Research
Duplicitous Logics of Gameplay and The Ethics of Far Cry 5
A Major Research Project presented to the School of English and Theatre Studies College of Arts University of Guelph submitted for partial requirements for the degree of M.A. in English Studies
This exploration intended to look into the ways the carnival is appearing in video games to allow players to experience the reality of the gruesome world of war. The ending of Far Cry 5 leaves the player unsure if they are a hero or not since their actions appear to be meaningless to the greater destructive forces that exist in this world in the form of nuclear bombs. The clear divide in the two forms of video gameplay modes consists of the role of the player in their story. Within Der Derian’s Virtuous War gameplay mode, the player is the hero who cleanses the world of villains and embodies hope for military action in defending freedom and nationalism. The carnivalesque invites players within this world to experience and play with war. The player might be led to critique war as I have, or they might have their beliefs in the military-industrial complex reinforced. The carnivalesque brings realism into the murdertainment medium within videogames by using grotesque realism to make the bloody reality of war part of their simulation.
“He was right. Humanity is once again in crisis. It doesn't matter what we build or achieve...we will always find a way to break it down. Babylon, Rome, empires rise, empires fall. America. We're no different. We think we're indestructible. World War II. War on 'Terror', we survived it, but it only brought us closer to the edge. And this is where we are. Right here on schedule, just waiting for someone to push us, and oh boy, have you pushed us. You did everything he said you would do. And you didn't even know it. You had no fucking clue."
Jacob Seed, Far Cry 5
Ubisoft’s Gameplay Mode Intervention: Watch_Dogs exploration of the Privacy Paradox
Accepted to the 2020 Canadian Game Studies Association Conference. Cancelled due to COVID-19
Research by: Megan J.E. Hutchison, Joshua Garcia and Dr. Don Moore
At E3 2019, Ubisoft announced their plans to release the 3rd iteration of the Watch_Dogs series: Legion. The series is an action-adventure game set in an open world, with locals in fictionalized United States; however, Legion plans to represent a near-future within London, England. The gameplay of Watch_Dogs: Legion takes place in a setting where personal liberties have become vastly limited due to London becoming a surveillance state. Citizens are monitored continuously by Albion, a private security company that acts as the city’s law enforcement. Watch_Dogs is a series that uses game mechanics to highlight technology privacy concerns through hacking into devices within smart interconnected cities. Smart technology is on the rise within homes and people’s private lives through the installation and use of smart home doorbells with cameras or Google home systems. The second game within the series followed the group DedSec who rebels against the development of surveillance of smart cities due to their means to create algorithms of prejudicial pattern discrimination. The playable character within DedSec is Marcus Holloway, a young hacker falsely accused of being a suspect in a high tech robbery with the only evidence being the Home Domain Center surveillance predictive software. Marcus' story highlights concerns of racial profiling within surveillance technology. DedSec’s narrative also works to promote media literacy of the threats to privacy that face civilians when existing in surveillance states, through the player’s abilities to hack into private cameras and interfere with objects (speeding up a treadmill until the user falls off). Watch Dogs: Legion focuses on the uprising of individuals against a surveillance state to push back against the privacy paradox that technology creates. The privacy paradox is the contradictory idea that civilians have privacy in a society that requires information from online participation or surveillance.
The gameplay of Watch_Dogs unpacks the possibilities of privacy extortion from publics living in smart cities where information is gathered and turned into algorithmic projections, as Wendy Chun calls “Big Data.” Publics in England have noted their concerns about emerging technology in Edelman’s 2020 trust barometer, 72% of the British population believes the government does not understand emerging technologies enough to regulate them. The increasing use of technology in public spaces is a concern for Google’s move to Toronto and the launch of the Google Sidewalks project. Google’s project is an example of smart cities’ fictionalized within Watch_dogs entering into our realities. Questions are surrounding the privacy paradox involves how governments will control the use and collection of private information with the publics’ growing reliance on technology. The Watch_Dogs series demonstrates a progression of a virtual world where the resistance against a surveillance state escalates to mass violence. Ubisoft’s Watch_Dogs series uses gameplay as an intervention to the concerns of public acceptance of data privacy collection and surveillance. Watch_Dogs encourages players to interrogate the privacy paradox and ask how much privacy they are willing to lose for access to technology.
The Outcry Against Far Cry 5
Presented at MEDIA ETHICS: Human Ecology in a Connected World 2019 conference.
Research by: Dr. Don Moore and Megan J.E. Hutchison
In March 2018, Ubisoft launched the fifth iteration of its popular action-adventure video game series Far cry, which is known for its militarized tourism scenarios in “exotic” (read non-north American) locals. Far Cry 5, however, departs from the formula, such that its “exotic local” is in the State of Montana in the southern United States, and the “dangerous natives” are a fictional far right-wing christian doomsday/terrorist cult. This scenario caused an unexpected backlash from thousands of self described “American gamers” who, via online petition, demanded that Ubisoft “change the villains to something more realistic. islam is on the rise in America, as is the violence of inner city gangs” (“cancel Far Cry 5”). Our paper argues that this outcry against Far Cry 5 is symptomatic of the wider racism, colonialism, and hyperideological segmentation of post-9/11 U.S. media discourse about terrorism. Far Cry 5, we argue, thus represents an unexpected intervention.
F*cking NPCs: Exploring the Expansion of Digital Sex within Video Game Play.
Accepted to the 2020 Sexaulity Studies Association Conference. Cancelled due to COVID-19
Research by: Megan J.E. Hutchison
Video games are exploding and exploiting virtual representations of digital sex. Gone are the “woohoo” days of Sims, under-the-covers. Following Brenda Brathwaite, the narratives of today's video games empower players through explicit act of casual sex. Ubisoft’s Assassins’ Creed Odyssey encourages players to participate in vast sexual experiences, including orgies with non-playable (& not real) characters. The story in Life is Strange 2 highlights for players both the awkwardness of initiating sex and an interrupted hesitation when witnessing the embarrassments of Sean’s (the player’s avatar) first sex performance. My work applies gameplay research of these new forms of popular pleasure/leisure, re-framing colonial expectations and the hegemonic gaze through perceptual analysis of representations of explicit sex acts in the virtual worlds of video games.
Memory and resilience of networked characters in Let the Great World Spin
The wire walk act connects the characters of Let the Great World Spin through collective memory. The characters together represent the network of individual experiences that exist at the same moment from different points of view. The mode of writing that Colum McCann explores is an example of how literature can communicate moments in history through a multidimensional lens and remove the hierarchy of characters that occurs in works with single focalization. Let the Great World Spin provides the reader with an opportunity to explore the characters’ collective memory of the wire walker and the twin towers through the focalization of different characters within New York City.
As society moves towards globalization and worldwide media coverage, we need to consider the network expansion of individuals impacted by news stories and events from around the world. We are all interconnected. It is through writing like McCann that we can get a grasp on the vast complex interactions people have with one another in their lives. McCann ends his novel with: “The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough” (McCann 512). It is a tribute to the resilience that invisible networks of individuals have throughout trauma and change. There is no main character in this life we know, just many focalizers trying to understand the world around them. Despite what may occur in the future, we have each other, and we are all connected, we just might not know how yet.
Headlines printed in blood: creating the legend of Jack the Ripper
Submitted for MDST*4500 (Applied Research Project).
“If it bleeds it leads” in the media and the stories of serial killers run the arteries dry; this is the saying that created a monster that stalked the streets of Whitechapel in 1888. The newspapers and media products to follow built a persona to fill in the gaps in the cold case of the Whitechapel murders. Through a series of events involving the police, the media, and several crimes, created the legend of Jack the Ripper and his nightly terrors. Jack the Ripper is a creation of the human imagination fused together by many attempts to find solutions to unsolvable murders. The murders themselves were a new kind of horror for the people of Whitechapel that captured their attention as well as the media’s. People found solace in the comforting knowledge of knowing the identity of murderers but Jack the Ripper created a new dialogue in the newspapers. The masses were fascinated with horror and murdertainment found within the pages of news stories. Therefore, to sell more papers, the news companies played a significant role in the creation of the legend of Jack the Ripper. The media products in 1888 aided the creation of the legend by shaping the dialogue in the papers and the public opinion of the Whitechapel Murderer. From this reporting, a subculture developed called Ripperlogists, people who wish to discover the identity and motives behind Jack the Ripper. Today the legend of Jack the Ripper is lives on through dark tourism in the east end of London. Jack's story continues to integrate into modern media products that hold Jack the Ripper as a relevant topic today. A media storm from the Whitechapel murders created Jack the Ripper and fortified the legend of a faceless man that is reborn through new media products and dark tourism.