Yes, it was a joke. And a comment on how a lot of the modern gaming systems seems to be America-centric.
This may be because most gaming systems are written in America - and perhaps as a consequence, large numbers of gamers are, well, American. Gamers of all stripes like to play either a) where they live - when I lived in Cincinnati, we Ran in Cincinnati - or b) where the game is set, i.e. Seattle for Shadowrun, New York for Marvel, etc.
That said, Shadowrun is one of the few that I've observed that has made an effort to explore pretty much the entire world. As for the issues in GeMiTo, well ... okay, Lucy, let me 'splain.
The area - GeMiTo - really
is like sub-Saharan Africa today. The corporations
like the place just the way it is - chaotic, without government, with the citizens who are dependent on them knowing they're dependent. The corporations put the infrastructure in only where they control - which means that, like much of Sub-Saharan Africa today, the people who live there simply
do not have a lot of what most people everywhere else take for granted. Sub-Saharan Africa: clean water, electrical power, easy transportation. GeMiTo: wireless, clean water, electrical power, easy transportation.
Unlike most of the events in East Africa, you don't
have roaming terror squads, which you can flee; Darfur was made known to the international community because hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes, villages burned, and
that is when reporters got a hold of the facts. You lose 300 people a day, scattered across
sixty-one thousand square kilometers, and things are uncertain. Nobody's getting driven from their homes; one person is lifted, per day, from 200 square kilometers - each sixteen-kilometer (or ten-mile) diameter circle. Might be your house; might be four miles away. Over the last six months,
one person has died within the square kilometer in which you live.
So what do you do? You don't actually
have any real way to report this; your normal Matrix networking has gone to pot, some of it wrecked completely over the last almost-thirty years. In fact, you
almost don't have anything to report, unless you are aware that two hundred kilometers away, the same thing is happening - but you don't have any way to discover that. The international community doesn't have the smoking cannon of entire communities getting displaced; you have what amounts to single, individual killers, not ones wrecking your entire town and driving you, your family, and everyone in your neighborhood hither and yon.
The horrific events of the dragons hunting in GeMiTo isn't a huge international outcry because a) it's only able to be recognized by someone who's looking for it (and putting together information from across sixty-one thousand square kilometers is going to be hellishly difficult), and b) because even if you're looking for it, you have one hell of a time actually contacting people to confirm it, much less getting the information out
past the people who really don't want to have the international community looking closely at the area.
If you want to tighten GeMiTo up to the triangular area hilighted in the Almanac, your areas are 7374 square kilometers, one person per day per 24 2/3 square kilometers (2.8 km diameter, or 1.75 miles), one person across the last six months from within a hundred meters radius from where you live. More intense, certainly. Still, because of the fact that it's spread out over time and space, stuff like this gets missed. It's only when it's taken together as a whole that it becomes a smack in the face.
This really doesn't have anything to do with America-centric information; this has to do with something that is insidious despite its apparently overt nature. A dragon takes a single person from a mile away, okay, fine, whatever - you're more concerned about the seven zip-gun-armed punks that hang out on the stoop of the house next door to yours, because they're a current, daily,
immediate threat...
