“But,” writes Wired, “there’s one key difference between the American and Chinese ‘shooters.’ Where the bad guys in ‘America’s Army’ are generic Middle Eastern or Central Asian insurgents and terrorists, the enemy in ‘Glorious Mission’ is apparently the U.S. military.”

Clearly, this is an assault on The Complex’s storyline that says the U.S. military must always be The Good Guy. To understand just how taboo that is, consider that “America’s Army” — the inspiration for “Glorious Mission” — is so intent on painting the U.S. military as The Good Guy that it makes players fighting each other “always perceive [that] they are in the U.S. Army.” In other words, in “America’s Army” no matter what team you are on, you always see yourself dressed as a U.S. soldier and shooting at evil foreign terrorists — even though opposing players controlling the “terrorists” you are shooting at see you as the terrorist and themselves as the U.S. soldiers.

That China is using the video game industry to turn that formula around on us should be no surprise. Quite frankly, we should stop mustering faux outrage/shock at this sort of thing, and start getting used to it, because it’s here to stay.

As a budget-strapped America tumbles down the same path of decay and diminished global status that other crumbling empires followed, the first part of The Complex’s storyline about U.S. supremacy will lose cultural traction because its narrative will cease to reflect the the real world. And as that decline accelerates, more and more ascendant countries will start to make cultural products that portray us in the same way our own cultural products have long portrayed the rest of the world. Think of it as the cultural version of what the CIA calls “blowback.”

If there’s any silver lining in this disturbing development, it’s that we will be exposed to video games, movies, television shows and other media products that show how the world perceives us. Yes, rather than continuing to exist only in a hermetically sealed self-assuring bubble of hyper-exceptionalist agitprop, we will be increasingly confronted with an alternate non-American perspective — one that forces us to gaze into a fun-house mirror. We can be afraid of the inevitable (and inevitably caricatured) distortions we see — or we can use the experience as an opportunity to finally start changing the underlying image in the reflection.