See, I really appreciate the landscape here. The city post-apocalypse but not of the zombie kind (because let's be honest here, the Last of Us had vibes of this but swapped out a lot of humans for former-people who are now fungus and gave the cities much longer to be "reclaimed") has a really haunted deserted tone.
This is, in areas, a place to dread when no one is even there. This is the fog of a Silent Hill made of night snowstorms and the potential for anything to be out there but actually the horror is the body bags peeking out of the snow as you walk past. This is a virtual space in great need of a camera mode.
I've actually thought a lot about this too. It's kind of a shame that so much of the nuanced storytelling in The Division is so ancillary to what you're actually doing in the game. Here's a cellphone recording where someone who thinks she's about to die takes what might be her last chance to call her mom and open up about being gay. Here's a recording where a dad calls his daughter who's trapped in New York and tries to make sure she feeds their honeybee colony, because he's not just worried about today, he's also looking toward the future. Here's a series of ECHO recordings where we see that someone at a pharmaceutical company was ready to blow the whistle on her employer, who may have been much closer to a cure to the Dollar Flu than anyone realized, but withholding it for a profit motive.
And as you point out, a lot of the experience of running around a deserted, infected NYC is delivered by the environment design--maybe even the majority of it. Body bags, viral contamination tents, abandoned vehicles and disaster relief infrastructure give you a glimpse of what it was like before you showed up with the Division's second wave.
And yet the story that YOU play, as a Division agent, is just something you experience behind a gun barrel, with all the problems that come along with that, which Heather outlines in the article and we've all been discussing here.
And sometimes that horror does map well to the combat and what it says about a person with a badge and the right to kill anyone they see. A bit of that is thanks to the setting (which is also somewhat refreshing for an RPG as it's not fantasy/faux history humans or scifi - those seem to be the two genres you can set your RPG in to get a crowded setting off the bat) but it also wouldn't go away with a palette swap.
Just mapping this to SciFi? There is no genre that is typically more loaded with metaphor than SciFi. We may not immediately feel the same discomfort if this was given a SciFi sheen but it's not as if the commentary it makes would have gone anywhere if they'd done that. Halo is still about marines taking on a diverse religious group, even if those marines are "United Nations Space Command" not USMC. The phrase "alien enemies entirely devoid of humanity and undeserving of sympathy" isn't restricted to SciFi, it's in half of Trump's speeches.
You're absolutely not wrong, and I didn't mean to imply that science fiction stories are devoid of parallels to the real human condition. I'm a big consumer of sci-fi tales myself! The point I intended to make is that, correctly or incorrectly, we'd be much less likely to have a discussion on a game website about the ethics of what a Division agent does if the Division were a group killing Locust grunts in the aftermath of Emergence Day, rather than a group of humans killing people in New York City in a near future scenario the game posits as at least somewhat plausible.
What makes me facepalm the hardest when it comes to the story and setting in The Division is how much more easily we'd all be able to swallow it whole if it wasn't set in the real world. A perfectly competent third-person cover shooter where you shoot enemies and numbers pop off and you find loot and level up--mechanically, that's what The Division is. But instead of being set in outer space, with heroes battling alien enemies entirely devoid of humanity and undeserving of sympathy, you play as a regular person who left a job at the gas station and picked up an assault rifle to go kill hundreds and hundreds of human beings.
Whoever pitched this game at Ubisoft sure laid out an unenviable task for the scenario writers. If you look closely at what's actually happening in the game, for even a brief moment, it's just totally outrageous. I can't help but imagine this kind of criticism just wouldn't even be happening if Ubi had published "third-person Destiny" rather than what we're playing now.
Huge fan of this article. I dive back into DF every 2-3 years and get sucked in for a month or so. It's always a pain to relearn the game, but it's always a rewarding experience, for all the reasons you've expertly relayed here.
Gotta agree with @cautionman about Mieville's Bas-Lag series--the world is fascinating, but not presented in a masturbatory, look-how-creative-I-can-be fashion. What matters is what's happening to the people in the story. Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council all make you turn pages feverishly, not simply because you want to see another unique thing that exists in the world Mieville has imagined, but also because you have to know what happens next. It's a mixture that I like to believe a lot sci-fi and fantasy authors shoot for, but many fall short.
To anyone sounding the refrain of "I wish this was something I could do", rejoice: in this era of Skype and Roll20, anyone can do it.
30 years ago, the aspiring tabletop RPG player was constrained by the limits of geography and personnel. You only knew so many people, and if your family and friend groups didn't include enough players interested in trying out a game, you could only drive so far to a game shop to look for the like-minded. But nowadays there are many (free!) tools available to connect you to an RPG group and help run your game online.
Just search for folks using the web to organize a game you're interested in playing, download whatever they're using to connect, and jump in!
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