Wargame

Those who know me will also probably know that I have an infinitely insatiable demand for gaming on my beloved iPod Touch. I tend to spend all my time commuting from one destination to another with the handheld device grasped in my fingers, poking at the screen excitedly. This summer, while going to and from work on the subway, I had missed my stop on two separate occassions because of my understandable obsession with a turn-based strategy game called Highborn.

My newest game-to-conquer is named Wargame, and it is actually about, well, conquering. To be specific, the player chooses a "faction" (which is really a bloc in international political terms, to clear things up) to play as, and through weapons upgrades, training more troops and spying on other countries, take over the world. It's a little like Risk, a little like common sense, but for a history buff like me, it was a must-play.

I wasn't expecting, however, that the opening screenshot of the game would be this:




Dated Spring 2010, the world map is clearly divided up into colours, representing the different factions of the world. Dark countries are neutral countries, there to take over for any ambitious national leader. My little cry of shock came at the yellow countries on the right side of the map--where China (Hong Kong, Macau and Tibet included), the Koreas and Taiwan are, by default, a part of the "Empire of the Sun"--the Japanese Empire. Why, I thought, must a modern-day game contain such a glaring obvious and insulting mistake?

My initial reaction and indignation to Wargame's carelessness is interesting. It's a reaction that I would expect many people with knowledge of and sympathies towards China's history to hold. There's something necessary and righteous about speaking for a nation that has suffered through the years, and for it not to be recognised as independent and powerful beyond the realms of its past of being colonised.

Especially, in this case, when the offender in China's history is a country like imperial Japan from the past--warlike, militant, brutal, fascist and controversial. With so many issues and questions hidden under the rug even today, how can a handheld gaming software take such a huge liberty?

It is easy to assume and demand that everyone in the world should be sensitive to a particular nation's own needs. Identifying with the historical dignity of one nation automatically personalises and exacerbates any issues of a 'nationalistic' level, including other people's mistakes. It becomes a personal and national insult that there is someone or someones in the world unfamiliar with the crucial sensitivity of China's past with the Japanese Empire.

Such a large degree of individual indignation for this cause is not necessarily something negative. Rather, I think that having loyal, historigraphically-fanatical people who care is a positive manifestation of the pride of a nation. This means that this nation has something worth defending.

And yet, it is this very same defensive attitude that prolongs inter-nation disputes, historical controversy and any necessity for national apologies. Nationalism and competition, wrongdoing and indignation, all go hand-in-hand.

With Wargame, even a third-party is dragged into the mix, consisting of video game developers that have never needed a history requirement in their job applications. Does our defensive nature go as far as to require that their sympathies should be with us?