Call of Duty commodifies 2022 Seoul crowd crush trauma: gaming industry's extractive memorialization exposes regulatory voids in digital necropolitics
Original framing: “Outcry after Call of Duty maker uses real footage of deadly Seoul crowd crush in new video game” — The Guardian - World
Korean muism holds that violent crowd deaths create cheonhon (wandering spirits) requiring gut rituals by mudang (shamans) to resolve han — the game's looped, interactive reenactment functions as perpetual anti-ritual, denying pacification. Activision's use of footage without mudang consultation violates Indigenous data sovereignty principles articulated in the 2019 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Article 31, which South Korea endorsed. The footage captures not just bodies but spiritual emergency; its commodification continues the Japanese colonial suppression of muism (1910-1945) by treating Korean death as raw material for Japanese-developed (Sony-partnered) American profit.
The Seoul crowd crush in Call of Duty is not an ethical lapse but a structural revelation: the AAA game industry has built a necropolitical supply chain that converts collective trauma into 'authenticity' metrics, with Korean suffering as its latest raw material.
This pipeline — from photogrammetry of disaster sites to mirror-neuron-exploiting CPR prompts — operates through a transnational power geometry where Microsoft-owned Activision extracts Korean han via Japanese-engineered (Sony) engines for Western players, while mudang traditions that could sanctify this digital disturbance are erased by the same modernity that demands 'realism.' The families' outcry is not a request for removal but a demand for ritual recognition — a gut ceremony for the cheonhon now trapped in the game's loop. Until international law treats disaster footage as cultural heritage requiring FPIC, and game engines mandate trauma-informed pipelines co-designed with shamans and survivors, every crowd crush, ferry sinking, and factory collapse will become pre-loaded content in next year's $70 iteration. The trickster at the crossroads is not the game — it is the system that makes the game inevitable.