I watched a man die. Inches from me, right off of Fifth Avenue. He started coughing violently before falling to his knees. Convulsions consumed his ailing body. As he lay there, contorted, slowly shifting onto his back, he reached out to me, eyes pleading for help.

For the past few days, I've been working my way through Tom Clancy's The Division, the latest blockbuster game from super-publisher Ubisoft. That scene was the most affecting in my time with the game, because it highlighted how misanthropic The Division's perspective on humanity is.

I wanted to help the man. In fact, it was my duty as a member of the eponymous "Division," a top-secret organization founded with the express purpose of serving as the last line of civil defense in a crisis. But the game didn't give me the opportunity. I couldn't heal him with any of the life-saving medicines I carried. I couldn't even euthanize him. He was a background, a fixed point in this sobering rendition of New York City.

The premise, you see, is that Manhattan has been ravaged by a smallpox outbreak. The epidemic started as an act of biological terrorism, when some unknown group planted the virus on greenbacks on Black Friday. The aftermath of which causes the complete disintegration of NYC's social infrastructure. If there was an archetypical American disaster, summarizing the nation's collective phobias, this is it.

As if the proverbial bombs had fallen, battered cars, boarded windows and bombed-out building dot the cityscape. Make no mistake: in spite of its serene beauty, this is an apocalyptic wasteland. And that's just the thing: all that's happened here is the release of a terrible disease. The Division presumes that that alone, if bad enough, would be indistinguishable from nuclear war.

It's a paradoxical message that puts the game's themes at odds with themselves. On the one hand, you're told from the outset that you're the one to save New York, that you and a small band of agents can bring order to the chaos. That seems like a brilliant set-up at first glance. Established to operate outside of any command structure in just such a catastrophe, you, alongside other players, are collectively branded the Joint Task Force.

You'll get missions and assignments, establish a base of operations and set to work curing the disease while working through the city "liberating" civilians from the tyrannical clutches of looting gangs. It's a jumbled mess of a plot which operates on so many contrived, ridiculous twists and pieces that it comes off as a distillation of affluent white American paranoia.

It gets worse when you start drawing the requisite parallels between The Division and other games of its type, like Activision's Destiny. Both are generally built for one player, but they allow for cooperation and show others running about the world all the time. They also revolve around the idea of killing lots of things to earn new items and skills.

Destiny had you destroying robots and killing unambiguously evil aliens. The same rings true for games like World of Warcraft, which, aside from supplanting robots with demons, follow the same formula.

Your Neighbor: The Secret Psychopath ————————————

The Division is quite different, though. Here you slaughter looters and riot-leaders en masse. And while farcical levels of violence are common in many games, The Division is also a Tom Clancy game, which brings with it an assumed air of realism.

That's supported by the fact that Ubisoft painstakingly recreated Manhattan for the game. The accuracy is even a major piece of its promotional campaign.

When we start to factor in this presentation of ruffians and common thieves as heavily-armed, unreasonable monster-analogues, that starts becoming a critical problem. At the very least it comes off as tone-deaf at a time when the U.S. faces a lot of questions about how it responds to questions about government overreach and police brutality.

Common street punks are shown with military-grade hardware—machine guns, bombs, grenades, etc. They cannot be reasoned with or placated. At best you'll get a few terse lines and a battle cry before they charge you. It's a narrative throughline that's eerily similar to the worst perceptions of the men, women and children at the end of our police's gun barrels. This, we're told, is New York, and these are its people: Recklessly violent to the point of being suicidal, and armed to teeth with the world's most lethal war machines.

The Division wears the trappings of every other AAA game, save for the fact that its villains aren't monsters. They're desperate people. And while The Division claims again and again that you're helping, that you're the last bastion of goodness and Manhattan's only hope for survival, you're killing people who, not that long ago, were your friends and neighbors.

By my tenth hour, I'd lost track of how many people I'd killed. Every firefight in this militaristic dystopia wore me down. It was numbing. The Division muddles the line of realism and veers dangerously close to presenting actual, real-world problems as a simple binary.

I can accept games as escapism. I can accept them as a means to "unwind." I can tolerate even extreme violence. But the time when we could let juvenile, reductive cynicism guide the themes of games is past. There's a reason most opt for orcs or cyborgs as foes—we don't have to deal with their reality. When I turn off the television after hearing about yet another mass shooting, or yet another black man's life snuffed out by an overzealous cop, I don't want to turn on the Xbox to play a law enforcement official mowing down wave after wave of hapless thieves.