Blips: Not Watching

Source: Watch Dogs is a miracle even if it sucks
Author: Emanuel Maiberg
Site: Kill Screen

I'm not excited for Watch Dogs. In fact, I'm not really excited for any upcoming blockbuster action games; they all just feel kind of the same, like something I've already played. I get a similar feeling from superhero movies, which I'm well past the point of feigning interest in. The disinterest encroaches on two fronts: my nostalgia for comic book characters has worn through, and the calculated roll-out of something like the Marvel universe movies just feels like business decisions that happen to take the shape of a particular artform. So, you'd think a title like Watch Dogs would have a bit more promise, since it isn't drawing source material directly from an existing trademark, but when I look at it, I just see futuristic Assassin's Creed. And I mean, futuristic Assassin's Creed could be good (it's a proven formula), but it doesn't inspire excitement. Even moreso with its delayed development, Watch Dogs is a game that will simply exist someday –no need for anticipation.

But that's not how Ubisoft wants me to feel about Watch Dogs, which is a product that hundreds of people have worked on in some capacity and some of those individuals have been plugging away for upwards of 5 years. In a new article for Kill Screen, writer Emanuel Maiberg illustrates the palpable rift between the mountain of labor that goes into a game like Watch Dogs and the lack of face-value recognition that that labor receives. He doesn't want to protect these types of games from criticism, but rather recognize that there is a quantity of effort that in some way supersedes the final evaluation of whether a game is any good. No matter how good or bad Watch Dogs ends up being, it's still a tremendous feat of engineering, both on technical and personnel levels. That said, I'd still rather have the 50 smaller games that the budget and laborforce for Watch Dogs could otherwise be applied toward instead of seeing that work spent on a single, flashy yet middling title for half a decade. Not that I don't enjoy some spectacle for time to time.

Blips: Charged Imagery

Source: Being Black and Nerdy
Author: Sidney Fussell
Site: Medium

There's a lot of denial about the influence of racial politics in popular media, including games. Hopefully at this point we can at least agree that there's no such thing as an apolitical game, and that the pertinent question asks what a game's politics are, not whether it has any. Writer Sidney Fussell has published a very personal account of his relationship with the racial politics of video games, reflecting both on the images depicted in games and those projected by the medium as a whole. Check it out via the "Source" link above, but in summary, it's about growing up black in a racially divided Midwestern city where games are both an escape and a curse of sorts. It's a story about the perceived whiteness of games and how that racial label impacted Fussell's feelings of conflicted inclusivity among members of his own race as well as among his white magnet school classmates. And there's more to it than just that, so please give Fussell's article a look as it's an honest account of the power and influence games wield.

Though it is part of a critic's job to read and interpret media, it's the responsibility of creators of all media to thoroughly consider the politics of their creation before releasing it to the world. Case in point is the header image for this post, an actual promotional screenshot for Ubisoft's upcoming open-world cyber-crime game Watch Dogs. Another white male protagonist of vigilante justice (now also armed with a smartphone!) and another gang of angry black street thugs. Of course Ubisoft has the right to create and publicize these sorts of images (no one stopped them, after all), but it's also entirely within their power to produce imagery that rejects this status quo or at the very least frames their game in a less problematic context. Now, that would have potential to be a refreshing exercise in free speech. Everything in games is a design choice, and as Sidney Fussell's essay details, sometimes those choices have real world consequences.