The forthcoming Watch Dogs is set in Chicago's near-future and organized around a massive, state-run network called the Central Operating System. The hero of the game is a hacker who has gained access to the network, and can use it to pry into the lives of everyone around him, but with the noble goal of protecting the innocent from the city's lurking evildoers. In one scenario, he aims his smartphone at a woman on the street and instantly pulls up the network's data about her, learning that she's recently broken up with a violent boyfriend who has a criminal record. You can then follow her and protect her from an eventual attack by her ex-boyfriend. Last year's Sleeping Dogs, an open world detective game set in Hong Kong, had a similar mechanic, in which players hack into CCTVs around the city to pick out drug dealers for the local police to arrest.
In these cases, the moral breach of surveillance is acceptable because the game worlds necessitate it, introducing villains that can only be stopped through surveillance—a mirror of the argument made in defense of current surveillance programs: that while the NSA and FBI have access to huge stores of private information, they promise only to pursue likely or suspect terrorists and traitors. When President Barack Obama claims that Americans “can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he’s calling for tolerance of the general idea of surveillance as a necessary compromise for safety from terrorism. Yet, in the fantasy of the game world, we can accept these logical extremes because the game builds a space where there are imminent threats behind every closed door—sex traffickers, drug dealers, gunrunners, terrorists. But the threats in real life are less imminent, and certainly more opaque, which is what makes these games so seductive: There are no unknowns—known or otherwise.
Read More | "Video Games Are Making Us Too Comfortable With the Modern Surveillance State" | Michael Thomsen | The New Republic