Yo Cameron,I do. I know exactly when it fucks it all up. You'd given me a (spoiler-free) warning that some bad shit was coming, but when it happened I was still floored. No, wait, floored is wrong. I was disappointed. Because… well, to get into why it was so disappointing, I have to talk briefly about why things had been going so well with Horatio.During the early portions of the game, Watch Dogs 2 communicates that it is—for better or worse—going to try to engage with questions of identity and marginalization. The catalyst for Marcus joining the do-gooder hacktivist collective called DedSec is that the crime-stopping (and privacy invading) CTOS software suite determined that he was a criminal because he fit a profile: Young, black, and in the wrong places at the wrong times.
Hey Austin,That's exactly where the game lost me. Marcus walks into a room looking for Horatio. He's laying there dead on the floor and covered in blood, and I was straight-up flabbergasted about what was happening.The stakes of the game aren't that serious when Marcus finds the body. DedSec is a hacking group, and they do a bunch of prankish things to show corporate America where it can shove its surveillance apparatus. It's edgy-leaning-toward-silly, but it's a tone that all the characters can really live in. At this stage in the game, Marcus is investigating a politician, and it's some Socially Aware Video Games 101 all the way through.And then, cynically and brutally, the game unravels all of the brilliant setup that it's done around race in order to make the stakes that much more real or serious. Back in 2014, I wrote a piece for Paste where I said that the original Watch Dogs only understood women as plot points. In that game, the only engine of narrative movement was through physically hurting and emotionally wounding women in order to motivate Aiden Pearce to react. Women couldn't be women. They could only be a stand-in for dramatic development.
Cam,Exactly! It's not just that the game "forgets all those interesting moments that it has shown us," it's that it forgets that it ever showed them to us to begin with. WD2 doesn't only stop delving into this territory, it stops even referencing that it ever did.I really believe there could've been a way for Horatio to be killed that "works." As is, he's kidnapped and killed by the Tezcas (a gang in WD2's Oakland) because he's part of DedSec, and they… I guess I'm not really sure? They want to know some secret info that hackers know, is I think what the game is going for?Instead, though, what we get is a boilerplate set of missions that feel ripped from the first Watch Dogs. Marcus goes from gang hideout to gang hideout "neutralizing" everyone he finds there, ruining the gang's operations, and eventually confronting its leader. But the Tezcas are a sketch in a game filled with paintings. Where many of WD2's missions offer clever geometries to explore and exploit, this mission's are indistinct (and like the first game's faux-Cabrini-Green, they feel ripped from sensationalist depictions of "the inner city.")Worse, though, is that when all of this is over, it really is over. The remaining members of DedSec commiserate, arrive at an "at least we got those bastards" equilibrium, and Marcus "buries" Horatio by drilling into his private hard drive. And that's it. Ratio is never mentioned again.
Games, for their sprawling scale, have historically been a "tight" medium when it comes to characterization. There is not room (or budget) to show the soccer balls and science kits, the embraces and private jokes. Yet Watch Dogs 2 finds the time for those. The quick, knowing glances. The personal assurances. The little sketches of humanity that elevate it so high above the first game in the series. But for Horatio, all of that is not only shattered on the concrete, but the ash inside swept under the rug and ignored. No one, it seems, remembers that Horatio was a particular boy.But I so want to be wrong. In my fanon (apologies, Frantz), Marcus is biting his tongue for the entire final third of the game. Now he is the only brotha in the meeting who has to represent all of blackdom. Who else in DedSec understands Horatio's death like him? How can he share the weight of his grief?As he enters Blume HQ during the game's final mission, Marcus hypes himself up by singing a Danny Brown's lyric on the group's voice chat: "Got the game the game on lock like we changed the key!" DedSec is confused. "Huh? Who" No one recognizes Brown's high speed cadence or playful lyricism. Maybe, I imagine Marcus thinking to himself, Horatio would've.Always remember that Trayvon Martin was a boy, that Tamir Rice was a particular boy, that Jordan Davis was a boy, like you. When you hear these names think of all the wealth poured into them. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the day care, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth.