Watch Dogs is one of the most racist games I’ve ever played

I liked Watch Dogs: it’s a great sandbox, full of fun and hacking escapades, but by the time I finished it, I really wished that I didn’t. Watch Dogs is a game designed with a single audience in mind: white men. The game makes no effort to appeal anyone else, and actually manages to alienate every other audience by adhering to the dullest racial stereotypes around.

Spot the odd one out?

Watch Dogs is very, very white. The cast includes Aiden Pearce, the dullest cyber-terrorist known to man, his equally dull family, two friendly hackers, an evil gang lord, and an evil hacker. All white and obsessed with their little dramas, schemes and power games.

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The only two minorities in Watch Dogs are distinctly second class, getting less screen time and having less agency than any of the white characters. They are essentially just supporting characters, and Jordi Chin, the Asian character, is completely unnecessary to the plot.

Why am I even here?

The sad fact is that the most intriguing character is the one African-American character, Iraq. Iraq was a military veteran who begins a life of crime after being honorably discharged. He is a hacker, whose talents rival any of the other characters’, and who manages to acquire a enough information about Chicago’s most powerful men that he can blackmail anyone at any time.

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But how does Watch Dogs treat this character? The make him the hired thug for the game’s “real” nemesis, Lucky Quinn. Iraq should have been the villain of this piece, not a throwaway boss fight, easily ended with a couple of grenades.

And if you think that the treatment of Iraq is bad, wait until you see how Watch Dogs treats his gang, the Black Viceroys. I mean come on, isn’t “The Viceroys” good enough? But naming aside, everything about the treatment of this gang is offensive.

The Black Viceroys are portrayed as scum. While surveilling Freemont-Rossi I watched one Viceroy commit sexual assault on a woman and then throw money in her face, and two others having aggressive sex out in the open. I never saw anything else like this during the game, so for those two things to happen almost simultaneously, in the same area by the same group of people, is obviously a comment on those people.