Legible Bodies and the Ghosts of American History: On Racialized Surveillance in Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs Videogames

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This article reads Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs, a series of open-world videogames, through and against the entangled histories of race and surveillance in the United States. Drawing especially on recent research at the intersections of STS (science and technology studies) and CRT (critical race theory), several aspects of the videogames’ fictional world, game mechanics, plot, and visual and procedural representation are scrutinized. The first two Watch Dogs titles, I argue, both erase the realities of racializing surveillance in their conceptualization and simulation of a contemporary American surveillance society and prominently feature characters who embody the painful histories and the enduring present of racializing surveillance in the United States in several ways. These two opposing representations ultimately reproduce the racializing logics of contemporary digital surveillance as well as its lineage in American history in the ways that both whiteness and Blackness organize the operation of surveillance in the Watch Dogs franchise.