Marcus had finally reached the computer where he could access his criminal record. Having snuck through a building and silently disposed of multiple guards using his home-brewed, non-lethal arsenal, here it was. A young African American man, Marcus had been flagged, profiled by the system for a crime he didn’t commit. I, the player, am given control to delete his record, and replace Marcus’ striking features with a pudgy, deer-in-headlights white guy.
Later, Marcus gets drunk at the beach and throws his phone in the water.
Watch Dogs 2 is a big, fun, AAA experience that feels, after five hours of play, as much a step forward for the series as Assassin’s Creed 2 was to the original. But it’s also surprisingly anarchic, shot though with anti-establishment sensibilities and a sense of very real paranoia around the way our data is being wickedly manipulated in the modern world. Watch Dogs 2 is a blast to play, but it also wants you to get angry.
It’s a call to arms reflected in the brightly coloured, meme-filled aesthetic, diversity of its central cast (privacy is an issue that speaks to all walks of life) and primary mechanic: hacking. Watch Dogs 2’s hackers aren’t the jerks taking down the internet for the lols but a group of young tech-natives who have the expertise to fight back against the omnipresent Man.
Thomas Geffroyd, who operates as brand content manager on Watch Dogs 2, understands this sentiment more than most. The Montreal-based Geffroyd has been around hacking communities for over 20 years, initially drawn to it as a countercultural movement safe from commoditisation. “I used to surf, skate, and I always felt that all those cultures were being bought by marketing and being commercialised,” says Geffroyd. “To me this idea of Internet in the early '90s and everything was basically wide open space.”
One of Geffroyd’s alternative jobs is to make sure the hacking culture in Watch Dogs 2 never slips into caricature. The primary characters all represent a part of this culture - the artist, the punk, the techie, the ‘face’. “We want to say to hackers ‘it’s time for you to be heard’, says Geffroyd. “It’s time for us to break the stereotype of the fat dude in his basement to show you for what you are and what you’ve been doing for us, because you’ve been doing a lot for us.”
This reverence for the positive side of hacking culture is shared by journalist and hacker Violet Blue, who served as a consultant for Watch Dogs 2. “No one is telling us to protect ourselves right now,” says the San Francisco native. “And I think that it is very much to the advantage of a lot of big companies and governments. And we don't know what they are doing with our information. And I think that journey of Marcus is a perfect illustration of that and how it can go horribly wrong. And it is going horribly wrong.”
Indeed, Watch Dogs 2 opens with a chilling video that places us firmly in the near-future of possessing devices that are ubiquitously ‘smart’, constantly transmitting data that is now more valuable than our own lives. In Watch Dogs 2, predictive policing is being grossly misapplied, banks are doing discriminatory lending, and nothing you transmit is safe from greedy corporations.This is a near-future, sure, but it’s a very real future. “What hackers nowadays are finding is that none of our information is being secured,” says Blue. “So the potential for abuse is huge. And I think that we should be worried about it, and I think it's easy to feel disempowered and helpless and fearful. I think fear is a good state to start with, but it's not a good place to stay. Fear is just us realising the threat, and now that we're learning about it, we can start to hold people to account and companies to account. And the hackers help publicise this stuff.”
Both Blue and Geffroyd have committed to making sure that every hack in Watch Dogs is plausible, no matter how many explosions I caused by placing sticky bombs on the sides of my flying drone and sending it into heavily-populated areas. “We spent a lot of time working on those,” says Geffroyd, “making sure that they're exciting but that you learn something about the hacks, the things we’re seeing at cons. We use real software. We use real devices, and we also use 3D printers for weaponry which is something that is happening in real life, too.”
The variety of hacking tools and the way they can be used in Watch Dogs 2 makes for a thrilling experience, but a somewhat liberating one, too. Unlike the chaos one can cause in GTA V “just because,” the chaos you cause in Watch Dogs 2 is “just because everything is f*cked.” “It's f*cked - excuse my French,” says Geffroyd, “and we have to do something. Whatever my point of view, wherever I'm coming from, there is a real problem, and wherever you're coming from you should be able to see that it's a problem. And I know we’re making games and we're not here to give lessons, but what we can do is highlight the issues. You're going to have fun, but if you want to dig a little further and put some thought into that, Watch Dogs can extend far beyond the gaming experience, at least that's what we hope.”
Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.
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