Pulp games, like pulp movies or books, are meant to be enjoyable, with exceptional characters and a bombastic and exaggerated view of the world. But much pulp thrives on identifying with the downtrodden. Ballardian dystopias, with their themes of men and women being crushed by an unfeeling system, are the bread and butter of written science fiction. The best dystopian novels and films mire characters firmly in the day-to-day hopelessness of life before allowing them to rise above it.

The big AAA shooters that currently carry the mantle for most narrative gaming, though, often end up treating oppression as a fun tool to be wielded, not a thing to be overcome — even when they’re ostensibly meant to do the opposite. They don’t so much provide escape fantasies as they provide fantasies of never being affected in the first place, of being so far above the hoi polloi that the concerns with which the game is ostensibly struggling come off as little more than window dressing.

Early promotions for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the high-profile sequel to classic Deus Ex, played on the present-day anxiety over drugs like Adderall. "If I don't improve myself, if I don't augment myself, then I'll be less intelligent, less capable, less strong than the rest of the human race," said a character in a faux-expose of mechanical augmentations. Characters were shown being driven into homelessness trying to afford medically necessary immunosuppressants.

Dystopian games' concerns end up coming off as window dressing

When you started the game, your character was promptly revealed to have no need for the drugs, and despite nods to the contrary, the overwhelming ethos was not "How can I accept these changes to my body?" but "How long until I can afford the next upgrade?" BioShock Infinite, another game meant to interrogate how power corrupts, was described as "art" in part because of its shocking violence. The constant bloodshed illustrated that "Booker DeWitt isn’t a good guy. He’s a brutal, immoral thug," wrote Rus McLaughlin at VentureBeat. But when I played, I wasn’t really disgusted with myself for killing hundreds of people. I was too busy figuring out the optimal way to cut through them in that slick, aesthetic way that BioShock Infinite offers.

As the famous (supposed) Truffaut quote posits, it’s arguably almost impossible to make an anti-war film, and creating a mainstream game that effectively critiques its core mechanic is even harder. Power is fun: if I see an overreaching, draconian enforcement system in a game, I’m going to want to use it. All in all, I’m pretty comfortable with that. It is, however, strange to see anybody take these same games’ social messages as anything more than a marketing strategy. Even if, in the past, I’ve done it.

Some game developers have talked about the problems of working in a narrative medium that strongly favors certain styles of play — particularly shooting and hitting. It’s hard to get around this, and one of the cleanest ways to do so is just to embrace the implications, to show players how easily they can become brutal, immoral thugs. BioShock Infinite, obviously, falls into this, but so does the self-aware indie splatter game Hotline Miami, whose entire premise can be summed up in one quote: "You’re not a nice person, are you?"

Do we really need help learning that, though? No matter how mildly discomfited you might feel playing an oppressor, it’s far more uncomfortable and revealing to see yourself as helpless. From what we’ve seen so far in Watch Dogs, your power depends on a huge surveillance network that lets you spy on almost everyone you meet, turning you into a kind of vigilante NSA and letting you choose whether to use your power responsibly. Becoming the NSA might show us how easy it is to be virtuous or corrupted, but it ultimately won’t help us work through the problem of being spied on by a hundred exceptional Aidan Pearces, and identifying with people who hurt people isn’t a substitute for empathizing with people who get hurt.