Content Warning: Watch_Dogs

Trigger warnings: sexism, rape, human trafficking, racism, transmisogyny.

From a narrative, political, and ethical perspective, Watch_Dogs is a total mess. From the very beginning, the plot is driven largely by the suffering and death of women. Aiden Pearce sets out to investigate the death of his niece, Lena - a character who is more important as a victim than as a person. The same can be said of Nicole Pearce, Aiden’s sister, who is kidnapped and used as leverage. And of Clara Lisle, erstwhile ally. And the unnamed secondary characters who are assaulted and raped. The women auctioned off into sex slavery. The list goes on. None of these characters have narrative depth - they exist to incite action from the player.

Racial politics in Watch_Dogs are similarly shallow. In the real world, many Chicago neighborhoods have a lasting history of segregation by ethnicity. The city is complex, and the citizens know it. This is not reflected in Ubisoft’s Chicago; instead, the developers condensed distinct minority neighborhoods into “the Wards”, a zone of low-income housing with a high crime rate. Characters are pigeonholed in much the same way; three of the four plot-critical black characters are murderers, and two are members of the same gang. The “Black Viceroys” are one-dimensional, violent, slang-spouting stereotypes, and the game spends no time trying to engender sympathy. They are enemies for the sake of being enemies.

And of course, there is the issue of the Profiler, Aiden Pearce’s primary toolkit. It’s a mobile hacking platform that exploits ctOS, Chicago’s infrastructure control system. Interacting with ctOS is the game’s big gimmick, and one of its features is scanning and summarizing NPCs. When Watch_Dogs generates one of these labels, it’s not influencing the world in any significant way. The developers are assigning a short description to a character who exists solely as a potential victim. The player might attack them, steal from them, or protect them from harm; that’s informed by the mindset of whoever is playing. What are these labels? Lots of ‘wacky’ sex stuff. Characters who are “skeptical about global warming.” And mixed in there, more serious subjects - “Illiterate.” “HIV positive.” “Transgender.”

Make no mistake - in the real world, being outed is a nightmare scenario, and including it in this context is horribly insensitive. (The developers seem particularly tone-deaf on gender disclosure as a whole - when Aiden Pearce learns that one of his hacker contacts is a woman, rather than a man, he fumes that “he is a she”.) People are frequently attacked just for being trans, particularly if they’re PoC. This is the sole facet of trans life reproduced in Watch_Dogs - the threat of being targeted for violence.

And Ubisoft saw it coming.

Now that it’s out there, I can’t wait to see how you guys abuse our poor npcs in #WatchDogs. Be sure to take screenshots!

A game purportedly about justice and revenge in the digital age, and the lead scriptwriter is encouraging players to abuse random passerby. He got his wish - people have been posting videos of themselves using the Profiler to target and kill minorities. Of course, the game doesn’t punish them for it, because there are no systems to reprimand players who commit hate crimes.

In this game, women are disposable. Black people are thugs. Trans people are casually outed. This is a title you should avoid. Don’t expose yourself to its offhand bigotry, and don’t help put this game on bestseller lists.

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Note: a few points in the “Profiler” section have been edited for clarity, though changes may not show through in reblogs. Our apologies.