Watch Dogs has spent five years soaking in the brine of the thirtysomething white guy, and those juices leak from every pore. This game feels aimed squarely at the predominantly male video game demographic and cares nothing for women or minorities, let alone any substantive investigation of real-life issues like the cultural fallout of sex trafficking or Chicago's long history of racial violence.
One of primary groups you'll be fighting is a gang called "The Black Viceroys," a group of tech-savvy project hoods who embody blackness in the most uninteresting and trope-y ways imaginable. These guys talk ceaselessly about bitches and hos; they call each other "B" and say "sheeeit!" with regularity. "You there B?" they ask one another. Upon seeing a comrade get shot: "Yo, B's been hit!" When engaging Aiden in combat: "Ain't nothin' can save you now, cracker!"
Only one black character gets anything resembling character development; the rest exist simply to kill or be killed, or occasionally to engage in sexual assault while on camera. Toward the end of the game, I pondered just how many of Chicago's young black men I'd helped Aiden Pearce murder. A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? It was enough to make me feel like I was playing as some sort of weird techno white supremacist.
