So The Division is out and has been for a few weeks now. I enjoy it, the endgame is grind-y, but fun, so far and it's just been a fun place to burn time while rocking a podcast or two and searching for the 'phat loots' we all love so much.

Then I made the mistake of reading a Kotaku review. Now, to be completely fair to the writer of said review, they may not have expected their social commentary to go this far That was what the comments did. Before I get into this, however, I'll be completely upfront about three things:

1. I have reached max level in The Division. Meaning I have beaten all story content and dabbled in the Dark Zone PVP/PVE areas.

2. I should not have been surprised that an article on Kotaku, or any of it's many sister sites for that matter, took a heavily biased stance on something. That is how they get their pageviews after all.

3. I should not have read the comments on the article to begin with. That was a mistake I can readily admit to. I am sorry for doing that, both for myself and for anyone who reads this since those comments moved me to type this damn thing to begin with

Now then; let's get down to the meat of this.

While I have greatly enjoyed my time with the game, it has become obvious to me that I apparently didn't pay much attention to it during my double digit hours in that world. I say this because the very first collection of comments on Kotaku's review mention how you just run around gunning down homeless people and take part in Right-Wing wet dreams. If such an opinion is so often repeated, I wonder if I have been playing a super secret version of the game. With the exception of wildlife such as birds and dogs, you cannot harm any unarmed person in the game world. You can read about stories of such a thing, rioters attacking a group of non-combatants for example, but that is it. Any civilian you can save can't be injured by your weapons. The cursor turns green, you can pull the trigger, but nothing actually happens to them. It's almost like, I don't know, you're some kind of good guy! Speaking of which.

The more "obvious" complaint people are making is that you are not a good guy at all: You're some kind of government lackey out to cleanse the world of the poor and downtrodden. Again, in over twenty hours of playtime, I guess I must have missed that part. There are moments where it gets absurd of course, like when the people who supposedly are just trying to survive also shoot the supplies you're defending, but the concept that you're some kind of reverse Punisher who's out to sweep the streets clear of any seemingly worthless human life is insane. I read that comment thread, followed it deep into that pit of revulsion and I came out with a new understanding of what the original poster was talking about. Namely that he or she didn't know what the Hell they were talking about.

Their argument, as near as I can understand it, was this: An off-hand comment made during the game referenced the "Black Lives Matter" movement. This line, uttered by an African-American woman who lead one of the game's hostile factions, was handled poorly and seemed to provoke the topic yet offer no sense of explanation or examination of what the topic means. The commenter saw this, and the aforementioned (but, again, impossible) purge of innocents in the game, as a form of Jingoism.

There are a lot of deep dives we could take here on that topic. Examinations of what that phrase truly means to some people and the like, but let's not. Instead, let's just stick to two very obvious things that took some digging to find in that thread.

The "Clance"

Let's not beat around the bush here people: Tom Clancy wrote mostly about Jingoistic scenarios. They were kind of his bag. I'm not saying every story was like that, nor am I saying that the man thought that way in his day to day life, but such a concept showing up in The Division is not a surprise. That setting was discussed in further depth in the review proper, the author coming to the conclusion that the game was too afraid to actually elaborate on some topics it brought up. I take issue with this because both the author and the main commenter I'm referencing seemed to read far more into the game than I did. I'm not saying they are wrong for doing that in a game, but I will call them out for doing it here. The Division is, at it's core, a game set in a fairly realistic version of New York City. That is obvious. The part that annoys me is how a few lines, uttered by a character you barely know, somehow means that the entire game is a propaganda piece. These assumptions were made, one would imagine, because the character in question who speaks that line is the leader of "The Rikers," a gang that formed after it escaped from an abandoned Rikers Island and made it back to NYC.

Rikers Island is a messed up place out here in the real world. It's walls house forms of cruelty and corruption I could not even imagine let alone get into here. I bring this up because the reviewer made damn sure to do so. The game, however, never did. It made no mention of this gang's motivation beyond getting revenge for being locked up. There were no banners thrown in player's faces hinting that they had been mistreated. The only hint you got about their motivations were those of a more common, dare I say even obvious, nature. The cops put them away and left them to rot at Rikers; now they want revenge. Hell, I would too. That's not propaganda, that's human nature.

I won't even touch the Black Lives Matter controversy the reviewer and commenter mentioned. Know why? Because the game damn sure didn't. The off hand comment made by a boss character in the game may have hinted at it, but the effort both people I've been reading reviews and comments from are going through sure make it sound like the game is throwing the topic in our faces. It is not, so I will not even bother going deeper than this. It was a hunt to find something that was not there, pure and simple.

"Three Hours Total"

So here we are folks, the main event. The whole enchilada. The entire reason I typed this...

The commenter who, along with the reviewer, started all this Jingoistic/Race-Related nonsense to begin with stated that he or she had only played "three hours total" of the game on PC. "It was a gift" they said. Even that admitted fact, however, did not dissuade them from speaking up about the horrible things that Ms. Barrett, the leader of "The Rikers" gang, hinted at with her comment. Now, maybe some of you haven't played the game or, perhaps, some of you just forgot, but here's a little fact for you folks: It is impossible to get anywhere near that area of the game within three hours. That is a mission with a recommended level of twenty. There is no way on this or any other Earth that this person made it to that fight within such a short amount of time.

So why the long blog post on my part? Was it the obviously slanted nature of the review? No, not so much. That is what reviews are. Was it the bashing the game took recently for it's flaws? Nah, people can like what they like. My problem, the thing that truly enraged me, is how this uninformed commenter read the review, altered some words to not be so obviously taken from it and then threw that misplaced "knowledge" in the public's face.

Yes, I know: It's the internet and people are terrible, but come on. Come. On. If you're going to make claims like theirs, you had better be able to at least access the part of the game you're bashing. I'll be honest people: It disgusted me. I had hoped, foolishly I admit, that the person just wanted to comment on the nature of the topics at hand. Maybe, just maybe, even go deeper into the true atrocities they claimed to be so against and how the the game itself handled them. But no, they just wanted to throw their opinion in under a disguise of fact. To push an agenda.

This has been a rant, I know and I'm sorry if you feel angered by the content you've just read. But hey, unlike that commenter, at least you earned the anger! Kudos.

If you're going to go through the trouble to type something like this up for a blog, you should link it to the forums as well so people can actually see it. I wouldn't have seen it myself, except for the fact that I follow you on Giant Bomb.

Now I find myself wondering what appeared in the game that could have been linked to the BLM movement, even if it was more inferred rather that implied.

I'd probably agree with you that it was people looking for something that wasn't there, but I'd still be interested in hearing the facts for myself.

@spaceinsomniac: Thanks for pointing that out. I thought I did link it, but I guess not! I'll try and amend it now.

As for what people are claiming was related to the BLM movement: The only thing I actually read about that I can verify as being in the game itself is a line spoken by the leader of the Rikers gang. Austin brings it up on one of the more recent Beastcasts actually.

I could quote it if you like, but it just seemed like a throwaway line to me. A bit of dialog to make the character appear to have more depth perhaps. If we're being honest, I thought her character was dumb anyway: Cruel, but with no real development at all beyond being an all around murderer. She was, quite simply, angry about being locked up. They didn't take it any farther than that. I can understand wanting more depth to a villain, but, again, that just lead down this path of reading far too deep into things.

Personally, as far as the gangs go, I enjoyed fighting the "Cleaners" the most. They had the better design (Flamethrowers! Hazmat Suits! Axes For Some Reason!) and their leader had more backstory.

Not that it matters since I've played the damn game so much. I've stopped those gangs many, many times over by now!

The story in that game is paper thin. How anyone could interpret anything from that story, let alone anything racial or political, is beyond me. Grasping at straws is an understatement here.

@stonyman65: That's true, especially with so much of it locked away in audio logs and such.

Seeing that I wasn't able to play as much of this game as I would have liked when I had the chance--borrowed from a friend--let me ask you this. When people complain that you shoot looters, and then go in and loot the same place yourself, that sounds pretty bad. But are the "looters" in question the same heavily armed guys walking around who will shoot you on sight, or am I missing something?

Because shoot at me before I even raise my gun = you're the bad guy. I think that's a pretty simple concept, but when I'm playing a video game, killing people who started shooting at me first apparently makes me a horrible murderer in the opinion of some people. Complaining about Nathan Drake comes to mind.

@spaceinsomniac: Yeah that is a bit odd to do that and then just take their stuff instead. You're right though; they are immediately hostile. There is no tightly woven morality choices that could set them off from neutral to hostile or anything here. If they see you, they shoot you. That's it.

@spaceinsomniac: Yeah they shoot you on sight. Usually while saying "you're gonna die, pig!" or something like that.

People super analyzing the division's plot are just grasping at straws. I never saw anyone complain that Diablo 3 was anti Catholic because you go into heaven and murder a bunch of angels. That's why it was weird to me when the beastcast guys spent so much time complaining about how unrealistic it was.

Also, maybe I missed something but you're not murdering poor people right? Idk how people got to that conclusion

Yeah, well then I'd hardly call that hypocritical or anything. I'm not shooting them for looting, I'm shooting them for trying to kill me.

Had they not shot at me first, and were I able to somehow speak with them, I'd probably say something like "It's okay guys, no need to shoot. You go ahead and take the loot this time, and I'll get it next time after it respawns, BECAUSE THIS IS A VIDEO GAME!"

Well, you can't arrest anyone nor can you resolve a situation in a non-lethal way. And the enemy don't shoot you immediately. You have to get close enough before they actually become hostile. You also jack shit from stores and police stations. So there is room for those kinds of complaints. But, at the end of the day, it's a shallow video game that plays well.

@mems1224: Diablo doesn't market itself on its or its associated brand (Tom Clancy's <Whattever>) realism and try too make its setting match a real location. Side note, my Christian parents were strongly against me getting the first Diablo when that came out because they perceived it to be supporting a Satanic message.

Maybe they shoot you on sight because you are a heavily armed stranger who comes into their neighborhood after recently killing several hundred people and looting their puffas and beanies? It's just an idea.

They whole story side of things is one of the things that kept me away from this game (I played the demo). You are an activated agent in the secret police who is sent to New York to initially kill regular people who are defending their homes so that you can steal their clothes. That is a weird facist wet dream right there.

And most people won't see it that way and that's fine. They just see a cover based loot shooter in the vein of a light mmo borderlands or a Destiny. And those people are right.

Some people will see at as being a distasteful power fantasy where you murder the poor for being poor and appearing red in your hud, because you're in a shadowy government agency that answers to no one. And those people are also right. And that's fine.

It's a video game. As long as you are not out in the streets shooting randoms and former convicts then it doesn't matter. Neither side of this argument is really wrong here.

The story for game is fucking shite though, Ubisoft need to hire some writers.

Firstly, Diablo 3 is a fantasy game set in a fantasy world. The Division is a semi-realistic representation of New York in present time. Big difference if you ask me.

Secondly, looters aren't going around harm and/or kill people because they have everything to survive. In the collectible intels, you can hear looters talk about doing some nasty shit because they have to in order to not die from starvation, freezing or something else.

That's not even an excuse to kill people in the Dark Zone, much less a reason for the game's AI characters to try and kill you. "He got too close to me" isn't a very good reason to start shooting at someone. And everyone would be jacking shit from stores and police stations in that situation, so I don't see that being a very good complaint.

It is a pretty shallow game, though. I agree with you there. And yeah, there's certainly no tranquilizers in The Division. It's not a game someone should play if they're not alright with killing video game characters.

Wait, what? I mean, I agree that the story and basic setup of the game is pretty ridiculous and kind of stupid, but WHAT? What game were you playing, because this goes far beyond any interpretation that I would imagine it would be possible to extrapolate from this game.

Agent, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to kill regular people who are defending their homes so that you can steal their clothes. Wait. Our bad. Your mission is actually to rescue some doctors and stuff, so the sick and injured can come to our bunker, and we can save their lives. Forget the stuff about killing people defending their homes so you can take their clothes. We're not doing that anymore.

@spaceinsomniac: When a real well armed person, who is not from a recognizable government organization approaches you and you know you did bad things, you might act like them, too. Sure, it's not the best reaction, but the player is supposed to be some super agent who could (or should) handle things better than just shoot to kill. The agents also got some pretty awesome gadgets but not tranq stuff? I don't know man.

@neozeon: Welcome to new age game criticism, is all I can say sadly. I put the onus on the critics because most of the people leaving the comments are in fact influenced by them - I know I was when I was younger and more impressionable to my surroundings. I've written about this before in various threads how game writers, the "news" people so to speak, have so little to actually write about that a need arises to start seeing entire oceans within a puddle. The Division is a loot shooter that has some real world drama mixed in for flavor. For anyone to read deeply into social commentary here is misguided at best and tragic at worst. Even Austin mentions the "black lives matter" line in the game which to him was really egregious in execution. Ironically enough I have done that mission multiple times now as part of the daily challenges, and despite actually trying to listen for it a few times I have not once heard it in the heat of the battle.

I feel your pain as I too will read comments at times and get enraged beyond belief. Each time I tell myself to simply not read comments because it's a waste of time. These people.. these, angry teens with something to prove, they aren't worth it. Yet I keep coming back like some masochist wondering "what did they think of this." Yesterday I saw a comment that prompted me to edit together an entire image.

No idea how angry this made me for various reasons. Took a lot of willpower to not write up a similar article just based on this alone. People are the worst, and some game writers simply fuel the already blazing fires.

@humanity: Sad but true. That comment on HLD you posted is the kind of thing that makes me want to stop playing games sometimes. It's ignorance and arrogance rolled into one. Your dedication to creating that image is both pleasant and depressing. That dedication does, however, get you the newly minted "Top Masochist" award here on GB though! Congrats! ... I, uh, I don't know how to photoshop one up though so, you know, picture it in your mind!

@spaceinsomniac: Don't fall into @arabes' trap Space: Those are the same kind of comments mister/misses "I only played three hours but I know everything about the game" tried to bust out over on Kotaku. They are the words spoken by someone who has never played the game or is out to project their own agenda onto things. Only thing I ever got from innocent people in The Division was an article of clothing after I traded food to them. That's a barter system to me; not the secret hit squads people are trying to force into the game for whatever reason.

Also, on a more lighthearted note: I really hope someone whips up an image about how your character is really only on a quest to be the Freshest Looking Agent ever. Seriously - So many different clothing items. Might as well have the dude walk down a runway instead of through Times Square. Right Said Fred style.

@whatshisface: you spend most of the time killing minorities in resident evil 4 and 5. Don't recall outrage from reviewers back then. There are plenty of games with realistic settings that make you do fucked up things that people have ignored.

Most of the population in new York has been wiped out. Everyone is scraping by to survive. There is no rich or poor. Just because they're looters now doesn't mean they were poor before the outbreak. People riot and destroy their cities after winning championships, theyre not all poor. what do you think would happen after an apocalyptic event?

@neozeon: I'm not at all upset or bothered by anyone's opinion, or anything. I just think it sounds really funny to suggest that your initial mission in the game is to kill people for their clothing. People who are defending their houses, no less. Just thinking about that being the way this game starts makes me chuckle.

As for your Right Said Fred comment, that sounds pretty funny too.

I guess this is the closest I've seen: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/03/18/pant-singular

Also:

Only thing I ever got from innocent people in The Division was an article of clothing after I traded food to them. That's a barter system to me

This isn't being talked about by anyone, but I think it's the cruelest thing in the game. I give someone food out of the kindness of my heart, and they give me their coat or even their pants, despite the fact that it's freezing cold!? And then, I TAKE IT. What kind of monster am I?

@mems1224: Spaniards aren't a minority in Spain and Africans aren't a minority in unidentified African countries. The people you killed weren't minorities. They were in fact majorities :)

And there were reviewer who took issue with 5 depictions of a white soldier gunning down black people somewhere in Africa. I thought that was silly as the baddies were zombies but the issue was brought up.

To be fair, that's probably a pair of pants they looted from one of the myriad apartments positively overflowing with winter clothing in your exact size.

So I think what you read was an opinion piece on The Division and not Kotaku's actual review which I found was pretty well rounded and thorough given that the reviewer player around 60 hours. The actual review made some pretty good points about how the game feigns like it wants to tackle real-world issues but lacks the ability to resolve them or even explore them in any depth. It uses these issues -quite distatefully- as window dressing. It shows you people who've been given no other option but to steal and commit violent acts to survive and then tells you to the only way to advance is to 'clear the area of hostiles'.

My opinion is that The Division is not the right type of game to have a nuanced discussion about the prison system in america or the encroaching militarization of law enforcement. If this was a bioware game, maybe I could convince Larae Barrett and the rikers that if they abandon their quest for revenge and make a good faith attempt to get the city out of the mess it's in, they may be granted pardons and a place would be made for them in the society that re emerges. No dialogue options present themselves and myself and 3 other group members routinely lobbed explosives into that room until coloured beams of light arising from the various bodies signified that it was safe to move in begin looting our yellow puffy jackets and rare AK's.

@renegadedoppelganger: Unless the review has since been amended to remove a few things, I was referring to the review itself over on Kotaku. Though, to be fair, between their own take, the comments on that review and other people droning on about it, I assume I merely hit a critical mass of people whining about something in the game that I just don't see. To each is own and all that, but it's been tiring to hear the same points from people over and over about a situation in the game that is barely even mentioned. I've got about fifty hours in the game myself and have completed the story missions multiple times. Even when actively trying to listen for these topics on those subsequent playthroughs, I haven't heard any of them. Especially ones that seek to invoke such deep conversation. I often wonder: If the developer had left off the "black" descriptor in reference to "just another dead (black) body on the pile" during her rant before the fight, would we even be having this conversation? That, more than anything else, seems to be what set people off.

Long rant (both here and in the post itself) aside, I agree with you. It's not the type of game that should be used to discuss the topics you and others have mentioned. I maintain, though, that it never intended to do so and people are blowing this way the Hell out of proportion.

@spaceinsomniac: Maybe they just had that extra puffy coat tucked away in case some random Division dude needed to look fly? I mean, they are still wearing clothes when you take the item from them...which also doesn't make sense of course. I'm just going to assume that was another way the developer added to get some easy XP to the game. If I remember right, you get between 200-800 experience for giving them an item. Not saying that makes any more sense, but at least I can understand the decision. Why they give you guns sometimes on the hand...

The irony of RE5 was that it's poor racial representations was not ultimately the skin color of the zombies being shot, which Capcom actually took steps to address by adding in zombies that looked very much like Eminem. That part that dodged the initial public outcry but was ultimately more damning was the depiction of many of the zombies you eventually encountered: designed to look right at home in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

My real criticism for The Division is the lack of Hispanic/Latin/Chicano/etc. face models. You'd think that with the demographics of the United States the game developers would put just a bit more effort and take that small step to be more inclusive to the largest minority group in the US.

That wont happen anytime soon though. I don't believe there is a strong voice in video game criticism to speak for Hispanic/Latin/Chicano/etc. representation (random gang banger or cartel villain doesn't exactly cut it). I think the only time I was ever able to make a character look like me was GTA 5. All other times I just make waifus. I know I'll be making a new waifu in Dark Souls 3.

The Division is tonally uneven, not because of any great agenda, its because its poorly written and fleshed out. Just look at it from a mechanical standpoint, you eat energy bars to stop being on fire, drink bottled water to shoot named enemies better! Even the buffs are poorly justified in world, I have Canine unit, not uh.. now my cover is.. uh 'magic'. There are loads of examples in game, that with just a tiny bit of flavor could have been better.

It is a fun shooter, but it just justifies it's action very sloppily. It doesn't help of course that it's set in a 'real world environment' so its easy to why people raise an eye brow or two at the players actions.

Ubisoft have always been hit and miss narratively, and often squander interesting opportunities (Far Cry 3 springs to mind) now combine that with patriotic rhetoric of the Clancy brand, and your left with a pretty bitter pill to swallow.

That said, if you are enjoying playing it, don't feel bad about.

@spaceinsomniac said:

You can totally just execute looters in the street without them having a chance to even turn and face you, though. There are moments in The Division where the only way to tell the difference between "enemy" looters and regular people just scrounging for stuff in the streets is the red bar over their heads.

So you can choose to kill civilians? I have to admit, in my time with the game, I never even tried to do that. What even happens if you go all GTA rampage on everyone in this game?

If I'm walking down the street in my town and I see a bunch of people with red bars floating over their heads; I think I'm within my rights to launch a sticky bomb at them and blow them to pieces.

@spaceinsomniac said:

No, when you try to shoot a civilian the game doesn't register it. But there are enemies that, unless you roll right up to them, behave very similarly to civilians who are just scrounging for supplies on the streets.

There are also enemies that I didn't see, calmly walked by, and who then shot me in the back before I even noticed their existence.

But yeah, it is kind of odd in games like The Division or the previously mentioned Uncharted games that "they were shooting at me first" works as a fairly sound defense, but after a while, you already know who is going to shoot at you, and who isn't. At that point, does Nathan Drake take the first shot so he can stealthy remove enemies who will definitely try to kill him once they see him? I'd say IF you are looking for moral justification for your character's actions, it makes things kind of weird.

It would be strange to be playing one of these games and hear "oh God, he shot frank! We don't even want to fight you! We were just going to let you past. You've killed everyone else, and I'm not even a very good shot! Why did you have to shoot frank!"

Thanks for the great, civil discussion in this thread. I feel the need to call that out because the GiantBomb community is unusually great about deciding not to jump the shark on discussions that touch on things this sensitive.

My take on the BLM reference in the boss fight is that it wasn't particularly well thought out. I doubt that the writers and developers intended any grand protest nor intended to undermine that particular cause. But I am glad it's being talked about, in the hopes that those same writers or others will take note that it is possible to embed political views that will be noticed as easily as this random enemy bark was, and that taking the time to understand the varied reactions to this one is worth spending time on.

That said, the most important thing that emerged from the discussion about this game's political leanings for me was that loot games need to very carefully balance the inherent mechanics of the genre, "I want to kill something to acquire better gear", against the story motives of the player character. While I've had a blast with The Division (ding! just hit the single-player ending after 49 hours of mostly-solo play), I've never once felt like my desire for loot was explained by my role.

Destiny, for as little story as it has, can escape that central question of motivation because its writers invented alien races that by the writers' own definition are relentless murder machines. Humans versus humans, in almost any capacity, are going to take an order of magnitude more care to overcome totally reasonable, if unintended, ethical red flags.

Could someone please give me the actual quote from the game's dialogue? I tried looking it up myself, but doing a search for "BLM Division video game" didn't even turn up anything useful. A you tube link would be even better, but I can't find that either.

I'm gonna state what I hope to be obvious: when someone criticizes something you like, it doesn't mean that they are trying to take away your positive experience. If you think people are going overboard or trying to find something that isn't there, fine. You don't have to agree with them or support them. In the 'everyone has a voice' age this world has created, you can pick and choose who you want to read and support.

In this situation we have a game based in the real world that mentions a real life political movement, so people are going to talk about it. People have this perception that if the developers consciously didn't put meaning into what they did, it means that it doesn't have any meaning to anyone anywhere. That is false. I try not to be too stubborn, but it's really hard for me to accept that as a true statement. Again, you can view it as grasping at straws all you want. You can view it as clickbaity and forced content and whatever. At the end of the day, the artist doesn't control the reaction to their art.

This whole 'I want real discussion about games' stuff tends to translate into 'I only want discussion I care about to be relevant'. I'm sorry, but that's really how it is. There are discussions I can view as irrelevant, such as 'what does the bank in the background of this video game trailer mean for the actual game', but I'm not going to say that I only want discussion to be about what I want or that the people analyzing trailers are reprehensible. I just don't care for it.

When game developers create something and want us to look at it, they have responsibility in that what gets put into their art can be discussed in the context of the real world and what it means to the individual, regardless if the reaction in the discussion was intended by the developer. When people criticize art, they aren't telling the artist that they are bad, they're making the artist uphold that responsibility. Artists should be willing to converse with critics when they can, IMHO, so that they can improve as they wish or think about their work in an angle they might not have intended it. Of course in this 'everyone has a voice' age, it's not going to happen, at least not on a grand scale, but effort should be made nonetheless.

My 2 cents.

I think anyone arguing about whether or not you can actually shoot people the game considers to be civilians isn't really engaging in good faith here.

Ultimately I am on the side of the line that says the writing is just not that great. I love the game and have well over 120 hours and counting, but it's pretty obvious that they were way more concerned with establishing a world and building a foundation for future games than they were with giving us an engaging story, or revealing the motivations of characters and factions in an engaging way - or even really fleshing these motivations out at all in a lot of cases. I particularly shake my head every time a loading screen tip comes up that says something like "Faye Lau is a life long New Yorker and taking the city back is her primary motivation." No shit, game, there is a really fucking ham-fisted bit of dialogue where she straight up tells me that at the beginning of the game, and then she fucks off and I barely hear from her again.

There are a lot of other moments where the limited scope of how you interact with the game butts up against the world it is trying to create. In Warrengate Powerplant the dude comes over the speaker and says something like "Larae told us we could go our own way...now these fucking feds want to come and put us back behind bars." Sorry dude, that wasn't ever the plan. I have three guns and no handcuffs so I guess a lot of dead dudes will have to do.

The warrengate I think contains everything that is weird about the games' politics. It hints at "the rikers" actually not being one monolithic entity, but actually lots of different groups made up of individuals. However the rest of the story, and the gameplay, treats them as identical. Similarly the rioters are generally presented in the collectibles as just being people trying to survive. So yes, obviously there's no one saying it's fascistic to defend the Lincoln tunnel, but it's a little weird that because of that, anyone in a hoodie in the open world is automatically also a criminal - in the sense of how the player reacts, but also in how the game itself presents them. And all of these problems are just compounded by the fact that you as the player are very limited in how you interact with this world.

But at the end of the day, this is all largely down to the limitations of the medium, isn't it. Massive needed to have some distinct types of enemies, and in a "realistic" world these were the ones that occurred to them. Some of them make more sense than others, but I think if it was 3 variations of fanatics + LMB it would seem a lot less grounded. Could they have made it all seem a little more nuanced? Probably, with a bit of time and effort. I don't think it would have made for a better game though.

Honestly I half didn't pay attention to the story in that game. It may as well have not been there. Yes though, the world is really weird in this game that is just nonsense....... Best not to overthink it or apply it to the real world, despite it taking place in some near future, real world-like setup.

Either games are art and can be deconstructed and criticized, or they're dismissable toys. It's always weird to me when people get bent out of shape over interpretations of a game that don't align with their own. You can disagree with a review without pointing out "obvious biases" or deciding the commenters are angry teens parroting those biases because they're just so gosh-darned impressionable.

Personally, I'm tired of games where you run around as a government agent in real world locations while shooting conveniently-villainous poor peoples. It rings hollow, it revels in the fear of the other, and maybe worst of all, it's fucking boring. But more power to you if enjoy military action hero themes. I'll be over here swinging swords at monsters and whatnot.

@jellybones: I would argue that something doesn't have to be "art" to be eligible for criticism. Similarly I wouldn't draw a harsh line in the sand saying well this is art and it has the potential for deeper meaning or it's not art and thus is completely dismissable. Criticism can be applied to anything, whether that criticism is logical or warranted is another issue. Sometimes things go beyond a simple matter of interpretation and are so outlandish as to leave that safety net of "subjective" opinion. I'm not saying that is happening here necessarily, although it totally is to a certain degree, but we can't just throw our hands up in the air each time someone writes a wordy criticism that seems to contradict the nature of the very thing it's critiquing and say "well everything is up for grabs, this is art, these are my subjective thoughts, I can't be wrong but this game sure is!"

1) The people you shoot in the game are PREYING upon the people who are homeless. They are shooting civilians, they are stealing form civilians, they are buring civilans alwave for haveing post nales drop. and they are shooting at you.

2) I would be all for a mechanism in the game that was a "DROP YOUR WEAPONS" button where you could bluff you want into having one of the 'milita/gangs' give up. That woudl be interesting....but very very few gamnes so that and if we don';t ask for that in CoD, Battlefiled, Destiny, MoH, or Team Fortress...well maybe we should.

3) I view what happens in New York in the game or any real catastrophic disasters it is as good a time as any to suspend Habeas Corpus. Think of it this way. If that actully happend in New York what woudl you wnat to happen? Sit down with cleaners and negaontie if they should roast people alive? Maybe talk to the Rikers and ask if not giving them medial care a month again was a good reason for then to execute the police, civilans, and anyone else they want any time they want?

4) You as the player are only allowed to shoot people who are preying on other New Yorkers. The fixed story line is about a person who does not shoot civilians and never will, because he/she shoots 'militants' who endanger not just the 'coninunity of government', but are just killing people like terrorists.

Is the game a Conservative wet dream? Not really, taht game would be GTA. GTA is a game where NOTHING has gone wrong in a big city. yet the protagonists still shoot everyone, run people over, and kill hookers over $20 BJs. If you want Conservative wet-dream game it would be one where you plow into tent city full of homeless people right now or an Occupy Wall Street Protest and then just burn them to the ground. Home gropwn terrorists who have guns and flame throwers in their hands are not "civilians"

If the Kotaku review and interesting peek into another view? Sure, but that point of view falls apart under close examination. Again having the option to have any of the militants give up and go to a holding cell to await a trial woudl be SUPER COOL, I'd love that. But given what those militarists are doing, the second option of being just shot in the street is likely the best alternative.

@monkeyking1969: "You as the player are only allowed to shoot people who are preying on other New Yorkers."

(This is kind of hard for me to express, and I'm not sure this is a great attempt, but here goes anyway.)

A thing about this statement is that it maps pretty cleanly onto one side of a real argument being made by people in the real world. The idea is that it's OK that these guys have power to kill people without consequence because we can trust them to only kill Bad Guys.

One form of propaganda is the use of media to portray a political view overly-simplistically, glossing over a thing's dangers and glorifying it. The Division is not propaganda, but when you over-simplify a complex thing in this way, you can certainly edge closer and closer to accidentally becoming that.

If we're assuming good intent on the part of the developers (and I certainly am, and believe that most folks commenting on the game are also), then I think it's reasonable to say to those guys: hey, you're kinda glossing over stuff in a way that turns some real things into a caricature, here are some ways to maybe avoid that.

@mrroach: But, like, this is the issue with almost all games that involve shooting - how do you handle the idea of civilians and even the idea that there are no "civilians". We can even go back and look at how this has developed in various ways.

Fallout (the first one, with bloody mess and all that but not quite modern Soldier-of-Fortune-inspired guts because of the somewhat more abstract presentation of top down pixel work) had civilian kids running around. And that was a game where the dice rolls for "miss" often meant "someone else got it in the gut and now you've pissed of the village". Yep, mechanically that game involved accidentally killing children as something not core but definitely in the game. Except in Europe, unless you grabbed a patch to bring your version back to the American release because in Europe it didn't get past certification with killing kids (so the Euro release patched them all out: the world was adult only). A game series that literally gives you a debuff to chastise you for killing kids was too extreme for the censors.

Then you get into the Bethesda Fallout games and that's not a thing. Children in those RPGs can exist, but they all have plot armour on. They are immortal and you can attempt to do them harm without consequence. You can be throwing the bombs around them without making the link that using weapons around civilians can cause consequences. Because the mechanics mean you really won't find consequences. And some saw this as a massive improvement while others could argue the exact opposite. But there is no right thing, no easy answer. This is a complex issue of how to represent this stuff mechanically in our game settings.

I think one of the most salient points about this controversy appearing for the Division in such a more significant way than around any other game that came before it that have exactly these issues (as all shooters do) is that this game involved US military shooting US civilians (non-military). And this is a post-apocalypse but not quite in the same way people can distance themselves from the America of the Last of Us (for example of a setting that's only a decade after a Division-style fall of civilisation - the prequel in that game is effectively set in a time before the setting of the Division) or of Fallout. This apocalypse is too fresh for USians to make the differentiation (that this is a fantasy space not really the real world setting). Because US military kill civilians every day. By drone, by combat operation in nations in which they are not at war with. In actual war zones. But they're not US civilians on US soil.

That's what appears to make this game really get a lot of critics suddenly looking at what games are doing for their setting in far more detail than the normal smattering of "this is pretty fucked up" editorials. For once we're seeing that reaction around a fictional reality that somewhat links in to civilian on civilians state murder (militarised police etc) but is actually far less closely tied to that concern than many, many military shooters that have come before it which involve US troops in foreign lands with every person seen being someone to be shot. Those games are actually far closer to this peril of propaganda (and reflecting actual events going on in the name of democratic nations). Only it's propaganda that more USians are happy with, that doesn't put them potentially as the person in the crosshairs.

As I recall it, it was your character (or group if you had friends along) about to fight Laurie Barret, the leader of the Rikers gang. She mentions how she'll be "just another black body on the pile." I'm looking for a link but the only thing I can find are videos of the fight itself: She says the line before the fight if I remember right. If I can track down the link I'll let you know. It's a high probability that I'll be fighting her again soon with all the "dailies" seeming to be reruns of that mission anyway.

I'd love to give people who see this as some kind of deeper topic a pass, but I just can't do it. Criticism is one thing; this just reeks of a separate agenda push on their part to me. Taking this outside of it's setting and genre, I just feel like the game had lackluster writing and this whole "controversy" is fallout from bad explanations/wording on their part. Not even about the so-called BLM comment either. Just the way the story is presented in general.

I must be super shallow. I'm just running around shooting dudes. I got none of that stuff from the game's story. I don't think it has a message or any deeper meaning than "make bigger numbers fly off these dudes". At a certain point I don't even think about it as shooting. It's a game ass game to me. The red dots on the radar shoot me, so I shoot them. I don't care what their intentions are outside of that, because it's a work of fiction. For as little story as this thing has, it could be unicorns with lasers and I would feel the same way.

Don't get me wrong, I get where people are coming from. It's a good thing to discuss, but I don't think they thought about the story or the characters outside of "How can we fit this game into the setting we selected?". Should they be more responsible with their message? Probably. Do I think there is any sort of propaganda or negative message slipped in there on purpose? No. I like that the lines between good and evil are less black and white than space aliens invading (though people would probably pull something from that too). Like I kind of see where the cleaners are coming from in a cold calculated way. Their methods are extreme, but so are that of the JTF and my character. Perhaps the game's mistake is not letting that stuff play out in a different way, but at the same time that's not the game they were making. They're making Borderlands/Destiny/Diablo, all games where story and message aren't really that important. Perhaps the realistic setting (which is canceled out by healing grenades and stuff [for me]) makes The Division easier to pull something out of the little that they are saying.

I don't think there's any message here, but again I'm pretty shallow. I'm always about gameplay over story, and I think games are generally very bad at telling stories. That being said, I like that you guys made me think of it, even if I draw a different conclusion.

My only question would be does she either mention the BLM movement, OR at least mention someone being unjustly killed by the police? Because if not, and "just another black body on the pile" is enough for some people to say The Division is clearly making a direct reference to the BLM movement, that's some pretty shaky evidence.

Also, BLM is about unarmed black men dying as a result of probable racial hostility. A well-armed woman leading a group of other well-armed people isn't really the best example of the issues that concern the BLM movement, even if she mentioned the movement by name.

@spaceinsomniac: Just reran the mission today and, with the exception of the line I already mentioned, I didn't hear anything beyond that. To be fair to the critics, however, I was in a firefight within a minute of walking in there so maybe I just missed it? I don't know.

For those to whom this matters, I've played over 100 hours of The Division, I've picked up all the intel and watched/listened to almost all of it. TL;DR: I like the game quite a lot despite the fact that I think it has really shitty things to say about society. Also, varied opinions are good for discussion.

I think the tone of the criticism of this game, regardless of the specifics discussed, is more that of disappointment at unrealized potential than it is flatly declaring it a trash fire. In fact, I think Austin, Alex and Jeff B. said repeatedly, "I wish this game was better" on the Beastcast while discussing some of the issues also pointed out in the Kotaku review and comments.

The Kotaku review is a nuanced opinion. It immediately gives away the ambivalent tone of the review by saying essentially "I like this.. even though I don't like that..." Nuanced opinions about games are a good thing. Games, like all media, aren't simplistic and neither are the people consuming them, thus discussion about them shouldn't be. For example, I agree with some of the earlier comments about shallow narrative and the sort of "defensive" position many games, not just The Division, put you in to justify your character's violence. However, though the "bad guys" shoot at you first, someone at Ubisoft Massive decided that was the only thing that could happen. There's never a non-violent resolution to conflict. Rare are the thoughtful discussions, literal or figurative, of poverty and desperation in this horrible scenario and never do they extend to your character's actions (as mentioned above, even helping civilians isn't altruistic, you get awesome pants and xp from them in exchange for the water or energy bar). That's the source of the criticism. Can every game feature those non-violent choices? Perhaps not. Can every game be criticised for what it contains and doesn't? Absolutely, because everything a game contains and doesn't is a creative decision. If we're to understand what makes games better or worse, those creative decisions have to be interrogated. At the end of the day, the setting of The Division is intended to be realistic and having utterly unrealistic interactions with NPCs without satisfactory explanation is jarring, if not downright troubling.

As to the specifics in the review, games don't exist in a vacuum. Pretending that the real world implications of violence in fictional spaces don't matter just doesn't hold up to scrutiny. If we want games to be an important medium (and if we don't why the hell are we discussing this?) they need to stand up to the criticisms of the world they interpret and represent. So when The Division tasks you as a government agent in a realistic NYC setting with killing (not talking to or helping, just killing) hundreds of people from a group for which the most distinct physical traits are a hoody, baggy pants and a ball cap, that's fucked up. Full stop. On the other side of the coin, when I'm playing in the Dark Zone and I extract some sweet loot amidst a torrent of gunfire and explosions after barely defeating a horde of tough NPCs or escaping some dastardly rogues, that's a great experience. Full stop.

Both experiences can exist in the same game. Both perspectives can exist in a review. The Division is great. The Division is terrible. I love and hate The Division.