Watch_Dogs: A Retrospective

I’ve bagged on Ubisoft’s inability to deal with the politics within its own games for, well, some time now. Swinging casually from utter ignorance to dangerous complicity, Ubisoft’s unique brand of open world adventures sell well but ultimately try to stay far away from making any point that might drive customers away.

Apart from one of their newest and smallest franchises. So let’s talk about Watch_Dogs.

Watch_Dogs was a wonderfully unique pitch back when it was first revealed in 2012; the incredible graphics, contextual heads up display, and the gameplay were like nothing gamers had seen before. Drawing influence from the emergent online hacker culture, DarkWeb sleaziness, and the way that people’s metadata was being collected and traded, Watch_Dogs promised to be a truly unique experience about a 21^st Century vigilante.

Players step into the shoes and “iconic” hat of Aiden Pearce, a criminal hacker whose involvement in a hotel robbery not only gets his niece killed, but also leads him down a rabbit hole of local government conspiracies and taking down Chicago’s central operating system, or ctOS.

Ubisoft, 2014

The idea behind many of the mechanics of the game was to get players to ”question technology and their relationship to it” in the words of one of the devs. For instance, in open world games like Grand Theft Auto the player earns money through completely missions and robbing NPCs in the street. In Watch_Dogs, however, the primary means of acquiring cash is by draining NPCs bank accounts via their mobile banking. The player will also utilise home security systems to spy on the occupants, and can hijack the ctOS for their benefit, for instance triggering bollards to rise up from the pavement in the event of a high speed chase.

Whilst a unique way to convey just how much of our world is vulnerable to the right kind of software manipulation, Ubisoft, in their Ubisoft way, seeks only to provide the player with a means to an end, rather than actually make some of these things feel wrong, at least not in a direct sense. The skill tree can be expanded so that people with large bank accounts are automatically flagged for theft, and the idea of spying on someone from their laptop’s webcam whilst they’re masturbating is played for jokes, rather than looking for a commentary on whether our own homes are private anymore.

One thing that is upfront in its unnerving display of metadata is that you can access every NPC’s ctOS file through your phone’s “profiler”, which includes their name and a summary of their digital footprint. Some will be as innocuous as “Star Trek fan” or “Degree in Agriculture”, along with their job description. But some also flag up much darker aspects of people’s lives, such as “victim of child abuse”, “trolls online political threads” or even a blood donor who is HIV positive. This does serve to demonstrate just how much anyone – be they a hacker, a corporation, or even your own government – can know about you just from a quick summation of your digital life.

Ubisoft, 2016

Watch_Dogs lost its way, however. It became bogged down with an unlikable, dour cliché of a protagonist. Its gameplay was a poor emulation of far better titles like GTA. Whilst the player is able to act as a vigilante and prevent crime with their mastery of cyberspace, the crux of the story is that of Pearce’s revenge against those who killed his niece. Which is a shame, because Ubisoft went in wanting the character to be complex, and stating that "It's important as creative people to observe the world around you and to make a statement in your work about what it means to you.” But there are so few statements made in the first game, it took an entire sequel to rectify that.

Set in San Francisco, with a good dollop of Silicon Valley greed and domestic surveillance, Watch_Dogs 2 brings the focus back to the idea of smart cities and their pitfalls, namely the Dedsec cell intent on bringing down the ctOS 2.0 running in their city. Only one man stands in their way, Dušan Nemec, the Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg hybrid who runs the whole operation.

Almost immediately, the game has far more to say about the nature of metadata and its dangers. Insurance companies can track their customer’s card transactions, so too many trips to the donut shop in one week will up their premiums. Internet search histories and proximity to crime hotspots marks you out as being a high risk individual by the police. The player even goes after a security company called Haum, who is illicitly gathering data on their customers and then selling it to the highest bidder.

Ubisoft, 2016

It appears that Watch_Dogs 2 doesn’t just take a stand against the collection of metadata, but doesn’t pull many punches against the culture within the tech industry. Marcus, the protagonist, and Horatio (another Dedsec member) both experience and push back against the racism – hateful, patronising, or otherwise – at the Nudle (Google stand-in) campus. “The amount of times I’ve been told I’m ‘Well spoken’…” Horatio laments, along with commenting that there are only 4 black people who work at Nudle. This is actually a real problem with the tech industry in reality, with Google only having 5% of its total US staff surveyed as black or Hispanic. There is even a brief nod to racial profiling by law enforcement, with Marcus entering an area of Oakland which has been flagged as having a high risk of crime and the police are told to “shoot on sight”: his being a black 20 year old male puts him in very real danger.

Dedsec this time around is more closely modelled on the Anonymous collective. It’s a decentralised community with a tendency to troll their victims whilst exposing their nefarious dealings. Dedsec reveal to the world a New Dawn (the Scientology stand-in) re-education camp for troublesome members of the church, along with their various other scams to con members out of spending more, all based on Anonymous’ targeting of Scientology in the early 2000s. There is also the targeting of security firms that dare the group to hack into them, dealing with rival hacking collectives as well as rogue elements within Dedsec itself – such as swatting a Dedsec member who has been caught swatting online gamers himself.

There’s a real emphasis on Dedsec being a social justice movement in the game too. The group seek to draw the public’s attention to their manipulation by tech companies and how little the word privacy means in the 21^st Century. The humorous, retro horror/sci-fi inspired graphic art, promotional videos, and merchandise available in the game mirrors yet another element drawn from Anonymous – or rather, the sect of Anonymous that became tied to the Occupy movement that merchandised many iconic emblems of the collective. Because it’s a loose collective, these stores aren’t official, but they are there to provide people with a link to a movement that they can identify with, from the masks to t-shirts and stickers, and have made the collective into a “political gateway for geeks”.

Ubisoft, 2016

In conclusion, Watch_Dogs 2 is the closest Ubisoft has come to taking a deliberate political stance in much of its library. The franchise had a rocky start narratively, with an unlikable protagonist and a story mostly designed to compete with Grand Theft Auto. If you compare this sudden jump in boldness to the accidental fascism of The Division and the tone deaf interpretation of the United States’relationship with Latin and South America in Ghost Recon: Wildlands, or even to the increasingly absurd ramblings about autocracy and freedom in the Assassin’s Creed series, one is simply left asking: why? Why is it that this franchise is allowed to be about something?

The cynic in me believes this is simply down to the scale of Ubisoft’s other franchises compared to Watch_Dogs. With only two entries, both of which were received with mixed reviews, perhaps there is less pressure from the top to make the game homogenous, bland, and open to interpretation. Granting the artists more freedom to create a solid narrative, and then to reinforce that narrative with fourth wall breaking propaganda, has lifted the series from being another grey-brown shooter with a bleak story, to a vibrant open world with a message.

Ubisoft, more of this sort of thing.