#exact life path which was expected of me due to my environment and gender

[runawaymun]

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Gav played: Watch_Dogs (1)

The game: Watch_Dogs by Ubisoft

Score: It’s a game!

Oh, hey, a new one of ‘em has been buzzy. Promos for Watch_Dogs Legion put the series on my radar, and I picked up both the previous installments when they were free on Epic earlier in the year. This is just a review for the original game, as I have not yet begun WD2.

Would you say you were disappointed? Kinda, yeah! Legion caught my eye because it’s trying a lot of unusual things with blurring the line between player characters and npcs, and with strategic elements. Also, I just find the idea of a big ole triple-A rpg about hacking fun. The original game is more conventional, which I don’t fault it for.

What do you fault it for? Having an unlikable hero, misogyny and fridging, skewing “disposable” adversaries to young black men, hypocrisy, and bad subtitles.

Oh. And yet I did have a lot of fun, and there are parts I really liked! This is a hard review to write, because my opinion differed so much on distinct elements.

Okay, let’s break it down. Player character: You play as Aiden Pearce, a criminal hacker and driver who has become a vigilante after his niece was killed during an attempted hit on Aiden himself. Through the course of the game, Aiden jumps through various obstacles to protect his sister and her surviving child, as well as identifying and exacting revenge on his niece’s killer. Standard tough guy with a private sorrow stuff, I found the child death difficult but not a mark against the game.

{Screenshot: I received a button prompt asking if I would like to make Aiden vault over his late niece’s gravestone, and I absolutely burst out laughing.}

It’s just--Aiden is an asshole. The best thing I can tell you to illustrate this occurs fairly early in the game. He meets with a hacker ally he has only interacted with online before. He harangues her for disguising her gender through including “boy” in her username and using a voice modulator on the phone, suggests she’s untrustworthy, and at one point threatens to choke her, even placing his hand on her throat and forcing her to step backwards. Oh, and he also checks her out.

I hate him. I hate him!

Not that this is the primary concern, but it also undercuts his credibility. Exactly, because as a hacker I assume he’s used to being Very Online, which means he should be aware that people often obscure their genders. As a vigilante, I expect him to care about things like violence against women and intimate partner violence (and indeed, some of the crimes I prevented in side missions fall into exactly these categories), so the fact that he would respond to a woman protecting her identity with aggression would startle me even if he didn’t threaten to choke her--did you know that threats to choke a person are the highest predictor that an abuse victim’s life is in danger? Because Aiden should, and he shouldn’t be the game’s hero if his reaction to she’s not the gender I thought she was from her username is to threaten her life.

What a piece of shit.

Since I’m on misogyny, I will also remark that no woman in this game is given more than the role of a victim or a villain, at least three characters are fridged, and at one point the camera sexualizes a human trafficking victim.

Oh my god. Like, I know that this is a game by a big company with lots of people involved, and those tend to fall short of my standards on social issues, due to a variety of issues including the fact that more people means there are more opportunities for problems in the culture to show themselves. I would like to say bluntly that I know it’s a video game, and I don’t think video games need to aim for lofty morals. I do think, though, that it matters who in a game is treated as a friend, and who is set dressing, who is a rival and who is put into the game as a target to be killed to advance. You might protest me pointing out that an awful lot of characters I had to kill were young black men by saying that they’re part of the gang that runs the aforementioned sex trafficking, and it’s set in Chicago, it’s in the name of accuracy--but it’s not a quirk of life that black people experience high rates of poverty, and it’s not an accident that the game chose to pit the player against these men in open combat, while their white boss is killed in a quieter, subtler, and less painful way. It’s not an accident that the only shootout Aiden expresses remorse over (because of who witnessed it) is against mostly white men, and it’s not an accident that every black character in the game is an adversary or a victim.

Dare we get into gameplay? Okay, this is why the game actually does rank “it’s a game” and not “do not recommend.” I had lots of fun playing it. I know, good news at last! The hacking parts of the game--and this is a game about hacking--are its best strength, fun and varied. One of my favorite activities is “camera-hopping,” hacking cameras to bring others into view until I achieved a hidden viewpoint or centered QR code graffiti. A lot of hacking is simple, a quick press of a button at the right moment to damage an enemy car with spikes to the tires or steal information from a stranger’s phone. Some are more challenging, asking the player to complete the sort of puzzle with rotating pieces to get continuous paths in a network. Running around to save people and investigate crimes and solve puzzles kept me engaged, even when I found the writing distasteful. Quick sidebar to say that the motivation given for one of my favorite optional activities, ominously called “privacy invasions” is simply “to satisfy your curiosity.” It can sometimes feel decidedly skeevy, especially when I found that I’d hacked into a room where people were having sex, and it did not improve my opinion of the game’s direction that Aiden apparently just thinks it’s fun to spy on strangers? I do too, it’s endlessly interesting to see what the pixel people on my screen have on their phones as I pass them on the pixel street in front of The Bean, but it’s one of many cases where it’s clear that Aiden thinks he’s better than his rivals.

{Screenshot: Aiden uses his phone to hack into Aisha Tyler’s phone and learn about her professions and hobbies. No, really, this is a cameo of that Aisha Tyler!}

Well, he is the hero, I guess. I mean I guess, but when you rack up all the death and theft and snooping and so on...and you remember that he is, for the entirety of the game, holding someone hostage while trying to rescue a different hostage...and his motivation is to avenge violence by organized crime, while doing many of the same things himself...I mean, what has he done to be better? Saved a lot of people, which is not nothing, but I’m asked to root for him because he is a nobler and more moral person, who opposes the surveillance state, and yet I have seen him threaten to choke Clara Lille, and I cannot believe it.

Hearing disorder corner: There are some beeping cues for hacking opportunities during car chases that I could almost never hear, and only learned existed from a tips guide. More significantly, this game would have benefited a great deal from identifying speakers by name in the subtitles. It also does a truly peculiar thing where, when there’s cross-talk or a quickly moving conversation, it positions the more recent line of dialogue higher on the screen than whatever immediately precedes it. Meaning that glancing down for the word I wasn’t sure of looks like: --”Do you begin all your conversations this way?” --”You wouldn’t happen to have six fingers on your right hand, would you?”

How do you feel about the series right now? Watch_Dogs 2 will have to step up the writing if I’m going to consider spending money on Legion. I know some encouraging things--the focus shifts to the hacker collective DedSec, the protagonist is black, and the “avant-garde” technology is more inventive than the first installment’s.

Is fun to play, bad to think about a good way to sum it up? Yeah! Thanks, me! Fun to play, bad to think about.

Try it if you like: grey heroes and antiheroes, puzzles integrated into rpgs, saying “I’ve accessed the mainframe” to yourself, soundtracks filled with absolute bops, the sort of lush urban environment Assassin’s Creed does well, but modern.