The Ludic Unconscious: Towards a Symptomatic Reading of Play and Narrative in Watch Dogs 2
by Vladimir RizovAbstract
This essay proposes that videogames are necessary objects of ideological critique. It does so by drawing on the lineage of ideological critique advanced by Louis Althusser via “symptomatic reading” and Fredric Jameson’s notion of “the political unconscious.” In such a framework, I propose the notion of the ludic unconscious, in which both gameplay mechanics and narrative sensibilities converge. To illustrate this, I examine a specific game -- Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2 (2016). I seek to provide both a micro- and macro-level analysis of the narrative and gameplay representations of surveillance. I do so with an emphasis on the military-industrial complex, ideology, technology and race. Ultimately, I posit the notion of ludic unconscious, which encapsulates videogames’ ludic and narrative dimensions, their reliance on repetition and displacement of real-life political contradictions.
Keywords: Watch Dogs 2; surveillance; ideology; race; political unconscious; ludic unconscious; symptomatic reading
Introduction
Videogames are products of determinate historical, social and cultural contexts. As such, they constitute representations of said contexts, and any worthwhile consideration of how said representations relate to the political realities outside the games needs to understand videogames as ideological. Accordingly, I shall begin by outlining my approach to the specificities of ideology in relation to videogames and play. My approach seeks to combine a focus on both narrative and gameplay, and to do this I will examine a single videogame -- Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2.
Watch Dogs 2 is the second in what is currently a trilogy that predominantly focuses on surveillance in a near-future dystopian smart city. The city in each game changes -- Chicago in Watch Dogs, London in Watch Dogs: Legion -- and San Francisco in the game of interest, Watch Dogs 2. As Vanolo notes (2016), the game series is the only one, at the time of respective releases, that engages in such a focused manner with the notion of a smart city (Sadowski and Bendor, 2019; Sadowski, 2020). Namely, in all three games, the protagonists are hackers engaged in a covert resistance against ctOS, a city-wide centralised operation system, run by the fictional Blume Corporation, that has control over policing, urban infrastructure such as traffic lights, smart bollards and most importantly a sprawling mass system of CCTV (and not only) surveillance. As early as the first game, this surveillance is presented as including user information from consumer electronics as well. In Watch Dogs 2, the main opponents of Blume’s ctOS are DedSec, a hacker collective with anarchist politics, whose resistance consistently includes insurgency, political campaigns of gathering public support and orchestrating public leaks of proprietary information. In terms of gameplay, Watch Dogs 2 gives the player a near-omnipotent hacker in the face of Marcus Holloway as avatar. Marcus is able to hack people, objects and cars. He can manipulate urban infrastructure such as traffic lights or drive remotely unmanned vehicles such as cars and construction cranes. He can also hack people, frame them as criminals, steal their money, or learn information about them.
On superficial reading, the choice of videogame for analysis passes the criteria for a political game. However, in this article I seek to demonstrate both a theoretical and an analytical framework for conducting ideological critique of videogame representations (see Rizov, 2026), in this case of surveillance. I do this by drawing on work by Rafter (2007, p. 417) who has argued that “popular criminology [is] a criminological discourse in its own right,” since popular imaginations tend to inform understandings of crime and its control. More than that, popular culture discourses on the topic of crime control in general, and surveillance in particular, can be understood as sources of “cultural information” (Rafter, 2007, p. 416). This approach to culture is in congruence with the theoretical framework of ideology, as such “cultural information” commonly “feeds into our ideologies and other mental schemata” (Rafter, 2007, p. 416).
The Ludic Unconscious
In his 1920 essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Sigmund Freud (1999) outlines an intriguing occurrence of a game invented by a child at about 18 months old. To do so, for Freud, was to explore “the way in which the psychic apparatus works in one of its earliest normal activities” (Freud, 1999, p. 14, emphasis in original). Often referred to as “fort/da,” the game which the child invented, and in which it only occasionally indulged, consisted of flinging his toys together in a single messy location, either a corner of the room or under the bed, all the while making a drawn-out exclamation, interpreted by both Freud and the child’s mother to mean “go away” (fort, in German). Similarly, the child would also play with a wooden toy attached to a string by throwing the toy outside of his cot while holding onto the string. Every time the toy would fall outside of the cot, the boy would exclaim “o-o-o-oh” (i.e. “go away/fort”) only to pull back the toy via the string and proclaim “da” (“there” in English). The entirety of the game seems to be encapsulated by this repetitive disappearance and return.
For Freud, this repetition consisted in an impulse for mastery. More to that, the circumstances of the mother having to leave him alone for hours are significant. It was precisely those circumstances that the child exercised an attempt at mitigating. Namely, the child invented a way in which he is in control of his mother’s disappearance, as well as her return. It is this game of repetition that allows the child to experience the joyful event of his mother’s return. Contrastingly, the impulse to exert control over the painful aspect of what the game represents -- the mother’s departure -- can also be seen as a pleasurable indulgence in the satisfaction of an impulse for revenge.
There are two clear implications: first, there is pleasure in controlled dissatisfaction; and second, the sources of both dissatisfaction and pleasure in our make-believe scenarios have roots in things that lie outside the spaces of play. This externality is important, as it reveals play to be enmeshed with factors outside that nevertheless determine it. On one level, we can pose the question: what are the elements outside videogames that determine the conventions of play in terms of the ways in which they give rise to pleasure or displeasure in game worlds? For instance, exploring a game focused on surveillance, such as Watch Dogs 2, localises the question further -- what is the relation between in-game surveillance, on the level of narrative and gameplay, and real-life surveillance? On another level, we can also posit that play (the purely ludic dimension of the game if there is such a thing) is determined by the narrative in which it is enmeshed; thus, posing the question: what does the narrative tell us about the repetitive actions of the gameplay?
Althusser’s formulation of ideology is helpful here as it seeks to explain the reproduction of the status quo. Ideology, as defined by Althusser, is “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (2020, p. 36). As such, it designates a relationship between real conditions and their imaginary refractions. We can transpose the definition onto videogames as imaginary representations themselves. More than this, according to Althusser, ideology is always already present, which is to say that there is no outside to ideology. This is so in two main ways: first, one has never not been (i.e., always already) a subject to ideology [1] (i.e. formulated as a subject on ideology’s terms); and second, this always already character manifests itself as readymade solutions and answers (i.e., “this is how the world works”).
To quote Keever, ideology in videogames “allows us to analyze how agency is produced” (2022, emphasis in original). If we take the broad view that the game described by Freud is a game loop, at its core it is about repetitive actions that constitute a practice, which has a representational dimension. In this sense, videogames are widely considered “an active medium” (Galloway, 2006, p. 83) that involves a player’s physical input and invites multisensory experience. However, solely focusing on a perspective that sees “the primary phenomenological reality of games [as] that of action” (Galloway, 2006, p. 83) is likely to be limited in its ability to engage with political reality, since “political reflection [tends to be] eclipsed by high-intensity action” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009, p. 194). Thus, videogames should be understood as ideological in their capacity as imaginary representations and in their capacity to allow for the experience of various subjectivities, practices and actions within said representations. As such, videogames are to be understood as manifoldly determined as meaningful, not the least as ludic, that is to say action-based, and narrative, that is to say as imaginary representations.
In a different register, Vella has argued that the “drive towards mastery […] is the impulse that structures the act of playing” (Vella, 2015). Understood ideologically, however, this drive towards mastery is itself determined by forces external to the game. As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter have aptly pointed out, the medium of videogames “is increasingly revealing itself as a school for labor, an instrument of rulership, and a laboratory for the fantasies of advanced techno-capital” (2009, p. xix). That is why, it is necessary to explore how such repetitive actions, in the case of Watch Dogs 2 repetitive and ubiquitous surveillance, as well as a design of “high-intensity action,” in which the player repetitively engages, are ideological in character.
In this context, Jameson’s work on “the political unconscious” can be illuminating. In this framework, the problem of ideology is seen as a matter of interrogating a “deeper meaning hidden within the text […] like an ‘unconscious’ of the text that needs to be interpreted out” (2005, p. 343). Jameson draws on Althusser to conceptualise ideology as a “representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History” (2002, pp. 14-15). So, the political unconscious is a notion rooted in ideology, and it seeks to capture the ways in which texts: 1) necessitate “political interpretation” (2022, p. 1); 2) are products of determinate historical and social contexts; 3) repress, displace, and sublimate the real contradictions of the historical and social contexts in which they are produced (cf. Foley, 2019).
We can elucidate this further -- every videogame is a work produced in a determinate historical context, as such it intervenes in the specific context. On one level, it does so in the form of a commodity that is reliant on labour, circulation, production and an entire infrastructure of devices that allow for its playing. On another, it does so through its representational content -- of ideas, social contexts, historical realities, etc. As such, every videogame is determined by the ideology which produces it. In this sense, ideology is understood as a representational structure, and so a relation to a specific determinate historical context. As I will demonstrate in this article, a videogame’s representation of surveillance, its technologies and practices, is indeed ideological, as even when dealing with non-realist representations, it nevertheless normalises and reproduces the logic justifying its use.
As Foley notes “in many [works] the existence of exploitation, alienation, and oppression is granted but then, to one degree or another, papered over” (Foley, 2019, p.132). It is this phenomenon that Jameson’s “political unconscious” captures -- the many ways in which a text, be it film, novel, or videogame, confronts contradictions that it cannot imagine resolved and thus engages in “procedures of repression, displacement, and sublimation” (Foley, 2019 p. 132). In this sense, we can see a clear parallel to the notion of “political unconscious” and play as understood in the case of Freud’s example of the child's game.
The “political unconscious” mandates the task of criticism as the articulation of the problem which the text attempts to resolve or reconcile. Reconciliation, in this context, can also mean to “paper over.” In Althusserian terms, criticism involves the task of rejecting readymade answers with the goal of posing the problem that gave birth to the imagined solutions. More than that, Jameson’s notion of a text’s extratextual political determinations is premised on Althusser’s very formulation of “symptomatic reading” -- an interpretive practice through which a text’s form, content and propositions are understood in relation to ideology and repression. Understood in a Freudian sense, the symptoms implied here can be both latent and manifest in a given “text.” Rather than psychoanalysing characters or the author’s intentions, symptomatic reading is an interpretation that “divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same movement relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first” (Althusser, 2016, p. 8). For Althusser, the notion of a “different text” was both understood in the lacunae in works one criticises, but also that which critique leaves unsaid or posed as questions in other works. Symptomatic reading designates a framework of reading “texts” by bringing to light a variety of symptoms -- be they latent, tacit, or obscured in the original. As Barbara Foley claims (2019, p. 132), the political unconscious captures the ways that a text seeks to contain within itself “social contradictions that defy reconciliation in the world beyond the text.”
This idea of “the political unconscious” is a characteristic of narrativity writ large -- films, videogames, and texts possess it. It is in this sense that Althusserian “symptomatic reading” seeks to “identify behind the spoken words the discourse of the silence” (2016, p. 86). In the sense of the specific game that will serve as a case study, the word text used so far should not be understood as exclusively referring to the narrative of the game. Rather, gameplay itself is to be understood as a text that can be read symptomatically. In this sense, I do not make a distinction between a game’s narrative and its gameplay -- as my analysis will seek to show, both are interwoven and co-construct their meaning.
In such a framework, I propose the notion of the ludic unconscious, in which both gameplay mechanics and narrative sensibilities converge. The ludic unconscious is a notion that seeks to capture the dynamic relationship between latent and manifest significations on both narrative and gameplay level [2]. It is this manifoldly determined relationship that distinguishes the ludic unconscious from Jameson’s general textual political unconscious, for videogames are constituted by action, interactivity and narrative in a complex network of signification that is medium-specific and not directly mappable onto texts in other media. The ludic unconscious is meant as an expansive term that allows for the study of the multidirectional relations of gameplay and narration, as well as their combined relation to the world outside the game. As such, it is not a matter of determining a system of deciphering a game’s unconscious, true meaning (where X is a symbol of Y, etc) [3]. Neither is it a matter of interrogating a hidden propagandistic message. Instead, the ludic unconscious posits that videogames are interactive texts that contain and negotiate a multitude of hidden, displaced, sublimated or repressed ideological tensions, which in turn need to be managed in some way (often in the overlap of representation and interactivity) and also appear to present a resolution (which is inevitably going to be false) to actual social contradictions [4]. The term is demonstrated in practice in this essay’s analysis.
From this position, I propose a symptomatic playing of videogames. Specifically, I take Watch Dogs 2 as a case study with a focus on a single mission. Even more specifically, the focus on both narrative and gameplay will be with an emphasis on surveillance. Namely, how is surveillance narrated, both on the micro level of a single mission and the macro level of the game’s main narrative, and how is it implemented in terms of the gameplay condition. With a look back to Freud, Althusser and Jameson, this can be rephrased as: how does the repetition of surveillance within the videogame relate to the realities of surveillance outside the videogame?
Surveillance, Entertainment and Ideology
In the 20th century, in particular in the aftermath of World War II, the “state complex” (Tagg, 1988) expanded drastically in terms of surveillance and military capacity. In the USA, the war itself saw an expansion in the field of cryptography (Ball and Snider, 2013, p. 2), while the Cold War inaugurated the development of many state agencies to do with either surveillance or the production of technologies for it. The context of the Cold War together with the USA’s global imperialist interests saw the development of an expanded state surveillance apparatus take the shape of the “military-industrial complex” -- a project of developing surveillance and military technology and practices, also known as “the warfare state,” that can be put in operation against internal and external enemies. Foster and McChesney (2014) refer to the effects of this development as “surveillance capitalism.”
The term “surveillance capital” has also recently been utilised by Zuboff to designate what she terms “a rogue mutation” of capitalism (2019). While using the term originally defined by Foster and McChesney (cf. Morozov, 2019), Zuboff is more concerned with what she describes as the process in which “human experience [is transformed] into behavioral data” (2019, p. 14). Morozov (2019) outlines clearly the way in which Zuboff’s account is insufficiently critical of corporations. As recent scholarship attests, surveillance is only one form of AI use, and it is profoundly interwoven with policing and the military, but also the control of labour, the poor, the disenfranchised and the underprivileged. Pasquinelli charts the development of AI from “data analytics techniques” through their use by intelligence agencies to their ultimate consolidation “by internet companies into a planetary business of surveillance and forecasting” (2023, p. 12).
Eubanks articulates this alternatively by highlighting both the continuities of surveillance and state agencies and corporations (what can be referred to as the state military-industrial complex) and the changes in contemporary surveillance; she claims that, rather than an all-seeing eye in the sky, “the new surveillance is a spider in a digital web, testing each connected strand for suspicious vibrations” (Eubanks, 2018, p. 99). This view speaks to scholarly suggestions that contemporary forms of surveillance are in fact post-panoptic (Andrejevic, 2019). According to Andrejevic, the Foucauldian framework of surveillance tends to be based around spectacle and fits into a logic of pre-emption (2019, p. 77). As Andrejevic further shows, contemporary forms of surveillance are a lot less total in their data collection, and are, in fact, reactive rather than preventative (2019, p. 73). This post-panoptic surveillance is less focused on deterrence and prevention but instead utilises systems of “comprehensive surveillance and thus mobilizes the logics of automated information collection and processing” (2019, p. 39). As Andrejevic notes (2019, p. 39), citing Anderson (2011), this type of surveillance has parallels in drone surveillance and as such it is environmental to the extent that it is pre-emptive as it “relies on total information capture in order to arrest emergent processes.” One such example is intelligence-led policing. A key factor that drives such policing is the construction of the notion of a risk to offend. In essence, this predictive model is already premised on inaccurate data which results in reifying crime; as Wang notes: predictions construct “the future through the present management of subjects categorized as threats or risks” (Wang, 2018, p. 43). Designating someone as a potential offender is integral to the production of risk as a tangible reality that needs to be dealt with within the parameters of a policing system. As Schrader notes (2019, p. 141) this amounts to “a move toward risk management rather than risk eradication.”
Scannell (2019, p. 111) further problematises this by highlighting that such a system “translates lived realities of oppression into a speculated likelihood of something called ‘crime.’” There is yet another productive dimension to this framework of risk -- it is intertwined with an understanding of risk as an imminent threat, which is best resolved via “exercises of state violence in the present” (Miller, 2019, p. 91; for an extended discussion, see Rizov, 2023, pp. 147-155). One significant way this process manifests is the concept of the “hotspot.” According to Miller (2019, p. 96), they should be understood as:
modes of distributing harm [through] environmental logics whereby space and place are themselves rendered criminogenic -- so saturated with racialized threat that persons within those spaces cannot be otherwise than suspect.
It is this that Andrejevic describes (2019, p. 106) as “the shift from [Foucauldian] discipline to prediction.” The effect of this emphasis on prediction is a form of sorting. Eubanks (2018, p. 148) points to the consequences of this being the formation of “smaller and smaller microgroups [which] are targeted for different kinds of aggression and control.” Similarly, Browne (2010) has referred to the especially racist versions of this sorting, one version of which is “digital epidermization” (pace Fanon) in which surveillance produces a “truth” about a specific subject without the subject having any right or capacity to refute it. Crawford notes that this speaks to a general problem in AI and surveillance, where: “the idea that race and gender can be automatically detectable in machine learning is treated as an assumed fact and rarely questioned” (2021, p. 144).
In another dimension, the developments of the military-industrial complex’s datafication culminate in what scholars have noted as “the military-entertainment complex” (Der Derian, 2001). For one, it is important to note that one of the first experimentations that led to what we now call videogames was the result of Pentagon workers innovating with technology they had at their disposal. More than that, as Marijam Did notes, certain types of videogames, namely militarist and imperialist in character, such as America’s Army (United States Army, 2002) benefit from huge investments from the Pentagon, often to do with military recruitment (Did, 2024). Emil Hammar’s work on this has been particularly instructive, especially on the conditions of videogame production (Hammar, de Wildt, Mukherjee and Pelletier, 2021; Hammar, 2022), the interrelation between fascism and imperialism in reactionary gamers (Hammar, 2020b), and the climate crisis (Hammar, Jong & Desplant-Lichtert, 2023). Videogames that centre on the USA’s global imperialism are ubiquitous -- most notable perhaps being the Call of Duty series (Payne, 2012; 2014; 2016). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2009) have referred to such games as a central component of the “military-entertainment complex” (a term introduced by Lenoir, 2000; cf. Lenoir and Lowood, 2005; compare to the “surveillance-entertainment complex” in Ball and Snider, 2013). Although the term is often linked to Hollywood cinema, videogames as a medium are both much more commercially successful and more entrenched in making warfare, reactionary politics, violence, conspicuous consumption and colonisation fun (cf. Did, 2024).
Watch Dogs 2 -- Playing at Surveillance
Watch Dogs is one of the most successful game series developed by Ubisoft studios, a leading videogame company with a net worth of $2.59 billion (Statista, 2024). When Watch Dogs was first released in 2014, it sold more than 4 million copies breaking industry records at the time for first week sales (Ubisoft, 2016). Despite Ubisoft’s claims that its videogames are purely fictional and not political (Webster, 2019; Gera, 2019; Chalk, 2019; Stuart, 2018), Watch Dogs and several games in the Ubisoft catalogue address highly controversial political issues such as religious extremism and government resistance (Far Cry 5), guerilla insurgency against a government (Far Cry 6), the use of artificial intelligence and drone technology for military interventions (Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint), or the political and civic aftermath of a smallpox epidemic following its transmission on banknotes (Tom Clancy’s The Division; Tom Clancy’s The Division 2). Hacking, vigilantism and tech corporations are the key elements of the Watch Dogs series. Its latest installation -- Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft, 2020) -- was introduced with reference to Brexit and is set in post-Brexit near-future London (Miranda, 2019). In this context, the claims of making “mature” rather than political games ring hollow (Chalk, 2019, n.p.).
This political dimension of the military-industrial complex is especially significant in the Watch Dogs series. Players are both afforded and made to participate in the deployment of, and resistance to, a variety of surveillance apparatuses. Watch Dogs was the first videogame to be completely set in a realistic smart city environment (Vanolo, 2016) where CCTV, GPS tracking, and database profiling technologies are ubiquitous (Sadowski and Bendor, 2019). By taking advantage of the networked nature of smart cities, Watch Dogs players can take control of both private infrastructure (e.g. smartphones, cars, ATMs) and public infrastructure (e.g. CCTV cameras, traffic lights, trains).
As Whitson and Simon (2014) have pointed out, the game series illustrates well the known position that the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) has on the use of videogames -- they can be both a tool for, and a threat to, national security. Namely, Whitson and Simon (2014, p. 311) refer to an NSA document, released by whistleblower Edward Snowden that highlights the following uses of games for NSA interests:
Games […] serve multiple functions, including: i) propagandizing and influencing populations, ii) circumventing established communications monitoring methods, iii) military recruiting, iv) military training and simulation, and iv) potentially laundering money and fundraising.
Representations of political issues in the Watch Dogs series are not restricted to hacking culture and surveillance. While racist practices in virtual worlds (see Aguilera, 2022) have already been reported in games like Second Life (Bugeja, 2008; DeWinter & Vie, 2008) and Mafia III (Leonard, 2019; cf. Hammar, 2020a), the fact that racist practices are facilitated by in-game surveillance technologies such as the ‘profiler’ tool is specific to Watch Dogs. Following criticism of the videogames industry’s portrayal of ethnic minorities, the storyline of Watch Dogs 2 (Ubisoft, 2016) engaged with race and identity politics explicitly. Moreover, it did so by drawing on issues with contemporary technological advances (for example, facial recognition and race), employment patterns in the immaterial labour industry (the in-game universe’s Nudle social media and tech megacorporation) and mass surveillance and crime prevention (the ctOS, city-wide operational system). In the Watch Dogs series representations of race and ethnicity have proved controversial and provide a significant example of how players engage in its political dimensions in, and beyond, its virtual world. A controversial feature of the first Watch Dogs (Ubisoft, 2014) is the in-game profiler smartphone app, which allowed players to access personal and sensitive data of non-player characters (NPCs) such as their gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. As Hernandez (2014) noted, the introduction of this app enabled groups of white supremacist players to conduct virtual racist attacks which they shared online via streaming networks. As such, the game represents the problem of surveillance, both by placing the player as the one being monitored and the one that monitors, through a focus on everyday experiences of race, identity, consumer culture and technological advances.
Ideological Symptoms
Early on in the game, as part of the main storyline, the player can participate in a mission titled “Cyberdriver.” Driven by a desire to expand their social media presence and wider reputation, the hackers of DedSec decide to undertake a publicity stunt in which they “take hostage” a famous smart car, part of the in-game famous movie Cyberdriver. The protagonist and avatar, Marcus, is tasked with sneaking into the location where the car is stored ahead of filming. The motivation for this is rooted in an implied politics of visibility -- the trailer for the new film seems to present the fictional show’s protagonist Devon Von Devon in a fight against a hacker organisation called “DeathSekt.” The real hacker collective, DedSec, led by Marcus, consider this attack on their public image as reasonable grounds for the grand theft auto operation. On one level, the hackers consider this a publicity stunt that will get them more followers on social media. On another, they portray it in a public statement as a desire to “teach” the fictional Hook Motion Pictures Company about “real hackers.”
Upon sneaking in and stealing the car, either by stealthily hacking through surveillance cameras and distracting guards or confronting guards head-on in a physical altercation, Marcus drives off with the car while being chased by the police. Marcus is able to hear the police radio who at first seem unsure whether DedSec’s theft is not, in fact, a marketing stunt by the motion picture company. Upon taking off with the car, referred to as the cybercar, the following dialogue takes place:
Cybercar: Powering up. System check. Marcus: Sweet! Let’s roll. Cybercar: Do you feel the need? Marcus: The need for speed! Cybercar: You are not authorised to drive this vehicle. Marcus: Well, I’m authorizing myself motherfucker. Wrench, you hear this? The car’s talking! Cybercar: You face is too dark for my sensors to read. Marcus: What? Bitch, I’m black and I’m proud! Tell your sensors to calibrate that. Cybercar: I have no reference for “black.” Marcus: No, of course you don’t. Marcus: Keep your hands and feet inside the tornado at all times. Cybercar: Hang on to your innards, Devon. Together we will carve up the streets. Marcus: Wait, did you just say a line from the movie. Wrench, you hearing this? Cybercar: I am one nitrous-jacked smart car. Wrench: Wait? Di-did you just say the car quoted the movie? Marcus: Yeah! Wrench: But-- that-- uh! That is so meta! Marcus: I am Devon Von Devon and I -- am Cybercar (interrupting): You are not Devon. Devon Von Devon is handsome and swarthy. You are not. Marcus: Aww, come on! I’m sure as hell swarthier than any dude named Von Devon. Man, Silicon Valley couldn’t hire one brother?! Cybercar: My Galilei creators think of everything. Marcus: Maybe not everything.
There are several significant dimensions to this event. On one level, there are 1980s popular culture tropes being refracted in the contemporary-like near-future of ctOS-controlled San Francisco. Namely, Cyberdriver is a clear reference to NBC’s TV show Knight Rider (1982-86), with its chief protagonist Michael Knight (Devon Von Devon in Watch Dogs 2) and an AI-controlled car under the name of Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT in Knight Rider, CHIP in Watch Dogs 2, both based on the 1982 Pontiac Trans Am). In Knight Rider, the protagonist Michael is a former police officer who is rescued after a near-fatal shot in the face, given plastic surgery and a new name, and provided with the smart car KITT by billionaire Wilton Knight. Michael is then tasked with fighting crime for the billionaire’s “Foundation for Law and Government” with the car as his sidekick. Cyberdriver appears to be more or less the same in themes and form. However, Knight Rider is only one instance of many popular culture representations of mass surveillance technology -- examples include Blue Thunder (1983), a film and show about an LAPD helicopter piloted by a Vietnam vet, who prevents a planned coup d’etat by destroying the machine; Airwolf (1984-1987) focusing on a stealth helicopter; and Street Hawk’s (1985) weapons-equipped motorcycle.
In his overview of the same thematic, Linnemann (2022:122) argues that the spectacular image of efficient crime control in such TV shows had much darker “everyday analogues [which] proved markedly less sophisticated and, indeed, far more horrifying.” Such “everyday analogues” are the actual practices of counterinsurgency and violent, discriminatory policing that the TV shows misrepresent. In this sense, Linnemann’s example can be taken to demonstrate how such TV shows are ideological to the extent that they misrepresent actual crime control measures by providing an imagined solution to the real problem of crime. More than that, in keeping with Jameson’s work on the conspiracy film as “the crystallization of a particular spatial or narrative model of the social totality” (1992, p. 4), a similar point can be made on the abovementioned TV shows and Watch Dogs -- they crystallize a narrative and urban model of technological policing in the framework of what Andrejevic refers to as “environmental surveillance” (2019, p. 87) in the form of the smart city.
With this wider context in mind, Watch Dogs 2’s representation of the smart crime-control car engages with the problematic in the same vein as the abovementioned TV shows. The hackers of DedSec do not buy into the idea that smart cars are the solution to problems of crime, but nevertheless they participate willingly as consumers in the ideological misrepresentation inherent to the trope. It is important to stress that the hackers demonstrate ironic nostalgia that is accepting of the reactionary misrepresentation (in the words of the cut-scene that starts the "Cyberdriver" mission: “Cheesy stunts and bad dialogue we can take. But you’ve insulted our intelligence”), only until it misrepresents them. In this sense, the fight against the misrepresentation at stake in "Cyberdriver" is rendered personal, not explicitly technophobic (cf. Linnemann, 2022, p. 121). Rendering the misrepresentation personal, thereby individualises it and removes it from the wider context of marginalised groups who are vilified in media depictions.
Marcus and DedSec’s reactions to the new trailer present an ideological problem. In the most superficial sense, the trailer itself is an ideological misrepresentation -- of crime, of hackers, of DedSec. With this in mind, one might interpret DedSec’s reaction to be towards the ideological misrepresentation of the trailer. However, the ideological misrepresentation of policing is something that was already present in the series, and something that Marcus and DedSec ostensibly enjoyed with ironic distance. It must be something else then that sparks their reaction and drives them to action -- it is as they say, an insult to the intelligence of DedSec, but it is also more -- it has attacked them by mispresenting them. In what amounts as a manoeuvre, the problem of police ideology in media in general is transformed into a personal slight. As such, it is an individualisation of the problem, albeit on a group level (i.e. DedSec), that thereby displaces the problem.
On another level, the encounter between Marcus and the cybercar appears to be engaging directly with the problem of facial recognition and race. On superficial examination, the first level of the encounter points to the long history of segregation embedded in various forms of technology. Benjamin points to the other side of this invisibility -- racialized minorities' hypervisibility to police surveillance (2019, p. 91). Moreover, directly on the matter of facial recognition, Benjamin highlights that both “the political-geographic setting augments the default setting of Whiteness” (2019, p. 148) and “the ethnoracial makeup of the software design team, the test photo databases, and the larger population of users influences the algorithms’ capacity for recognition” (2019 p. 148). All the while, facial recognition is disproportionately used on African Americans, despite it being especially bad at recognising Black faces (2019, p. 147).
In this sense, the dialogue appears to point to an existing social issue, i.e. a reality outside the videogame, with its own set of causes and material conditions, that is associated with the policing of African Americans. The solution to the problem implied is inclusion, as Marcus proclaims: “Man, Sillicon Valley couldn’t hire one brother?!” As Benjamin herself notes, such exclusion is not only characterised by marginalization, but also an invisible hypervisibility with regards to rendering African Americans as targets of surveillance and policing. In such terms, Benjamin adds (2019, p. 117), “inclusion is no straightforward good but is often a form of unwanted exposure” to even more surveillance and policing. As Schoppmeier notes, “surveillance in Watch Dogs constitutes a form of racialized, but also racializing, surveillance precisely because it operates from a position of whiteness” (2021, p. 6).
Moreover, the explicit acknowledgement of racist technology (itself a product of racism in design) has an ideological function. At first, it portrays the interpersonal encounter of the protagonist with the supposed smart car as one of racism, itself rooted in a deeper lineage of production that reproduces it. However, upon ending the playable part of the mission, a cut-scene is triggered, in which it is revealed to Marcus (and the player) that it was not the car speaking, but another member of DedSec -- Marcus’ friend Wrench. Again, in a similar vein to its treatment of the imaginary technological solutions to crime, the general tone is one of irony and ridicule. The resolution of the problem that the smart car is discriminatory is displaced in a Freudian sense. It is important to clarify -- it is not the case that the game puts forward a critique of racism and that this critique is ineffective. On the contrary, the game successfully displaces the problem of racism in surveillance technology and by doing so successfully misrepresents the reality of the world outside the game. While the illustrative example is of a single mission, this is not purely a matter of narrative. The entirety of the gameplay is constituted by some kind of use, abuse, or modification of surveillance. The magnification of the single mission as focus of analysis should not divert attention away from the multiple forms of surveillance, in which Marcus and DedSec engage continuously and repeatedly. The "Cyberdriver" mission is to be understood as a key with which to unlock the totality of the game’s surveillance-based gameplay: every street CCTV camera, random car, or phone that Marcus hacks into also functions as a repetitive, per Freud, displacement of the unspoken issue of racist surveillance.
Referring to another example by Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1971), we can compare the "Cyberdriver" mission in its capacity as an imaginary representation to Freud’s treatment of dreams. Freud discusses at length the ways in which somatic or psychical stimuli impact the dream content of a person’s dream. Importantly, he argues that dreams are to be understood as wish-fulfilments. He qualifies this further by specifying that dreams also have a dimension of fulfilling the wish to remain dreaming; examples of this include a person dreaming of getting out of bed and going about their day as a way of avoiding doing exactly that. To relate this to Watch Dogs 2, it has already been noted that critiques of the first Watch Dogs game were linked to the game’s handling of race and racism (Hernandez, 2014). In this sense, we can interpret the game’s incorporation of said critique as parallel to the dreamer’s incorporation of stimuli that disturb the dream, in this case the game’s central premise for its gameplay condition, into something that the dream absorbs. While it may appear tendentious to compare videogames with dreams, the point nevertheless stands that the effect on the level of signification is the same. In Watch Dogs 2 critique becomes absorbed into the representational framework of the game. This, however, does not affect the reality of surveillance within the world or much of the narrative. The effect of this is that things remain the same; in ideological terms, the status quo is successfully reproduced. It is in this sense that we can observe the similarity to dreaming -- as Freud notes, the somatic stimulus of thirst gets incorporated into the dream as a way of fulfilling the wish for a drink and a way for letting the dream continue. In the case of Watch Dogs 2, the primary function of incorporating mentions of racism in surveillance and policing functions in the same way -- to keep the player playing the game and to render surveillance unproblematic.
In yet another way, were we to entertain the parallel to dreaming a little longer, this absorption of critique, i.e. its effective pacification, can be understood as a form of censorship. As Freud notes, the psyche’s internal censorship operates on the premise of maintaining equilibrium and ultimately ensuring the protection of the psyche, predominantly from negative affect such as anxiety (Freud, 1971, p. 267). In this sense, the "Cyberdriver" mission example becomes even more poignant as it eventually gets resolved affectively in the form of a joke -- one imagines nervous laughter as an easy escape from the anxiety of having to resolve the contradiction at the heart of this example. Freud has something to contribute on this affective aspect as well; dreams may undergo a variety of displacements, substitutions and sublimations, but the affects remain unaltered (1981, p. 460). As Freud further adds, when discussing matters which fall “under the influence of the censorship imposed by resistance, the affects are the constituent which is least influenced and which alone can give us a pointer as to how we should fill in the missing thoughts” (1981, p. 461). That is to say, the affect of nervous laughter has a clear function of repressing critique; in Althusserian terms, we become witness to “the undivulged event” encountering its necessary constitution as an ideological closure [5]. More than that, this is a symptom of the game’s ludic unconscious, precisely because the signification of the repetitive actions that constitute the gameplay is what is at stake. In this sense, this analysis has only focused on a dialogue as an instance with which to unlock the misprision at the heart of Watch Dogs 2.
The very real problem of race in relation to facial recognition is in the first instance acknowledged, then in the next moment neutralised as being only a joke. In other words, the resolution to the problem is non-existent and merely resolves it in the form of a cut-scene. The joke here can be understood as an affective manoeuvre that: first, seeks to defuse the problem by reframing it as not an actual issue; and second, it displaces it into a narrative of inclusion, what amounts to a false solution. In both ways, the social problem is managed through the narrated joke. In other words, the resolution to the problem is non-existent; it is “papered over,” and the resolution is only in the form of a cutscene. In this sense, the dialogue has an ideological function in the sense that it both raises the problem and then ignores it, thereby displacing it.
There is another dimension to the displacement of racism in surveillance. Namely, while the dialogue quoted above is occurring, the gameplay consists of Marcus driving away in the cybercar, while being chased by police. To put this in other terms, the rendering explicit of racism in facial recognition in particular and surveillance in general is also symbolically underlined by a sequence in which the player controls Marcus, an African American man, driving a stolen car being chased by police. Importantly, both levels of racist policing speak to a hypervisibility that is discriminatory and results in exposure to violence, in the sense of disproportionate over- and under-policing of racial and other marginalised and disenfranchised minorities (Perry, 2006); not the least in the form of their premature death (Gilmore, 2007), debility (Puar, 2017) or incarceration on a mass scale (Rodríguez, 2020).
Leonard (2019, p. 117; cf. Tanya, 2016) takes a different view on this matter and argues that the acknowledgement of racism in the tech world is a challenge to whiteness and is indicative of “the game’s embrace of pleasure in and beyond diversity; there is pleasure in anti-racism and resistance.” For Leonard this is an instance of overcoming “representational color lines” (2019, p. 114) and in essence amounts to a form of “counterrepresentation,” which offers “power and pleasure” (p. 115). Fundamentally, Leonard aptly notes that visibility is powerful and joyful. However, this perspective does not contradict the core of the argument put forward here -- the visibility of representation can actually serve as a displacement of the actual problem that is surveillance in general, and hypersurveillance of minorities in particular. The visibility of Marcus as an African American protagonist also seeks to obscure the ways in which the game does little to engage with racist surveillance, other than in the abovementioned instances. Moreover, the analysis of the single mission can be read as illustrative of dynamics present at the level of gameplay. The repetitive gameplay loop of hacking into, stealing and traversing space with nigh-disembodied virtual omnipotence -- the repetitive tasks of gameplay amount to a hypervisibility of surveillance as empowering, liberating and politically radical. In this sense, the exclusively gameplay dimension of the game also displaces the problem of surveillance as one to do with who does it.
It is my argument that the cumulative effect of the case analysed here, treating the instance of dialogue as representative of the larger treatment of surveillance and resistance within Watch Dogs 2, is one of normalising the problems it acknowledges. As such, Watch Dogs 2 is ideological in its maintenance of the status quo, and thus instrumental to its reproduction. I claim that Watch Dogs 2 works as a representational structure that ironizes challenges to the status quo, thereby suppressing them and simultaneously reifying a need for countersurveillance and visibility. It is in this sense that I posit the notion of the ludic unconscious -- best understood as the dynamic relation between latent and manifest significations in narrative and gameplay. In the case of this analysis, I have sought to demonstrate that the meaning of the repetitive gameplay within Watch Dogs 2 can actually be found in the ideological displacements at the level of the game’s narrative. More than that, this treatment of the "Cyberdriver" mission as the “different text” (Althusser, 2016 p. 8) to the gameplay’s constitutive repetitive actions, also impacts the subsequent understanding of Watch Dogs 2’s gameplay as a whole. That is to say, every act of surveillance committed by Marcus (and DedSec) amounts to a displacement of the contradictions inherent to surveillance in the vein of what has been revealed in the "Cyberdriver" mission.
This insight can be taken further if placed in relation to the game’s implicit understanding of politics as reliant on an idealisation of knowledge as a driver for political action. This is evident in the sense that most of DedSec’s goals are to do with the revelation of a hidden truth, which is expected to be condemned upon revelation. Once the game’s central conflict is revealed to be between DedSec’s Marcus and Dusan, Blume Corporation’s CTO, the hacker collective’s interventions are two-pronged. First, they feature some kind of hacking mission, usually breaking and entering, stealing information or gaining access to some proprietary system. Second, the stolen information or uncovered network of conspiracy is then revealed publicly in the form of a video on social media. Notably, such “advisory” videos end with “DedSec has given you the truth. Do what you will.” The game’s engagement with racism can be understood in the same vein -- it merely renders racism in technology, surveillance and police violence visible, without addressing the determinate historical contexts that produce it. In a sense, this also can be understood as a displacement of sorts as the true meaning of the action is rendered not in terms of its product -- the revelation of what has been hidden -- but in a nebulous “do what you will.” The implication here is clearly one of political action, but the game’s entire mapping of political action in gameplay is hacking and surveillance. In such a sense, surveillance is presented as both the pretext for political action, the means, and the effect of it. This amounts to a circular depiction, in which the meaning of surveillance is always somewhere else, in what Althusser (2016, p. 8) would refer to “a different text,” never in the practice itself.
This is further compounded by the broader context of Watch Dogs 2’s gameplay. On one hand, the political activism of the DedSec hacker group is gamified into a question of popularity. The experience points that Marcus collects as the player levels up their avatar are in essence the increase of followers on the in-game social media app. There is a supposed diegetic reason for this -- the hackers use the collective computing power of the devices of their followers. However, on a symbolic level, this manifests as equating publicity with political power. Even more so, as Marcus gets more experience, he gets more hacking powers and tools, ultimately amounting to putting publicity, political power and surveillance power in parallel to each other.
This is interesting as the game’s wider narrative arc seems to incorporate a challenge to this in the form of an immanent critique. Namely, as the main narrative of the game progresses, Marcus and DedSec continuously clash with Dusan, the CTO of Blume Corp, responsible for the introduction of ctOS in San Francisco and beyond. Dusan recurrently thwarts Marcus’ plans and even manages to take advantage of most, if not all disruptions caused by DedSec, for his own recruitment discourse that solidifies ctOS hegemony as “the answer” to the security threat posed by hackers. In essence, Dusan illustrates the wider aspects of pacification beyond policing such as the utilisation of fearmongering (covertly supporting DedSec in order to then use them as bogeyman) in order to promote an idea of security that his company can deliver. Importantly, this echoes the already introduced military-industrial complex -- Dusan’s covert goal is by recruiting companies, through the tactics of spreading fear of hackers, to acquire their data and then profit off it; more than that, Dusan is often portrayed as working closely with the FBI to the point of ordering them around. As the game’s narrative progresses, it is revealed that Dusan’s masterplan is ”the Bellweather program,” what one senior member of DedSec, Ray, describes as: “The Bellwether program is control; […] Profiling, media manipulation, corporate collusion, consumerism, all driven by predictive algorithms.”
It is important to note that the exaggeration of Dusan as a mastermind villain has the effect of displacing the apparent critique of surveillance. First, it individualises the problem of surveillance in the face of Dusan, thus rendering him the exceptional villain who is misusing the technology. This individualisation is mirrored in the form of Marcus, who albeit a member of a collective, is again an individualised hero. And second, surveillance becomes embroiled in a larger network of corruption that thereby takes attention away from the problems of surveillance.
This undermining of the apparent critique of surveillance can be discerned on the level of gameplay. As already noted, Watch Dogs 2 offers a range of hacking possibilities -- the avatar is capable of 3D-printing a variety of drones, hacking into traffic lights, smart street bollards, even unmanned cars, forklifts, cranes and so on. The avatar is also capable of gathering relatively insignificant amounts of information, such as income information, criminal records, text messages, or other personal details, about every non-playable character (NPC) encountered in the game via the “profiler” tool. On one hand, Marcus himself is a surveillance apparatus that continuously scans others, both devices and people, collects information and identifies networks and their weak points. On the other hand, the avatar is capable of subverting the surveillance system for his own benefit, virtually transforming surveillance from a defensive technology into an offensive one. The player, via the avatar, is able to traverse giant server farms as a disembodied presence. The feeling of playing as Marcus has been described by Webster (2019) as:
At its best, Watch Dogs 2 makes you feel like an all-powerful ghost. Often I was able to complete a mission while barely being physically present […] away from the violence. It’s incredibly satisfying being able to casually stroll into a building and grab whatever you need, while the building’s security force has already been defeated before you walk in the door.
This near-omnipotence is yet another undermining of the apparent critique of surveillance. If surveillance is so problematic, how can it be so fun?
In his Foucauldian study of Victorian novels, The Novel and the Police, DA Miller (1988) describes a similar effect, albeit in a different context. In the context of the Victorian novel, Miller highlights the phenomenon of displacement typical of detective fiction -- the manner in which policing broadly speaking, and detection more particularly, in the Victorian novel is something undertaken not only by the police, but also by a proliferation of characters and simultaneously by the logic of the novel’s narration itself. One such displacement that Miller demonstrates is the way in which the function of detection, in this case of surveillance, passes from the professional to the amateur. A similar manoeuvre can be identified in the form of Marcus and DedSec.
An interesting dimension to the dynamic of surveillance and countersurveillance in the videogame is the way in which it demarcates a domain of contestation. On one side, there is the professional surveillance apparatus of ctOS and on the other are the amateurs of DedSec, such as Marcus. In a sense, the opposition between Marcus’ DedSec and Dusan’s Blume ctOS manifests as a symmetry. This symmetry has a productive dimension, as it configures a space of its own -- the dynamic designates an inside space of contestation, that is largely invisible to the larger public, and an outside space, usually represented as the wider public (with the connotation of visibility). This delineation of space thus has a productive effect in the sense that it generates a closed circuit, whose boundaries are only traversable through its own logic of surveillance i.e. the revelation of what has remained invisible. In this sense, the larger point looms that the game itself is premised on the logic of surveillance -- the surveillance that permeates the game, the critiques over Dusan’s use of it, or the counterexamples of DedSec -- all serve to reinforce the larger domain of surveillance as necessary and ubiquitous. Put more concretely, the countersurveillance of DedSec is rendered necessary, as the central point of the narrative is that Dusan’s machinations are hidden and thus need to be uncovered. Extrapolating from this, the implication might be taken to mean that certain kinds of power are inherently unknowable unless put under surveillance. The game seems to recurrently revisit the point that what is visible might not be the whole picture. In this sense, surveillance becomes a much more profound matter -- not just about seeing what is happening, but also about being able to discern the core of the matter behind what is visible. It is in this sense that the narrative manoeuvre to criticise and strike at the core of the problem of surveillance, displaces the problem and thereby disperses it. Everyone should do surveillance, if they do not want to be left powerless in the dark.
Conclusion
To conclude, I would refer to another example in which the struggle against surveillance, its resistance is manifested in Watch Dogs 2. From the first introductory mission, Marcus encounters his profile within ctOS’ database -- in addition to his unemployed status, race, gender and age, it marks him as “threat probability 82%” and includes his search history and criminal record. Marcus deletes the latter, thereby reducing his “threat probability” to 42%. Ultimately, he deletes his entire profile in the database. However, this is shown to be an incomplete picture. The revisiting of this profile happens throughout the game’s narrative. Following numerous conflicts with Dusan, Marcus’ profile gets reinstated at one point, and at another, before the final confrontation, Marcus is even put on Homeland Security’s most wanted list.
To come back full circle, both the gameplay and the narrative of Watch Dogs 2 are premised on repetition as a way of displacing the core contradiction of visibility/invisibility in regard to surveillance. On narrative level, Marcus continuously seeks to restore his status as invisible, while also uncovering Dusan’s invisible conspiracies. On gameplay level, surveillance is the core of the gameplay loop thereby making the breaking of the visible/invisible divide entertaining. At its core, this is the case with the single mission analysed above -- the making visible of an invisible reality, racism, is at first presented as a serious matter, only to be dismissed. While there is a critique of surveillance on the narrative level, as outlined in the dialogue analysed above, the gameplay’s repetitive loop pacifies this. In this sense, the potential critique put forward, whether on race, technological solutions to crime, surveillance and its abuse, is displaced on the level of the narrative, thus preventing any actual resolution. The closest thing resembling a resolution, either on narrative or gameplay level, is irony. More than that, the ultimate effect of the videogame’s representation of surveillance is one of normalisation.
It has been this essay’s argument that videogames are ideological. In effect, the ludic unconscious is a notion rooted in ideology, that posits videogames as dynamic entities; it seeks to capture the ways in which 1) videogames necessitate political interpretation; 2) videogames are products of determinate historical and social contexts; 3) videogames repress, displace and sublimate the real contradictions of the historical and social contexts in which they are produced. To make this point, I have taken Freud’s insistence on repetition as inherent to the drive towards play, Jameson’s argument that texts possess an ideological, “political unconscious,” and Althusser’s claim that ideology is best understood as the means by which society is reproduced through interwoven processes of subjectivity and the practices that constitute them. Taking all of these influences together, I have proposed the notion of the ludic unconscious in order to capture the way in which repetitive gameplay elements interweave a game’s narrative in relation to actual social and political problems outside their circumscribed world of representation. The ludic unconscious was demonstrated to be the key to unlocking the myriad impasses, contradictions and tensions within Watch Dogs 2’s representation of surveillance in both narrative and gameplay. In particular, I have sought to demonstrate how the contradictions that arise at the intersection of gameplay and narrative, sometimes at the overlap of those two dimensions of the game, are not necessarily resolved, but instead displaced, sublimated or repressed. In this sense, videogames are understood as active ideological apparatuses that reproduce one’s imaginary relationship to real conditions of existence.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Leonardo Sandoval Guzman for his help on an early analysis of Watch Dogs 2 and the many conversations, without which this essay would have been much the poorer.
Endnotes
[1] The Althusserian view of ideology (1969) would posit that any person at any given point in time is constituted by ideology -- that is, one is already implicated in an imaginary relationship to “their real conditions of existence” -- it is this imaginary relationship that is the basis on which a person determines an appropriate course of action.
[2] This should not imply that I see narrative and gameplay as distinct. A better framing of my approach is one based in cybernetics, where both narrative and gameplay can be understood as autonomous, but related systems that are structurally coupled. The two systems interact in numerous ways, and importantly the limits of one impact the limits and expressions of the other. This posits videogames as dynamic entities, whose capacity to represent is not solely premised on the game’s narrative, for example, nor is their capacity for action and/or interaction solely premised on gameplay. The two systems work in tandem, exchange information, constraints and capacities. To illustrate, imagine a hypothetical gameplay that consists of combat. The meaning of the ludic element of combat is not solely determined by the system we term “gameplay.” Rather, it is also determined by narrative conventions both within the gameworld and significations outside it. To wit, it matters whether one combats a police officer or a criminal, it also matters who one plays as -- a police officer or a criminal. But those are solely signifiers that are largely determined by real world networks of meaning. However, the signifier of the enemy also has a local meaning that is determined on the level of the narrative. The implication of this position is that an analysis of a purely ludic element -- i.e. combat -- will be incomplete, especially so in an ideological sense were it to ignore the layers of signification. The same logic has been applied to the subject of surveillance throughout this essay.
[3] As Barthes has noted, in a discussion of photography, such a list would be a naïve analysis, precisely because such enumerations of contents lack any power to explain (1977, p. 37). My analysis, in the form of the notion of the ludic unconscious, is concerned with the medium-specific, that is to say ludic, unconscious of the game in question, Watch Dogs 2, in terms of its treatment of surveillance and its underlying contradictions, mainly racism.
[4] It is important to stress that ideological here means imaginary in the sense of a representation. This representation is constitutive of one’s relation to their own subjectivity, their actions, ideas about the world, and subsequently their way of being in the world (Althusser, 2020). Elsewhere, I have referred to this as an affective relation (Rizov, 2026). In yet another sense, this duality of ideology (both image and practice that constitute subjectivity), as well as the noted duality of videogames as both constituted by gameplay and narrative, can be understood in the framework of overdetermination (Althusser, 1969).
[5] In the framework of formal literary analysis, the example of the "Cyberdriver" mission could be understood as a modified recognition scene, in which a narrative’s subjectivity is made to reckon with the conditions of its constitution (see Parker, 2024).
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