Watch Dogs: Embracing Fear

Steal, invade and observe.

I wouldn’t consider myself a paranoid person. I fear a few things, much like anyone else. I’m not a huge fan of heights. Snakes, alligators and spiders freak me out. And I’m still not really sure why clowns need to exist. But most of those things are situational, and easily solved or avoided.
There is, however, one thing that sits in the back of my head, making me look over my back and wonder if and when it might happen. Broadly speaking, that fear pertains to electronic surveillance and theft. It’s not that I wear a tinfoil hat and mutter to myself constantly, but I’m certainly aware of the risks and danger. I’ve had my credit card information stolen. I’ve had people jump into my home network. I think we’re all aware that the United States government has been watching digital activity to various degrees.

A digital invasion of our lives is simply a reality of the modern world. It’s something most of us are aware of, but will have trouble completely evading. Which I think is why Watch Dogs strikes such a strong note. Rather than being persecuted by those with great technological skill, Ubisoft places all of us in the role of someone striking back against an oppressive system, against those who have wronged him.
Like all of you, I’ve been hearing about Watch Dogs non-stop since E3 2012. Back then it captivated me, and it was by far my game of that show. There was one caveat though - I didn’t play it. And that trend would continue, despite Ubisoft releasing dozens of trailers in the year that followed, until last week. It’s such a relief that Watch Dogs was precisely what I expected - an action game in a modern setting with great world design and a very confident feeling of play and control.
The Watch Dogs team has taken special care to make hacking seem real without applying excessive complexities on top of it. Your character, Aiden Pearce, is capable and ready - meaning he can pull up information on civilians around him instantly, or he can invade a security system with a simple command on his cell phone. All of this plays out through fantastic, layered gameplay that seems capable of supporting a vast, sprawling open world.

But nothing comes easy in Watch Dogs. If you want to spy on civilians, which not only adds a bit of flavor to the overall world but can give Aiden valuable experience points, you’ll need to hack servers that are housed in carved out territories. Naturally these servers are guarded and tucked away, so figuring out how to gain access is a puzzle in and of itself.
The demo I played featured very simple, intuitive hacks, something that the developers told me was intentional. The team wants to layer in concepts, including more sophisticated hacking techniques, teaching players tools and approaches that are unique to Watch Dogs. The game does feature guns, and wild shoot outs with gangsters and police certainly can happen, but the team views players solving challenges consistently with violence as a bit of a failure on their part. They want creative solutions. They want hacking to be the default approach for most missions.

As I gained my bearings in Chicago, I invaded peoples’ lives. I discovered their darkest secrets. I stole their ATM PINs and their money. I watched them in their living rooms.

There’s something strange about a game that relies on these actions, which makes me wonder how much I’ll ultimately sympathize with Aiden, who is described to me as an anti-hero who has made mistakes and is now on a journey to redemption of sorts. Kevin Shortt, the lead story designer for Watch Dogs, told me it took the team a while to figure out Aiden’s “tricky” character, to the point where many of the game’s secondary characters came first. Aiden is designed to be flawed yet obsessive, relatable while not simply being a blank slate for the player to project upon. From what I can see, the biggest hurdle will be whether Aiden’s invasive tactics can become relatable. Whatever these “mistakes” are will have to be considerable and understandable, to say the least.
But that’s a fascinating problem to have. Games have basically conditioned us all to accept violence as some sort of acceptable way of life, and for Watch Dogs to lean away from that, and embrace something far more relevant to our modern lives, is in many ways more powerful. Here in the United States, we’re dealing with revelation after revelation of digital observation and invasion by the government.
Bit by bit it seems as though the concept of CtOS, a central governing monitoring service, which Ubisoft conceived of years ago, isn’t too far off. It’s part of the team’s focus on an elevated realism, taking the notion of “smart” cities like Chicago and London and bringing that into an interactive medium. And it really does work. A click of the left stick brings up quick heads-up displays above all civilians. A mini-map highlights guarded areas or regions where police will search for you if someone calls for help. There’s even a reputation system, which affects society’s tolerance for your vigilante actions. Are you serving the greater good or just yourself? That will matter.

Motivations of Pearce aside, my one question is how the game will develop and mature its missions, which I didn’t play. My time with Watch Dogs was mostly spent on ancillary activities - hacking a server to invade the privacy of civilians. Deliberately antagonizing police to see what would happen. I even had a chance to test how another player could invade my game and attempt to hack me, which plays into a leaderboard system to see who is the craftiest hacker.
All of those ideas were great, and all of them will be strong supplemental material, but I want to see how the core interactive story works. I want to see what kind of tasks I must complete, and how the game teaches me and evolves its systemic design. In other words, while I feel I understand the world and themes of Watch Dogs, I’m waiting to really get a glimpse of the game. That’s sort of odd considering we’re mere months from release, but every new layer that’s added to this game assures me my questions have appropriate and satisfying answers. With that in mind, I wait patiently until the next layer is revealed.