Examples of Damage Control in Gaming: Ubisoft Finally Acknowledges “Politics”

The newest Far Cry 6 trailers are all anyone needs to watch to know the themes it’s going for. The game will have players control Dani Rojas, a young fighter whose gender is of the player’s choosing, who aspires to overthrowing the president of island nation Yara as part of the Libertad rebel group. This “president” is actually dictator Anton Castillo (Giancarlo Esposito), a brazenly corrupt leader in the process of grooming his son to take over as leader in a country that couldn’t be more of a blatant stand-in for Cuba. The game will touch on themes of slavery, fascism, and rebellion, and perhaps more in the final game. It’s political as shit, and it’s not subtle about it.

Yet, a Ubisoft development team member couldn’t help but deploy the familiar ongoing Iconic® schtick by denying that even the most obviously “political” game isn’t that. Narrative director Navid Khavari told TheGamer that they realize Cuba is a “complicated island,” but didn’t want the game to “make a political statement about what’s happening in Cuba specifically.” Equally as remarkable is how Khavari mentioned this unprompted, as if it’s a spasm from Ubisoft employees by this point. This is all despite the game using stories from real Cuban guerilla fighters as inspiration for its story and characters. This, to be fair, helps generate discussion and thus creates free advertising efforts, but it’s beyond tired by this point.

There was a positive twist this time, though. Khavari took to Ubisoft’s blog to acknowledge that “our story is political” after flubbing the initial explanation, that “a story about a revolution must be.” He continued:

“There are hard, relevant discussions in Far Cry 6 about the conditions that lead to the rise of fascism in a nation, the costs of imperialism, forced labor, the need for free-and-fair elections, LGBTQ+ rights, and more within the context of Yara, a fictional island in the Caribbean. My goal was to empower our team to be fearless in the story we were telling, and we worked incredibly hard to do this over the last five years. We also tried to be very careful about how we approached our inspirations, which include Cuba, but also other countries around the world that have experienced political revolutions in their histories.”

As mentioned above, the game utilizes the perspectives from guerilla fighters who fought in Cuba between the late 1950s and early 1960s for its overall story and character inspirations. It simply isn’t making a political statement about “the current political climate in Cuba,” which is understandable. Ubisoft got in trouble with Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands’ portrayal of Bolivia as a violent narco-state. (On brand for a Tom Clancy game, by the way.) The Bolivian government filed a formal complaint about this to the country’s French embassy, and then-Interior Minister Carlos Romero claimed Bolivia had standing to file a lawsuit. This never amounted to anything more than rhetoric, but successor Ghost Recon Breakpoint took place in a fictional country for this reason. Just the same, it’s why Far Cry 6 takes place in Yara instead of Cuba proper, and isn’t based on modern Cuba.

This is a welcome turn of events from a company with representatives and development team members who’ve previously claimed their games weren’t political despite obviously qualifying. Tom Clancy’s The Division II? Not political, despite Tom Clancy himself being outwardly so until his death. Far Cry 5? Not political, despite the villains being a religious cult. Watch Dogs Legion? Also, not political despite taking place in a London taken over by Brexit (like the real London right now). You get it by now: They found a theme and just had to stick with it. It’s about time we had an aversion to this given how the “apolitical” arguments only work on the worst people in the gaming audience.

It says quite a bit that a Ubisoft developer merely and correctly acknowledging that their game is political is considered mind-blowing, but that’s just where the AAA gaming industry is. The companies feel the need to advertise to the biggest audiences imaginable, which includes easily-aggrieved people who perceive games with “politics” as a slight against them. These same people probably think the mere presence of the female Dani in this game’s advertising campaign and the main game is too “political.” (I haven’t looked to see this, and won’t.) Ubisoft is actually taking a risk by not fully giving into that audience.

Ubisoft previously maintained this trend because it worked on that audience. Before addressing this topic, I wasn’t quite sure if there existed a significant crop of people who could be convinced that a particular game is apolitical thanks to developers and representatives merely saying so. Then, I remembered the frighteningly staggering amount of people in the United States (and many outside the country) who truly believe governments and big tech companies are staffed with Satan-worshipping pedophiles who drink the blood of children, or that kids are trapped within the non-existent basement of a DC pizza parlor. Never underestimate how dumb of a society we are. They are, in fact, always dumber than expected.

I’m glad Ubisoft and Khavari were honest about Far Cry 6’s politics here, but this still doesn’t give me a good feeling about how the game will tackle these themes. It’s clearly borrowing from revolutions that occurred in Latin American territories in history, but it sure as hell won’t deal with the political ramifications that came alongside them. The conscious effort on Far Cry 5’s writers to prevent its religious cult from resembling anything in the real world (cults that tend to be aligned with the far-right in the political sphere) justifies that concern. I’d love to be proven wrong here too, but I fear I won’t be.