Tamer Asfahani examines how Watch Dogs Legion, Control and other videogames can provide the best means of teaching us how we need to control the personal data we put out into the world

THERE is a mantra repeated in the circles of cyber security and information security sectors: “If the product is free, then YOU are the product.” That may appear innocuous on the surface, but it is much more sinister than most people give it credit for.

Just think about it for just a moment. What do you have access to for free? Think about your social media accounts, your subscriptions to websites, your web-based email addresses, profiles for online shopping platforms as well as other miscellaneous accounts which you’ve no doubt signed up to years before but have never visited again.

Now think about all those platforms, services and accounts, and ask yourself if you’ve ever paid money for them. You may think you haven’t, but in truth you’ve given away something much more valuable than any currency: your personal information. In a lot of the cases too, you’ve relinquished your rights to whatever content or information you put on those platforms.

This underlying fact is the root of games such as Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs and Remedy’s Control. The power of data is still completely dismissed by the majority of us who enjoy free access to social media, or name tests or apps that show us what we’ll look like in the future as older versions of ourselves, say.

All of those services are using your data and building a profile about you and the things you engage with.

That data is then sold, as we know, to advertisers and marketeers who then use that information to build a more detailed profile of you, so they’re better able to target you to sell things to as a unique/ discrete individual. Or to sell your information on to other organisations.

Watch Dogs Legion: a big data alternate reality

Watch Dogs Legion is a perfect example of a game that finds itself not necessarily predicting the future, but rather showing us an alternate reality. Not an alternate future, but an alternate reality. What happens in Watch Dogs can very easily be achieved in today’s world. As with a lot of Ubisoft games, they start off in speculative fiction (Far Cry 5 and New Dawn are the latest examples) but somehow end up happening in the real-world reality. Kent Hudson, game director on Watch Dogs Legion, explains how Watch Dogs Legion was conceived around a dystopian London. No-one in the team imagined Brexit would happen. When it did, the team had to think hard about the way in which the game was presented.

“When the game started, it was speculative fiction that Brexit would happen. Then it did happen, and we thought we had to adapt to that reality. Then we got to the following October, and the world had shifted on its axis again with all the unrest with police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and obviously Covid; it’s been crazy that when the game started none of this was on the radar.” Hudson tells me.

The world had shifted on its axis again with all the unrest with police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and obviously Covid

And lead writer Cameron Labine echoes his words: “First and foremost, Watch Dogs Legion is a piece of speculative fiction. What Spec-Fic does best is take current trends in the world that we see in the world happening now, and extrapolate into the future about where these things could go given some time.” Labine doesn’t claim Watch Dogs has predicted the future, but it’s interesting to note the foresight game designers and developers have when setting fictional stories around real-world events. In truth, most game developers and publishers would shy away of from any political message, affiliation or commentary - but it’s hard to work on a game like this without thinking what could be. After all, it’s the creativity that drives innovation and change.