I demand more games set in Beijing!

China is playing an increasingly large role in Western video games, perhaps in part because of the growth of its economy and in part because people are fed up with playing games in New York City. There have been a whole bunch of games featuring China recently, but I have begun to notice a terrible trend: Kane and Lynch 2? Set in Shanghai. Army of Two? Shanghai. The upcoming Battlefield 4, which I’ll be reviewing here next week? Shanghai. Whore of the Orient? Shanghai.

Of course, Shanghai isn’t the only Chinese city to get attention. Hong Kong gets a lot of love too, most recently in Sleeping Dogs and Call of Duty: Black Ops. Tibet’s scenic peaks played a role in Uncharted 2 and Cursed Mountain. Heck, Deus Ex: Human Revolution even took us to a fictional Chinese city near Shanghai! But where the hell is Beijing?

I’m not holding out much hope that Harbin, my first home in China, is ever likely to feature in a Western triple-A game, despite the fact that it’s a city of more than ten million people. But Beijing, which also has a place in my heart, is a gigantic city that’s globally-known and full of interesting, recognizable buildings. Don’t you want to lead a team of soldiers through the Forbidden City? Clash with your enemies on top of the nearby Great Wall? Battle it out in the shadows of Beijing’s CBD, sneak through the city’s labyrinthine hutong alleyways, race cars around the neighborhood of the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium, or lead the SWAT team that clears out Sanlitun once and for all? The city’s just as worthy as any other city in the globe for a feature spot in a game based on recognizable sights alone, and that’s not to mention the oodles of history China’s Northern Capital has on offer. It certainly has more to offer than the soulless, glass-and-steel tribute to capitalist modernity that is Shanghai. (Sorry Shanghai fans, but you’re wrong — Beijing is better).

Of course, it’s partially the history that’s the problem. A lot of Beijing’s more modern history is pretty painful, and maybe that’s a bit more than Western game developers want to deal with. Foreign armies entering Beijing is a touchy subject, for example, because that actually happened in 1900 and China is still pretty upset about it. And of course, sending Battlefield 4‘s tanks onto the streets of the capital might feel a little uncomfortable because it wasn’t that long ago there really were tanks rolling down Chang’an Avenue in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests.

A bigger problem might be China’s government, which gets pretty uptight when it comes to Beijing being destroyed in fiction because the city is the seat of government. You won’t find any Chinese games or films where modern Beijing is destroyed by armies or monsters the way modern-day New York gets taken out in a monster flick or two every year. And with the Chinese gaming market becoming increasingly lucrative, Western devs may be hesitant to unleash digital havoc on Beijing for fear of creating some real-life political havoc and getting their game banned in China.

But at the risk of sounding dismissive, everybody just needs to lighten up. Beijing would be an awesome place to set a triple-A game, and although I can understand why people would be hesitant to smash it up even in digital form, video games are works of fiction, and it’s not like setting a Grand Theft Auto game in Beijing is going to cause the city’s populace to become car thieves or somehow call the legitimacy of the Chinese government into question. Shanghai may be the model of a modern metropolis, but Beijing’s got soul, and isn’t that what video games really need?

So here’s my solemn promise to triple-A game developers everywhere: make a game set in Beijing, and I will buy it and play it. Make a game set in Beijing where I can destroy my old apartment building (which was awful and full of cockroaches) and I’ll buy copies for all my friends too. How about it, guys? Shanghai and Hong Kong have been done to death; let’s give gamers a taste of the city where they talk like pirates, drink like fish, curse like sailors, breathe like smokers, and never want to see Shanghai get the upper hand.