, I must draw the conclusion that rhetors and ideological

actors will always use their platforms to push the message they wish to be received by a

dominant and/or receptive cultural group. In the case of Homefront, Milius sought to

instill in a younger generation the same clean-cut construction of evil he made popular in

Red Dawn. However, what I see from this section of the implications is that such an

attempt will not always be completed perfectly or even successfully. Many players may

have completed the game campaign, but they did not do so out of their duty to country or

a rampant desire to destroy the evil that had invaded; many also complained about the

buggy gameplay and merely stopped. Only the future of the franchise will tell if Milius

and the design team of the sequel will be able to address many of the technical critiques

that prevented players from completing their journey through the interpellative message

of the text.

New Directions for Militainment and Videogames

Homefront is perhaps the definition of a dystopian fantasy war-game: it posits the

player act out the extreme violence of a resistance movement, without question or critical

reflection of his/her actions, in order to defeat a rhetorically perfect enemy right out of a

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neoconservative military dream. Rather than, as Stahl claimed, attempt to recreate the

distant “televised war in real time”—occurring far enough away that the player could

conceivably only imagine the battlefield, Homefront attempted something else. The game

instead attempted to create a world sans television in which every day was war, here, in

the proverbial heartland of the United States. This section will explore the implications of

this text for the study of militainment in a new decade—a decade where the economic

success of two videogame franchises, primarily Call of Duty and Battlefield to a lesser

degree, have dominated the videogame market and thus pushed the First-Person Shooter

genre to the limits of its tropes and themes. While militainment is, by definition, the

convergence of military culture and popular entertainment, game players have seen in

recent years the stretch by which developers and designers have gone in attempting to

bring new and exciting stories into the fold by incorporating elements of science-fiction

or fantasy—most often either unsuccessfully or with limited reception. Homefront, being

a work of fantasy, falls into this category.

The militainment phenomenon and theory discussed by Stahl argues that the

civilian will continually be immersed further into a spectacular, television war. But this

war will always be fantasy. The civilian will never step immediately from the role as

citizen and into soldier, back and forth like turning on a computer system. Unless there is

a total breakdown of the military structure or civil society, a separation between a

volunteer army and citizen body will always exist. This is the separation of the

videogame—it can only construct a fantasy, or recreate in representation a holographic

facsimile of actual events, but not take the player to the conflict. Try as they might,

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videogame developers can only suggest the immersion of players into combat—not

actually bring them there.

So this raises the question: what is next for the study of videogames, rhetoric and

the study of militainment? I believe that to further study the relationships between the

videogame and the militainment phenomenon, scholars must now begin to study the

relationship between player and text—essentially performing a hybrid analysis of

rhetorical and other scholarly methods. This takes the scholarship in a different direction,

to perhaps a media studies, critical/cultural, ethnographic or autoethnographic, and

qualitative interview form of research. Rather than focusing on the games themselves,

academics should begin to explore the roles that videogames play in the lives of the

people studied. How do players interact with videogames? What changes about the player

as they interact? What messages does the player consciously (subconsciously) consume

and perpetuate in the discourse about the game and their lives?

For example, a scholar may have gamers, critics, or general consumers play a

specific videogame and then interview them about how they understand the gameworld

and their reactions to playing the game text. Transcribing these interviews would allow

for an in-depth analysis of the ways in which lay or professional audiences respond about

videogames in their own words. This would not be unlike the study about genetic

metaphors undertaken by Gronnvoll and Landau. Such a study would, in addition to

providing the words of players, allow for direct integration with the players of texts as

they play. This may even open up potential opportunities for discourse analysis that,

although not rhetorical, flesh out the study of videogame discourse and understanding.

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Another example could fall into the realm of autoethnographic study. In the

coming sequel, a potential avenue for future study that I may pursue would be to

document my own playing of the game through journal, research, and recording to see

how my own understandings and interactions have changed along with my completion of

the game text. Both of these methods also provide a great gift to rhetorical scholarship, as

a methodological hybridity can help find commonalities between scholarly perspectives

within our discipline. It is also possible to potentially combine parts of a political

economy reading of both Homefront and Homefront II with a rhetorical analysis. As

videogames are a discourse that comes from somewhere and the profits of their sales line

someone’s pockets, the individuals and forces who are responsible for the creation,

production, and dissemination of these texts could be viewed as the rhetors for this visual

set of discourses. By examining who was responsible for the making and production of

both titles, a future analysis could compare and contrast the rhetorical messages and the

potential difference in ideological messages and personae constructed in the three years

between the release of both titles.

I argue that scholars of rhetoric and media cannot downplay the importance of

videogames as a transformative space and a medium of public address. The next area for

scholars to explore should be the immersion of the player into the spectacle of the game

text. Perhaps an interesting way to explore this immersion would be through auto-

ethnographic analysis of a scholar’s journey through the playing of a militainment game

text. While not rhetorical in nature, such an offering by scholars would explore the

interesting nature between the player and the videogame text, allowing for a potential

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step-by-step journey down the process of gradual interpellation which I noted in the end

of chapter three.

What This Study offers for Rhetorical Scholarship?

Upon first bringing this artifact to a friend of mine over a year ago, she looked at

me and said something to the effect of “This is interesting, Brendan, really disturbing—

but what is this going to do in society, what does this mean in rhetoric?” In this project, I

have used the theories and pieces of the bodies of scholarship from a handful of

influential academic theorists: Louis Althusser, Edwin Black, Kenneth Burke, and Sam

Keen. Additionally, I have pulled from the bodies of work of Richard Hofstadter, Robert

Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills, and Roger Stahl to name a

few. While much of this project drew on research that had a strong base in ideological

analysis, this research offers much to the fields of rhetoric and media studies. Scholars of

the rhetorical field of discourse, who regularly must address or critique discourses that

have strong ideological entailments, will find much service in the application of Burke,

Keen, and Blacks theories to this text. Scholars of media discourses will see the value in

the study of a video game as a text for analysis. Videogames are a growing field of

scholarship, and I argue that more research is needed to study the means by which a

videogame may serve as a space for social change, transformative space, or for personal

growth.

This project specifically offers for rhetorical theory two concepts: the metaphor of

plague, the potential hybridity of interpellation, identification, and persona theory for a

gradual positioning of players into rhetorical subject positions. As both of these offerings

have been explained in detail previously, I will only concisely describe them and what

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they offer here. The metaphor of plague offers the ability for rhetorical theorists to

analyze a text that frames both an enemy as inhuman (as bugs) but also as diseased (and

thus needing vaccination). This draws heavily from Judeo-Christian culture and Western

history, as the biblical plagues have been a specific trope of society for centuries. In

Western history, the arrival of the black plague in Europe was predicated by the invasion

of the Mongol hordes, who catapulted diseased corpses over castle walls. This is,

perhaps, the origin point of the “golden horde” trope Keen referenced. It is interesting

that this also parallels not only one of the first uses of germ warfare, but also the plague

metaphor that I offer: the Mongols were both non-Christian others and bearers of disease,

thus a plague on Europe. Future research that harnesses this metaphor could easily

explain the construction of an enemy as both something that attacks and occupies, but

also leaves an insidious trace of their taint behind. Something that must be purged or

cured after the enemy has been ejected from the society.

Second, the notion of gradual interpellation is controversial. Althusser argued that

a person is placed into a interpellative interaction after he/she is hailed by an outside

force. A primary critique of this theory is that an individual may ignore the hail or miss it

entirely and thus resist interpellation into a subject position. However, scholars of

persuasion and media know that consumers are bombarded with messages and

advertisements daily. Althusser’s theory predates the advancement and pervasion of

smart advertising in our everyday world. Most significantly, this theory predates the

internet, which revolutionized the way that advertisers and messages reach and circulate

in and through publics. It is therefore important that scholarship address this change in

the nature of visual discourses and the repetitive bombarding of messages received by an

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audience. Althusser’s theory serves as the “aha” moment when an individual realizes

their subject-position; but what happens after, or what if the individual rejects the hail?

More research is needed to expand and explore these moments and theoretical

understanding. Through the usage of identification and persona theory, a critic can judge

how a discourse may appeal to a specific audience (whether or not such an audience

exists) and then how that audience may identify with the rhetor or the message offered by

the rhetor. This places the individual in a precarious situation. Further research on this

potential aspect of interpellation is needed.

Additionally, this project has argued that videogames are a vital source for

rhetorical analysis in the new millennium. Scholarship cannot continue to marginalize the

popular culture artifacts that evolve and grow alongside diverse messages and publics.

Videogames, it has been said, are the new frontier for scholarship—and I cannot help but

agree and argue that in the rhetorical field, critics need to spend more time analyzing and

theorizing out of popular videogame discourses and the publics that these texts circulate

within.

Potential Interventions and Final Thoughts: What is a Videogame?

Upon first seeing the main promotional snap-shot for Homefront (The man—

presumably Robert Jacobs, wearing the bandana of North Korea’s star and proclaiming

“Home is where the heart war is”) in early January, 2011, I had no idea that this game

would be the artifact of my thesis and the focus of my scholarship for nearly one and one-

third years. To this day, I am still often caught off guard when I see the material on the

“occupation” map, as it continues to disturb and unsettle me as much now as it did a year

ago. However, following the lead of McKerrow’s critical rhetoric project, I cannot simply

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sit back and critique the game text of Homefront and the surrounding discourses from a

distance—I must also offer up my theoretical interpretations of an alternative course of

action; an interjection into this specific artifact and the larger merger of popular culture

and entertainment. I am glad to say that I am not the only person who feels similarly

about the militainment phenomenon, but more voices are needed to raise awareness to the

general population about the merger of military culture and phenomenon into

entertainment medium outside just video games. This is not to say that academics should

be critiquing warfare (though many academics are ardent peace activists) but that it is our

duty to make apparent the entailments in dominant discourses of the times. War and

conflict have been part of human civilization for the entirety of recorded history—

however, democratic participation and government by civilian discourse is not as old. In

a culture that values and promotes civic participation, scholarship is needed that

questions the taken for granted notion that military culture is always apparent in everyday

discourse. I offer two specific and simple solutions that would serve as a launching point:

reversal and active non-violence.

First, reversal holds that a simple way of questioning whether or not something

should be “as we are told” it is. This allows for the critiquing of taken-for-granted

instructions and rules that claim viewers must perform in certain ways. For example, in

most videogames and first-person shooters, there is a requirement to kill or destroy the

opponent in order to win. Not all games exist under this paradigm; some games, such as

puzzles or point-click adventures, take the player on a journey that reinforces an

emotional appeal or a message. In reversal, critics and theorists might ask what would a

first-person shooter look like if the player had no weapon or no recourse with which to

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defend himself/herself against attackers. Such a depiction would frame the conflict in a

very different manner and reveal the hopelessness or lack of empowerment faced by

individuals who are caught between the crossfires of warring factions or governments.

Roger Stahl notes the popular hack “Velvet Strike” to the FPS war game title Counter

Strike. In this hack, activists would spray-paint hopscotch chalk, posters, messages, or

other consciousness-jarring images into the battlefield and war zone that other players

engage. This method, a form of digital culture jamming, is interesting in its ability to

inject into the game world itself the major discourses of critique that are normally kept

locked-outside so that the players can have “fun” without thinking of the entailments of

their digital surroundings (Stahl 126-127).

Alternatively, designers and critics could construct a game that addresses the

needless violence and horror of the battlefield—such depictions of collateral damage and

dismembered limbs are conveniently forgotten in Homefront and many games. One game

series, Trauma Center, shows a simulation of a hospital where the player must perform

digital surgery on patients in their care; games such as this Nintendo Wii favorite are

labeled “casual,” or market for players who want only enjoyment and not the

consumption of a gaming lifestyle marketed by many first-person shooters and Massive-

Multiplayer titles. If Trauma Center is taken another step, designers could, in theory, set

up simulations that reflect actual wounds or situations from the hospitals of conflict zones

world-wide. I envision that Trauma Center: Wounds of Terror (as I would name it) could

reverse the way in which viewers consume messages about the war on terror and other

military action and videogames that glorify the action and violence but erase the pain and

mending of bodies afterwards. How memorable would it be to have the final level of

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Trauma Center: Wounds of Terror be the futile surgery on the militant who was shot in

the head numerous times by overzealous gamers? Hopefully, such an exercise may

produce the response of “Who would shoot someone in the head so many times…oh,

yeah, I guess I did in that other game.” If not, then the futile attempt may allow for the

player to understand the frustration of field trauma medics who must attempt to repair the

most grievous of war wounds.

Though not a medical game, one text that explores the repercussions of military

action does exist. Roger Stahl describes the game Under Ash in Militainment, Inc. The

game focuses upon a boy, Ahmad, who joins the intifada and resists the occupation by

Israel. Ahmad throws rocks, rescues wounded civilians and fighters, and takes down

Israeli flags in his missions that feature armed combat. However, the game takes a

realistic turn—if Ahmad is shot, he dies; if he shoots a civilian, the game ends. Such

details are important to remind the player that there are complications to armed combat in

war zones. Players initially stated that the game was too hard, and that there is no way to

“win” the game (Stahl 137). I argue that this is exactly the point that a “game of change,”

or game texts that promote awareness of a specific, political exigence in the world, needs

to make: videogame texts dramatically over-simplify the ramifications of warfare in their

portrayal of conflict. This oversimplification both offers no justice to the victims and

allows no critical discourse by the player.

Second, non-violence is an extension of the puzzle game or strategy-simulation

genre where violence is not an option. For example, I wonder what a game titled United

Nations Security Council: The Quest for World Peace might entail. Specific to this game

is the diplomacy between nations with the key tenet of avoiding warfare and bloodshed.

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Should such conflict break-out, the conflict must be ended quickly and through discursive

means and not further violence or genocide. The struggles of this method would highlight

that, although military options exist, diplomacy and dialogue are the means by which

lasting peace is established. Sadly, I cannot patent this idea, as it has already been

designed and implemented by an educator name John Hunter, an elementary teacher from

Charlottesville, Virginia. What he calls “The World Peace Game” (viewable at the

website worldpeacegame.org) is a hands-on simulation that places upon elementary

students

the opportunity to explore the connectedness of the global community through the

lens of the economic, social, and environmental crises and the imminent threat of

war. The goal of the game is to extricate each country from dangerous

circumstances and achieve global prosperity with the least amount of military

intervention. As “nation teams,” students will gain greater understanding of the

critical impact of information and how it is used. (worldpeacegame.org)

Hunter’s game was honored by being named the “Most Influential TED Talk of 2011” by

the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conferences of 2011. It is the subject

of a recent documentary (World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements) that “teaches

the concept of peace not as a utopian dream but as an attainable goal to strive for” by

society. I urge the reader to view Hunter’s award winning TED talk and to explore the

documentary, as his concepts of attainable peace are explained and conveyed in ways that

I cannot. Simple to say, that fourth graders under his tutelage have the ability to meet and

bend to solve the world’s problems, and yet society cannot use diplomacy to solve simple

disagreement between nations speaks volumes. Though not a videogame, Hunter’s board

game is perhaps the most well-publicized game of change, using Mileham’s definition of

a “game that shapes our behavior and worldview” (Mileham 75). As stated in the early

part of this project, games of change are perhaps the most direct intervention that

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videogames, or board games, may offer to reframe the way in which players perceive,

interact with, and discursively shape their world. More examples of games and actions

like Hunter’s are needed as options of non-violence and diplomatic learning for

alternative modes of education and action in a growingly interdependent world.

I am only one academic, and I cannot solve the problems of ideological

discourses, their entailments, and the growing discourse of militainment—one would

even need to believe that militainment is both a problem, and one that needed to be

stopped, in order to even begin the hunt for such a solution. However, as a rhetorical

critic, I can offer up my thoughts and opinions on the artifact and text Homefront: games

and ideological artifacts like this should not circulate and receive the attention which they

do. It is the job of educators and critics to continue to give their judgments, offer

alternatives, and rhetorically act to bring the active and intellectual change that the world

needs in this 21st century.

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