It’s one thing to read about dystopian societies in novels such as Brave New World or 1984—and another thing entirely to play through them. Instead of focusing on the destruction of structures that humanity took so long to achieve, or the few people left after a plague or a meteor, these kinds of apocalypses occur slowly and within society. They reflect potential futures that more technology enables—and Watch_Dogs has finally brought that to game consoles and PCs.
In the game, you play as someone who has a device that stops electric signals—the details aren’t displayed in the game, but similar technology does exist today. You control the electronic devices around you, either by stopping them with your device, tapping into signals, or hacking into devices that anyone might be holding—and I do mean anyone. While you walk through the game, you can also see what kind of occupations or special traits any character might have. The last of the trailer showed that there might be more than one character—or perhaps more than one player—in the elaborate world.
It’s very easy to imagine this world as our own. The technologies are so similar and the connection we share with the world through our tablets, games, computers, cars, and phones all give us our own kind of digital footprint. With privacy becoming an increasing issue as Facebook and Google publicize more and more of their data, Watch_Dogs brings up a new kind of dystopian society. Governments have even honed in on the issue, since it’s easy to track someone digitally and the legal status of doing so is hazy. Tracking dissidents through their cell phone messages or tweets and then disabling communications once you’ve found them isn’t a one-time occurrence in the Middle Eastern uprisings happening right now.
As time goes by, we start to see a trend towards more technology in games set in present day or near-present day worlds. Watch_Dogs has finally brought something so simple but so touchy to the table—privacy and information issues. If everything we’ve ever browsed or clicked on the internet could be viewable by someone else, what would they learn about you? Besides your taste in videos, your background, address, and location are all easy to figure out if you haven’t been careful. Just look up some articles on 4chan—some (not all) of their users are notorious for being able to track down information.
If that kind of information was in someone’s hands, it would be dangerous enough on its own. But what if that someone just happened to be an assassin? What if they could track your location each time you signed into your favorite media site, each time your phone made a call, or each time they saw your car’s license plate through a surveillance camera? You’d be dead meat. This kind of privacy problem throws a new light on just what kind of issues have to be brought up in politics—no matter the country, safety and protection of the individual should come before a whole. Countries that open up ways to access and track an individual user’s data are just opening the door to the kind of society that Watch_Dogs portrays: a dystopian world barely held together by the strings of the world wide web.
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