The Legion has joined the BBC • Eurogamer.net



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Watch Dogs: Legion, unveiled at E3 this week, will be held in a post-Brexit Britain. It addresses topics such as civil unrest, surveillance status and, at first glance, the dubious accents of London.

Inevitably, Ubisoft's latest open-world adventure has caught the attention of the mainstream media. Today, the BBC's Politics Live show presents a segment of Watch Dogs: Legion, which poses the question: does it offer a realistic portrayal of our future?

The sequence began with a film based on an interview with Legion Creative Director Clint Hocking, who said the team had been in development for a year and a half and had moved to the London site in the UK. vote on Brexit.

"The Brexit in our game is not the cause of the problems we describe in the game world," insists Hocking in the interview.

"The causes of Brexit are the causes of the problems of our world – it's really the way we treat it."

After a brief discussion of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and its realistic portrayal of a terrorist attack in London, the segment returns to the studio's panel, which discusses Watch Dogs: Legion.

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Toby Young, a Brexit supporter of The Spectator, is, as one might expect, dismissive of the dystopian London Legion after Brexit.

"As a supporter of Brexit, the temptation is to become scandalized, they describe the Brexit as such a disaster while no disaster has yet materialized," he said in the interview. ;program. "

Young says Watch Dogs: Legion is symptomatic of "paranoid style," an idea coined by American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, aka "those feverish apocalyptic fantasies, these conspiracy theories," which was once "what was true of popular law ".

"But since the Brexit and Trump win in 2016, the paranoid style, those paranoid apocalyptic fever dreams, seem to have migrated to the left, which seems like an example."

Aaron Bastani, of Novara Media, believes that Brexit "will result in quite dystopian results" … "but rather in the image of the Chinese state, where consumer surveillance is synergistic with the surveillance of the country. # 39; State. "

Bastani continues: "I doubt explosions and all the interesting costumes, but I think that the confluence of crises encountering massive data in a potentially authoritarian or authoritarian state of capitalism could be very worrying.

"What this kind of speculative fiction allows us is to say," The world is really going to change, do we want it to change for the better or for the worse? "

Young returns and says of Watch Dogs: Legion: "This does not seem particularly serious.

"This sounds like another manifestation of a dystopian satire emerging from mass culture, but none of these dystopian satires actually materialized."

Claire Cohen of the Boris Johnson blog, The Daily Telegraph, then enters the ring, claiming that Watch Dogs: Legion could spark controversy, because Ubisoft "seems to want to distance itself from the fact that it is related to the causes of Brexit" and … "This could cause a bit of agitation with those who do not agree".

Then: "Would it be incredible if the game was what united both the left and the right? It could happen."

The debate around Watch Dogs: Legion ends with a comment by Miatta Fahnbulleh of the New Economics Foundation, thanking Ubisoft for highlighting the causes of Brexit.

"It may not be dystopia, but the underlying drivers of Brexit, certainly, people have voted for the European Union, but for many it was desperation and the dissatisfaction with the economic system, with an economic system a tiny proportion of people where the majority does not feel the benefits, "she says.

"The problem in all the debates of the last three years is that we have moved away from that, and we are not talking about these issues or how we need to react, we are talking about the ins and outs of whether we let's leave or how we leave, and that's a problem.

"If it takes the game industry to shine the spotlight on that? Thank you very much."

The inevitable debate around Watch Dogs: Legion and its UK after Brexit in the mainstream media has begun. As the BBC suggests, the game does not exactly offer a flattering portrayal of the city of London in the near future. In fact, he puts forward a London that has lagged behind.

But is it politics? Given Watch Watchs: Legion has been integrated with the Politics Live show of the BBC, I will go with a big yes.

You can watch the Politics Live episode of the BBC in question on the BBC iPlayer.

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