What it's like to hear racist 'Watch Dog 2' fans say you don't exist
When Watch Dogs, Ubisoft’s fastest selling video game ever, was released in 2014, it captured the hacking spirit of the times. The game’s hacker hero, Aidan Pearce, takes advantage of the connected nature of today’s smart cities to wreak havoc in Chicago while hunting down the organization that killed his niece. The game was so spot-on that a U.S. cyber alert went out warning that it would inspire players to hack street lights and road signs.
This month, Ubisoft revealed the sequel, Watch Dogs 2, would be set in San Francisco and that its protagonist will be Marcus Holloway, a young black hacker from Oakland who was wrongfully jailed by a crime prediction algorithm. As my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore noted, some of the game’s fan were taken aback at this news:
Over on the forums for Steam, a streaming service through which people will be able to play the game this fall, nearly every single conversation about Watch_Dogs 2 was about Marcus’ race. In the now-closed thread titled “Shoehorned black character why can’t we be Aiden?” hundreds of disgruntled fans vented their frustrations about how “implausible” it would be for a black person to live in San Francisco….
Most of the 45 page-long thread is chock full of different spins on the idea that black people somehow don’t make sense as protagonists in general, let alone tech-savvy heroes in the Bay Area.
Some of the comments were so outrageous that they had to be examples of trolling, people trying to rile others up for the sake of riling. “Black people don’t know how to use technology,” was one such comment. But other commenters seemed more sincere in their offense at having to identify with a non-white character that they saw as unreflective of ‘reality’:
“Look at the demographics of San Fran. It would be more plausible if I played as a homo or an asian than some random black dude,” user MentholFox complained. “Considering they make up 6% of the population in SanFran.”
This of course is ridiculous. While there is a Silicon Valley stereotype of the hacker as a white guy in a hoodie, the hacker community has had diverse members since its early days. In 1994, a black hacker named John Lee graced Wired’s cover after two hacker gangs had an online turf war.
After reading the comments, I turned to one of my favorite hackers, Morgan Marquis-Boire, who has a history of making life difficult for surveillance companies who sell spyware to repressive regimes and who currently works at First Look Media on digital security for its journalists. (You may have spotted him in the Real Future and Vice documentaries on hacking.) Marquis-Boire lives in San Francisco and is black. By the reasoning of the Watch Dog 2 commenters, he can’t possibly exist.
I asked what he thought of the fans’ reactions.
“I was bewildered by their reaction. It bothers me,” he said. “Part of me is amused, because they don’t know anything about the hacker scene. They are complaining about a scene they have no firsthand knowledge of. We’ve been here all along.”
Carl Vincent, a long-time hacker who is now an information security professional in Seattle (and who is also black) said via phone, “Any real hacker would say it’s probably one of the most diverse groups of people on the planet.”
The thing about hackers is that they are behind screens, using online handles that mask their identities (often required because what they’re up to online can enter legal gray zones). The assumption may be that the people behind those handles fit the default white male narrative, but that assumption is flawed.