“Its end user license agreement plainly states that “UBISOFT may collect and store data about You in relation to Your use of the Product,” and that “certain data is recorded, archived, analysed and used to create user statistics.””
“Whatever else Watch Dogs 2 may be, it’s also a program designed to extract as much information as possible about its players.”
“What kind of data, and how much? The EULA is a tangle of corporate doublespeak, but it’s clear that Watch Dogs 2’s reach is as vast as it is precise. It includes, among other things, your computer’s hardware, internet service provider, operating system, and localization information; the days on which you play Watch Dogs 2 and for how long; metrics of in-game activity (what you do, where you do it, et cetera); advertising conversion rates; your purchase history, age, and gender; behavior in multiplayer spaces; any active third party apps; browsing history; and … well, it’s all there in the eight-point print.”
“Not only does the game strip-mine its users’ personal information, but it also does so behind a breezy plot line about disrupting intrusive corporate surveillance.”
“Watch Dogs 2 knows no history, and so it ends up becoming the very thing it set out to critique. This is a game about surveillance that exists in part to surveil you.”
“the artistic failure of Watch Dogs 2 can teach us something about the ubiquity of surveillance in the digital era and the price we pay when we normalize video games as instruments of surveillance.”
“Though we tend to use the term “surveillance” interchangeably with “data collection,” the two aren’t quite synonymous. Surveillance is not simply data collection, but the collection of data for a specific purpose (usually power, though not necessarily).”
“One effect of digitization is that damn near everything — phones, cars, even kitchen appliances — can generate and collect data.”
“As Ian Bogost writes of the so-called “Internet of Things,” the IoT “exists to build a market around new data about your toasting and grilling and refrigeration habits, while duping you into thinking smart devices are making your lives better than you could have made them otherwise, with materials other than computers.””
“The always already quantified environments of video games are just extreme versions of what now exists everywhere.”
“analysis depends entirely on representational content, which, conventionally, is where game criticism both starts and ends.”
“But games are more than stories and more than worlds. They are programs, and what we see on the screen — our “end user” experience — is only a fraction of what a game does. When we limit ourselves to whatever exists for us to see, we miss the larger context.”
“Without considering the systems that operate unseen but alongside our “end user experience,” it wouldn’t be possible to see how Watch Dogs 2 willfully obscures its complicity with the systems it purports to critique.”
“the main insight Ubisoft gleaned from this trove of data is that “better” games simply give players whatever they want, or at least throw in everything players might possibly want and direct their attention toward the cornucopia of things to do.”
“Watch Dog 2’s biggest sleight of hand isn’t actually that you have to find these for yourself; it’s that the game seeks them out for you — or, more accurately, continually produces them for you.”
“The boons of algorithmic surveillance certainly help make Watch Dogs 2 fun, but perhaps “fun” is not exactly the same as “good.” The feeling induced by playing Watch Dogs 2 is weirdly reminiscent of what David Foster Wallace said about cruise ships in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. What cruises really sell, Wallace surmises, is not a week at sea, but a particular affect: “[A] blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under configurations of the verb ‘to pamper.’” Was there ever a better way to describe video games?”
“So perhaps surveillance can make a game better, if by better we simply mean the efficiency with which a game transmutes time into dopamine, the lowest common denominator of reviewing games.”
“But is that all we want from video games? A ludic lullaby into which we can tumble, where the inventory of our desire is tended with uterine precision?”
“Or do we want something that helps us overcome our individualism in all its cosmic loneliness, a space where we might confront otherness to divest ourselves of solipsism?”
“I think Hegel got things right when he claimed that human freedom was not the right to self-legislation, but self-determination. Paradoxically, we are freest when we know what makes us unfree. Hegel’s sense of freedom is irreducibly historical.”
“There is no one definition of freedom; it must be rediscovered through renewed engagement with the world.”
“All you experience is a fake world warped for your pleasure.”
“For Hegel, this is the opposite of art, which is nothing less than the realization of human freedom. It was the otherness of art that appealed to Hegel, the externalization of the soul such that humans might see themselves more clearly. For these reasons, Hegel called art “a thousand-eyed Argus, whereby the inner soul and spirit is seen at every point [… and] in which the free soul is revealed […]””
“What if, instead, we believed that video games are meaningful precisely because of their inhumanity, their obdurate otherness that confronts us like an interrogation mirror?”
“As Michael Clune puts in it in his memoir Gamelife, “The human depends on the inhuman for its grip on the world.””
“Thanks to surveillance, games have become very good at finding us. Perhaps it’s time we went back to finding them. Let’s abandon immersion and embrace estrangement; let’s exchange seduction for wonder. Rather than worshipping games that help us lose ourselves more completely, let’s praise those that cast who we are into starker relief. And if that’s what a game can be at its very best, then Watch Dogs 2 is a game at its absolute, craven worst. Don’t look away.”