I think one of the interesting notes about the general critical coverage of the Division [so I'm talking broadly, rather than specifically GB coverage] has been that many USian writers have focussed on the story's premise and execution with a very US-centric eye. Detailed discussion of the constitution and viewing the violence in that light.
Of course, this means that the criticism can be read as even more tone-deaf than the story (which is the typical pro-military/might, generally Right-wing/Libertarian tale of dominance via force) it criticises. It's hard to read (as someone born anywhere other than the US) "but they're US soldiers killing civilians!" and the like in some of the criticisms of this game without a super o_O response.
Ye, that's what they're paid to do. We see it literally every day in the real world. Both via guns and bombs. That's the way the largest military force on the planet operates - lists of people to be assassinated and the surrounding people listed as "of potential combatant age" unless proven to be civilian casualties. This is how villages of unarmed people are left cratered. This is how MSF hospitals are ignited. This is the face of the non-wartime combat all over the globe where the US is not at war with the nation in which it does this killing.
Suddenly those civilians are USians and everything changes. People are putting down the controller and worrying about the messages in their games. Yes, it also resonates to the real world police issues but post-apocalyptic worlds where there are military forces "bringing order" after a disaster (right down to the specifics of "continuity of government") seems a lot more to be commentary on the global conflicts than the US. And we all know how most Western media paint this: the US troops (even from many media groups who are Western but not from the US) are heroes and that's the end of it. Drone strikes are just part of a "justified" war on terrorists.
I think the game sure has issues, but maybe the angle to engage it with is less US-centric (certainly when critics talk about US constitutional law, it seems to be grasping for an angle we already hear far more of than we need to). We are talking about a story where the big bad is more US military. Whose back-story for why they are the big bad is they're you, but got in first. They got left for dead by the retreating support lines. As you uncover the details that build out the world it is made incredibly clear what the first wave saw (and, we suppose, what your other agents would be seeing that are missed from this shooter-heavy protagonist story) and had to do that broke them, even before the rug was pulled from under them. If "the good guys" are rather simple*, the fact that "the bad guys" are the exact same crew but just after time, I'd posit is a message that right now you may think you're the good guys. In 3 months this story would be about how the 2nd wave defeated the 1st wave but then took over with an equally dystopian stranglehold on the area, trapped without support to "do what is necessary". We even see the DZ as where division agents go to avoid consequences to killing each other to get their hands on the better gear.
Anyway, I think there is actually a lot to mine out of this game and the various fragments of stories told in the setting. I'm only going to thoroughly do that myself once I've found every collectible and constructed every one of those fragments. For now, I've burned through 60 hours of the game and will give the setting a break. In a couple of months I'll be going back in to uncover every one of those stories because so far the ones I've found paint a pretty detailed picture. It's not amazing story-telling, but the Division definitely seems to get a lot more criticism for the military setting than basically every game that has come before it using a similar premise (with similar often being "but not US soil").
* Edit: yes, an argument for the blackness of satire that is in the eyes of the reader and not necessarily even hinted at directly in the authorial intent.
@anytus2007: Thanks, I didn't know how those laws were implemented in the US. That makes more sense now. I can now see how federal law pushes this split by how they constrain unions to act as bargaining groups beyond their actual membership.
It does seem a bit weird that this (creates a free-rider problem) is considered such an big issue. But then you've got so much money in politics there that I guess the unions might get in on the act and so be something other than a cheap operation (if money is strictly limited in politics then a [non-million-member] union pays for a meeting room to hear the workers, a few executives to part-time it, and maybe some legal advice to ensure everything in negotiations is going ok - dues should be pennies and lack of full membership should not be a major issue). Which would create the feeling that those not paying but getting good working conditions were avoiding expensive political intervention on their behalf.
Oh, also a less restricted legal framework for worker rights so the union fighting for a good deal would be winning significantly more rights than say a European* union where months of maternity and paternity leave, state healthcare, working-time directive (how long you can work), workplace health and safety regulations, the right to request flexi-time and so on would not necessarily be part of a negotiated package. Unions exist specifically to even the bargaining table between the company and an individual worker with a small effect, rather than being the only way to guarantee enough clout to get access to centrally-funded healthcare or a guarantee of paid maternity leave. That different climate probably influenced how important unions were and are to workers (and why there would be benefit for some from trying to break them).
* not to say there are no variations in working conditions and legal rights by region here - it's meant to be a single market with free-movement of labour and so roughly equivalent worker rights but some states do push beyond the common minimum (not all countries match, for example, some Nordic policies on parental leave).
@modiika: I mean, the U.S., Australia, and Canada certainly have no link to EU law (although they are technically failing to uphold the United Nations Charter by ignoring implementation of the UDHR - as you say, it's all politics but theoretically they are members of the UN and commit to uphold the foundational documents of the organisation). But the UK is not only bound by national legislation to implement the ECHR (very relevant to many high profile cases in the supreme court) but was the country that wrote it. The ECHR was drafted by a British lawyer after WWII as the foundation for the Council of Europe that the UK was establishing to prevent another European war. The UK may not have been an early member of the EU, but the ECHR is a Council of Europe thing so the UK got in on that on the ground floor. It is very much legally binding (although open to legal arguments over how it should be interpreted).
@benladen: I think some elements of it are quite theoretical, but the abstract concept of rights does map more directly than you think to this conflict of interests in how law is developed (but hearing how you do or don't think they line up in practice is exactly what I was interested in finding out). The right to work in the declaration, while not the right to pick any job, is the right to get a job without discrimination (which is expanded upon in the other parts) and to be fairly and evenly paid for the work done. That does conflict with a union blocking access to a job - a job that should be openly tendered: offered to anyone willing to do the work and given to the person the employer believes is best capable of doing it at a agreed rate they negotiate.
This somewhat abstract concept of the right to work, when expanded beyond the language of the declaration, does mean that restricting access to offer to work is something that has to be strongly justified (for example: we probably should be ok with the state requiring some formal qualification for anyone repairing critical equipment in nuclear power plants - they can step in and force the employer and potential employee to satisfy them before taking on that work rather than leaving it to the cheapest bidder the employer is happy to pay). At least that's how we were taught to interpret it.
Thank you for explaining about various local cases (the Gov. Scott Walker case was one I remember reading about). It's certainly showing that there is a lot of complexity here. As you say, there's a lot of history and current politics here and movement to remove unions (which modiika also talked about some reasons how local government can get local support to push through possibly because of what has been seen as monopoly positions).
Also thanks to @ian_williams, who I forgot to thank earlier for the article. Great stuff, really glad GB is keeping a range of topics covered with the guest slots.
@zaldar: Hi, I was using it as an example. I know not every country has signed up to it as legally binding - I even explicitly mentioned I was dropping it in as a generic statement to act as a jumping off point for something I understand many Americans don't have much education about. This seemed preferable to explicitly talking about the local laws where I live and getting a potential response of "but that is some weird foreign legal document". It's an easy thing to quote before discussing the sort of conflict that exists in all these types of declarations. That was the point of my post, to spur some responses from people in the US about their local laws and how they effectively balance the 1st and 4th part of Article 23 (even if not to directly implement it as law but simply to deal with how you create functional worker rights legislation). I'd love if you used your training in law to actually engage with the question I bolded at the end of my post to share your knowledge of local US union laws, make a constructive contribution rather than just complaining about people daring to quote a human rights declaration about the different worker rights in a thread about unions.
The specific declaration I was taught with was from the European Convention on Human Rights which is technically law (at least guidance - I'm talking about how two different clauses actually oppose each other in my post so clearly there are several interpretations) for everyone who has signed up to the Council of Europe. I wasn't "proving" anything by quoting the UN declaration - I was explicitly using it to ask questions about the local laws you have that I don't know the details of (because I am curious about how the right of the individual worker are balanced with the right of the union collective elsewhere where the ECHR is not part of the law with the interpretation I've given for how it is balanced where I live).
There seem to be several broad legislative options (including but possibly not limited to) which we can discuss with reference to the UDHR:
A23.1 not .4: right to work, no right to unions at all.
A23.4 not .1: right to unionise, unions can block people's right to work.
A23.1 above .4: right to unionise unless it interferes with right to work (potentially with professional bodies used to restrict some jobs by qualification).
None of these right to work or unionise.
But maybe my view of how things are (with power to unions somewhat limited, a completely separate class of the professional body, and even the idea of those broad categories above) is limited by my upbringing under the ECHR. Which is why I'm interested in the US perspective. If this is a framework you're familiar with, what sort of laws do your various states implement (am I right to say broadly you fall into option 1 or 2 above or are many states operating something similar to 3)?
[The above is written with what may be a European understanding of the difference between a union, a collective of members who choose to associate for collective bargaining, and a professional body, which is where the state for safety reasons grants a body an exclusive right to qualify people as capable of a job such as airline pilot or engineer to ensure a quality that means you get a qualified person and this is explicitly not unionisation and cannot be used for collective bargaining for remuneration.]
Just to go a bit deeper on this. When we were taught about unions and which powers they do and do not have, we are taught about the conflict within a single bit of the human rights declaration. I'll use the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights so this is less regional.
Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.
See the conflict? Part 1 gives people the right to work. But part 4 gives people the right to unionise. What if a union was to demand that only union members could do a job? Then it would be collective bargaining that would strip the part 1 right from anyone who didn't join that union (which may require payment of fees).
So the way this conflict was taught when I grew up was that unions do not have the right to monopolise work. The areas where you do have limited access to jobs (via governmental enforcement of minimum qualifications) then those qualifications are not provided by a union but a professional body that cannot act as a union to bargain. It acts as a gatekeeper (licensed to do so on behalf of the state) to preserve the quality of the (typically safety-critical) labour but not as a representative of the workers to bargain for conditions. A bit of a separation of church and state.
From what I read about in US news, this split is not true over there (you have "right to work" laws that basically block meaningful unionisation or no laws and so unions can monopolise labour markets and force workers to become members before being allowed to work - effectively stealing some of those wages even if the worker doesn't want to join the collective bargaining pool). I would love to hear from Americans about if what I believe from various reports is correct about the basically 2-system policy you have with no middle ground (I understand it's all very regional as different states can basically structure the local labour laws however they like).
@sil3n7: Why? If many groups have something then you can go to the cheapest one (baring price-fixing), if only one group has the thing then you've got to pay what they ask. That's not price fixing if it's only one group/company. That's just business. So if you don't want to pay the price for one union's members then get the labour from someone else who is offering the prices you want. If the only people who can offer that work have all chosen to be a member of the same union then that's just like wanting to buy an item that is only made by one company: you're stuck with their prices and the only option is to undercut the existing providers yourself (make it yourself - in labour terms, train up the expertise you need rather than buying it in from a union).
[The above is written with what may be a European understanding of the difference between a union, a collective of members who choose to associate for collective bargaining, and a professional body, which is where the state for safety reasons grants a body an exclusive right to qualify people as capable of a job such as airline pilot or engineer to ensure a quality that means you get a qualified person and this is explicitly not unionisation and cannot be used for collective bargaining for remuneration.]
@bigsocrates: I think general game dev friendly tax incentives have only gotten better in recent years (the big change was 2 years ago when breaks specifically just for game development arrived) but there was a big push for them recently and I'm not sure the industry got everything it wanted (to stay competitive with stuff like some Canadian regional tax breaks) and there were cultural limits imposed on some breaks.
Looking long-term, the UK may not even be in the EU in 5 years so making long-term plans it's possible that local volatility means large companies are less likely to risk further investment in local teams when leaving the EU could have serious economic shock (messing with ability to move staff between EU offices, have a single pan-European legal team who can manage all legal issues, and possibly mess with costs if the economy spins off from mainland Europe in either direction).
Definitely a shame for UK development (from which Sony picked up over the years various groups and have been slowly closing them all down - seems like the UK's tax incentives have not been enough to keep the local studios open as foreign publishers* close one after another in recent years) and the team. Not only was DriveClub VR a complete engine rework to get that operating at the 120fps required for VR but also they'd been teasing more content to come following on from DC Bikes (while it may not have been a critical success, DC is still one of the top tier driving game sellers this generation).
Another piece of the fragments of Psygnosis closes down.
* Pretty much the only publishers left after mergers etc removed the local publishing companies.
Going for PS VR (but need to wait for their full bundle price - headset box, camera, and two glowing balls all together is the full package I want to see them sell for those of us who haven't already invested in any of that yet).
I'm probably going to wait to see how PC VR develops out into a 2nd gen model (or if 1st gen models get aggressive price cuts when they work out how to keep the quality but manufacture it cheaper/at volume) and keep an eye on it via my DK2 (unless I actually find I plan to commercialise a dev project and so need to jump into PC VR to test) as that's all looking a bit too expensive (as I don't think motion controls are optional so Oculus doesn't really come out until they release and price the Touch controllers) - but at least I was planning on getting a nice GPU in the near future so should hit their requirements on that side.
The must have for me is Rez. I buy all versions of that game and have a lot of memories with it. I want to make some new memories of it as a truly immersive experience that it always wanted to implant on the player, even back when I was playing it on a Dreamcast 15 years ago.
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