Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Watch_Dogs.

Hacking is an activity that has long captivated writers and the public because the aesthetics of the pursuit match the ends to which it's often used. Hacking is about breaking the limitations of software, often while remaining undetected by computer security, and it's used in fiction by counterculturalists working from the shadows, busting out of the cages society has put them. The task provides a classic example of rebels using the tools of the powerful against them, turning technological empires back on their owners and funders. And it's a test of the characters: they need keen observation of a target's vulnerabilities, caution, and a toolbox of high tech gadgetry. Or if you're Watch_Dogs 1, hacking is a kind of modernised magic that must be kept at arm's length so that it doesn't risk syphoning attention away from the market-tested action.

Watch_Dogs is a quasi-cyberpunk open-world crime game where how we apply our head for hacking changes considerably from scenario to scenario. When on foot, we can hit "X" to activate certain hackable objects in the environment to distract enemies or sometimes stun them. This tees us up to slink past them or dispose of them with a quick headshot. Although it's tougher to go around an enemy than through them and it wins us no additional rewards, so most players end up going for the violent approach. When driving, hacking lets us blow open sewer drains and create multi-car pileups to throw off pursuers. Then there are the minigames which involve jumping between CCTV cams and rewiring circuitry in abstract cyberspace.

While this game is ostensibly about being a hacker, in the third-person shooter sections, the hacking feels supplemental to the shooting and sneaking which are the real cores of the play. What we're primarily concerned about while on-foot is reaching our checkpoints and overcoming any enemies that might try to stand in our way. While breaking guards' or gang members electronics can help us towards that goal, it's the use of the movement and firing mechanics which lets us complete it. We can go entire fights without hacking, but we can't go entire fights without firing our weapon or moving. What's more, the moving and shooting take up far more of our time than the hacking does and offer us more choice in how we solve problems. What Aiden Pearce's hacking skills can do in any one scene is down to what objects the designers have placed in our surroundings, but each of those objects only has a single pre-defined way in which we can interact with it. For all these reasons, the pedestrian hacking comes off as far from fundamental to the play.

During driving, the cracking of computer systems plays more of a key role because, like the shooting, it can directly disable enemies. However, it's still the piloting of the vehicles that puts distance between us and our pursuers, and which gets us to the geographical goals. What's more, hacking while in a vehicle typically consists of obediently hitting "X" whenever the game tells us; creativity and strategy are simply not a factor in how we deploy it. The on-road hacking is limited in this way because, as when on-foot, we must face a target and press "X" to trigger its effects, but when you're rushing past your targets at highway speed, it's a lot harder to aim at them. It's also difficult to drive safely along the road ahead of you while immobilising cops or gangsters behind you because you can't look forwards and backwards simultaneously. So the game makes it a little easier for us: Auto-targeting enemies whenever they're on top of a hazard and just letting us hit the button to deliver the strike. The system is markedly shallower than the driving itself.

We can view the difference in depth between the hacking mechanics and other systems from the perspective of control design. Systems like shooting or driving often use multiple buttons on the controller in conjunction, along with the sticks which can we can move into a multitude of different positions. As controller inputs in games translate into actions in the play, a wealth of controller inputs dedicated to single systems translates into a wealth of overlapping actions that can be performed with those systems, creating depth. On the other end of the spectrum, a lack of input methods focused on a system means that system provides you with very few actions in any given scenario.

Watch_Dogs director Jonathan Morin explained that he and his team made a very deliberate decision to tie all hacking in the game to a single button, ensuring the mechanic would be simple for the player to apply to driving, shooting, and other standard activities of the GTA-like genre. By doing so, Morin and his team ended up with a very narrow hacking system, whereas the driving and shooting systems offer the player a lot more creative space to experiment in. This doesn't just mean that the hacking is tiresome and feels tacked-on, but also that in this experience, it fails to evoke those feelings of freedom and subversion that hacking is meant to represent. The narrative of the game raises the question of what a hacker could do if they had access to any phone or any PC in a city and suggests that they'd use them to whatever end they want, but in the play, there's no question of what to do when you hack into any of these appliances: What you'll do has already been decided by the designer because it's whatever verb they've mapped to "X" for that object.

By letting showboating, brute force action come first and having the computer trickery play second fiddle to it, Watch_Dogs also fails to embody the characteristics of hacking that we looked at above. The play is not cautious or covert; it's uninhibited and explosive, and it's not about cool high-tech hardware either: Aiden launches all his hacks from a standard smartphone. While detractors criticised Watch_Dogs for cloning the already overused open-world design of Assassin's Creed, it also deserves a slap on the wrist for continuing that series' grift of convincing you that you're a shadowy stealth agent and then turning a blind eye to your highly obvious and inelegant methods of operation. Worse, the gameplay fails to put you in the underdog posture from which hacking is meant to be performed.

There's this moment near the end of the game that stuck with me. Awaiting your arrival, the villain Lucky Quinn hides behind a screen of bulletproof glass. He expects you to blow him away like the typical hero at the conclusion of a violent thriller film, and instead, Aiden subverts his expectations by breaching his pacemaker's software and stopping his heart. It displays the spooky power of hacking to topple the powerful even when they're holed up in fortresses purchased with their ill-gotten gains. The scene ironically sees a drain on society destroyed by the very technology that sustained him.

From the moment I saw that scene, that was the Watch_Dogs I wished we'd gotten. Hackers are the underdogs because they use their intelligence to succeed even when the enemy is strictly more powerful than them, and for once, that was true of Aiden. But the rest of the time, he comes out on top because the power is on his side. He's got all the guns and ammunition he needs to take on an army and so it's hard to see him as someone sniping upward at the elite. But just as Watch_Dogs 2 does much better at giving us characters, framing, and dialogue that convey rebellion from below, so its hacking is also more about playing the oppressed renegade.

Watch_Dogs 2 is an open-world hacker in content where Watch_Dogs 1 was an open-world hacker in name only. That is not to say that this follow-up accurately simulates the process of hacking, but it doesn't need to to communicate the spirit of it. If the base concepts behind hacking are discreteness, hardware, and observation, then all a game needs to do to make the player feel like a hacker is to implement play with these characteristics, something that can be viably done over the open-world crime skeleton. Let's look at where the traits mentioned above show up in Watch_Dogs 2's play:

A reduced health pool means that we're less likely to engage enemies directly, making us cautious. When we can only take a few bullets, it's not a smart idea to attract a lot of armed guards with noisy gunfire. Of course, this gives us the motivation to play stealthily, but we also need the methods to do it. You'll notice that the guarded locations in Watch_Dogs 2 are more opened out than those of the original game. While action titles have more linear routes to force us to confront our opposition, stealth games give us many paths through enemy territory to allow us room to sneak past foes. Then there are our discrete tools of the trade like the taser, a weapon which shows our protagonist, Marcus Holloway, cares about not leaving evidence at the scene of the crime, something less true of Aiden. Marcus also carries two high-tech drones: the RC Jumper and the Quadcopter.

Unlike our protagonist, these drones cannot fire a gun and can be destroyed by as little as a well-aimed pebble. That's not as much of a limitation for the Quadcopter which can fly silently over enemies, but our Quad also can't perform any hacks which require hands-on manipulation of a device, only Marcus and the RC Jumper can. So when infiltrating an area, we often run through the steps that a hacker might when breaking into a network. First, we observe patterns and weaknesses in enemy defences (using the Quad); then we quietly cut through those defences with a tool that's hard to spot (the RC Jumper). The combination of vulnerability and disposability that we get with our drones means that there's little genuine danger when we lose one and so we aren't sweating bullets in any of the missions, but it gives us a stealth challenge that even casual players can find manageable. The difference between Watch_Dogs 1 and Watch_Dogs 2 is frequently the difference between a hammer and a scalpel.

You'll also notice that the rewiring minigame now visually projects junctions and power supplies onto the surrounding environment. In Watch_Dogs 2, circuitry exists as part of the skin of facilities rather than in some featureless non-space. The designers use this minigame more sparingly, and the camera minigame is virtually gone. We also now get more options when hacking on-foot because this time we're opening a menu of possible actions for every object we profile instead of just receiving a single prompt for them. We may still be stuck with one-button hacking while in a car, but this is far less of an issue as we can fast-travel to almost anywhere in the city, and so spend less time forced into making calls from behind a windshield.

The hacking is not perfect. Most of the manipulable items still have a single primary function, and the other cracks you can perform on them are merely lead-ins for that function. e.g. With most hackables that can stun or kill foes, you can also hack them in a way that lures enemies towards them or arms them in anticipation of a guard wandering into their vicinity, but in the end, it all comes back to "stun" or "kill". Something else to keep in mind: If you collect enough research points, you can upgrade the drones to be able to carry and drop up to five explosive charges or shock devices. Once you've done that, you can pulverise whole rooms of guards by just flying your Qudracopter above foes, dropping charges, and arming them in mid-air. It means a reduction in the subtle, hushed actions which made you feel like a covert operator. Still, even in those scenarios, the drones do reproduce hacking's themes of anonymity and distance from your targets. Plus, when you do have to go loud, it's more consistent with the public persona of the new protagonist.

To summarise, how core a theme feels to a game depends on how much time we spend using the mechanics that represent that theme, how fleshed out those mechanics are, and how directly they help us achieve our objectives. What's more, mechanics need not be directly representative of a task to be thematically appropriate: they just need to evoke the themes and emotions of that task. The mechanical modifications Watch_Dogs 2 makes to its series' formula are proof of how injecting more power, openness, and thematic consistency into the mechanics that represent your themes gets you a game that owns its personality. Thanks for reading.