I’m finally back to writing my weekly posts on PopMatters, coming back with one that had been holding me back almost since I stopped writing.
This was originally supposed to be a review of Watch Dogs. I had gotten a copy from Ubisoft for that purpose. But the game was taking so long to play. Every time I sat down the play, I wanted to literally do anything else. While playing the game, I wanted to stop. There would be days or weeks in between play session as I got over my aversion to it. So, by the time I finished it, it was a bit late to actually “review” it even with our rather lax publishing schedule regarding reviews at PopMatters.
Still, I wrote it anyway and it came out at a nearly whopping 2000 words. For comparison, our style guide says around 800. After talking to my editor, it was agreed just to make this a post. So, after another go around of edits to change language and clear some of the fury filled typing mistakes, I found an extra couple of hundred words tacked on the end. And still I find I couldn’t include everything I’d have wanted to say about it, because I found no coherent place to insert these points.
I didn’t get to talk about the at first neat feature of invading other people’s privacy with your phone as you walk down the street. Eventually, it became a nuisance and then I realized it was a further distillation of the evils of Twitter. You are subliminally instructed to create a full human being out of the least amount of data possible and then your baseline interaction with said person is hostile, whether actively or passively so. It encourages the reinforcement of our worst beliefs and tendencies. It doesn’t characterize but dehumanizes.
Also, I mention how miserable this game was making me in my real life by leaching its horribleness into my being. There is not a single non-miserable person in all of Watch Dogs. The hackers, the gangsters, the gangstas, the normal folks, your family, your “friends” are all universally miserable in their lives. The entire world is a place of misery regardless of their personal situations. Even your former partner, Damien, who goes full on supervillian at the end, does so mainly because it is the only rational response to such an unpleasant world. Seriously, the only smile comes from Quinn and that’s more because of sadism than anything else.
There’s no joy in anything in Watch Dogs. Somehow that makes everything feel more inhuman, more disconnected from any recognizable reality. Like space aliens saw the superficial aspects of human society and tried to construct a video game out of those facts.
Nor did I discuss in detail any of the other types of mission that I tried once and fled from at every available opportunity for how awfully designed they were. Convoy missions and gang hideouts offered nothing, but the worst excesses of the poorly designed levels interacting with the poorly designed mechanics. Or how I roared in frustration every time the game forced an online match on me to continue the story. I ended up just standing in place and walking off to make a sandwich until I lost any time they came up. Yeah, didn’t even have to win them, just do them.
Three notes on the post’s ending. The “May you rot in hell” line was in there only because I didn’t not want the last words of the post to be “Holly Terror.” Two, my Nietzsche quotes got cut from the third to last paragraph, but it’s probably for the best. And finally, because this was originally a review and edited that specific context out a bit after the fact, I did leave the score at the end. Chris must have removed it. I left it in, because I considered it a powerful rhetorical device towards the game and for me taking my stand as a critic. This is what it takes to go so low. So, in case you were wondering: