I can buy so many shirts in Watch Dogs: Legion. This is not a fantasy for me: I’m a weirdo who keeps around the same 20 shirts all year. Some of them have distinct memory tied to them. More often than not they’re just cool looking shirts.

There’s a lot you can do in Watch Dogs: Legion. All of your anonymous co-conspirators bring their own talents and inventories to the mission. Solve a vignette challenge and they’re yours forever.
Every one of your disposable actors can wear a variety of cool shirts and pants.

If you wanted to buy a t-shirt on every street in London I bet you could theoretically I have not been on every street in Watch Dogs: Legion. This is because in a complete recreation of a city I’ve never been to, the spectacle and culture of the place has been reduced to “you can buy a t-shirt here.” Every street of London might as well exactly be the same.

But that’s what it is isn’t it? Living like we all are now has had me nostalgic for the city. The cities near me, even the shitty gentrified ones. You can play as anyone in Watch Dogs: Legion. Walk buy a policeman or an Uber driver or even a Pop Star. Everyone is in waiting. After all, without that tap on the shoulder by someone in a bandanna, how can we ever jump into action?

Videogames often communicate something unhealthy to me: We’re nothing but the brands. Nothing but the streets we buy T-Shirts on. To a corporation, social upheaval and revoluton means little elsethan the freedom to wear our Cyber Goth clothes in public. Cities, the stories that happen in them – these are not what turns concrete into a place. It’s a cynical reading, yet, the whole time I played, it felt true.

For a space to be reduced to a playground it has to be stripped of the real character and history. In videogames, what it gets replaced with is a kind of texture. It cannot be physically a real space – yet – so it has to recreate an idea of it. The way cities are depicted in videogames are the same way you recreate an area in an expressionist painting.

The London of Watch Dogs Legion is no more a real place than Liberty City or San Andreas. A caricature of a city that existed. Sort of like an impressionist painting, but that feels like being a little too generous.

Expressionism plays to a hue of moods that are dramatic. Our videogames cities, London, San Andreas, real or fake? By focusing on making something real they cannot focus on what makes cities interesting to live in or even tour. London in this game isn’t even tourable. There is no space to learn about what people think of it as a home – because it must reduce the city to recognizable traps and clever arrangements of bar neon.

What kind of revolution could there be in this city? One where I am made so disposable as to be wether or not I own a vehicle or what kind of shirt I wear. Community work often is one made of disparate people, true, but people who have to be willing to trust and if not, openly tolerate each other.

Watch Dog’s Legion’s brand-marketed version of revolution has no space for people. Neither does the city it takes place in. In losing the idea of a city as anything other than a place to blow shit up or fucking tase someone in, why should we worry for these people? In a way, this sort of abstraction of reality almost served as propaganda to avoid any kind of meaningful community interaction.

I find myself plumbing through the texts of Watch Dogs: Legion looking for any sense of meaning. The harmful PMC’s that seeingly have taken over London were installed by a government that then later was dismantled by them. That’s the story of so many governments handing themselves over to the military because it means The Government never goes out of power.

A character cracks about restoring a monument to worldwide imperialism to its former glory. Maybe when the government gets re-installed, they can fix the paint on all of these old monuments. Hold the hand of the government that turned to the rifle first, sure.

Maybe this is a cynical reading – but Legion introduces us to a hacker collective doing….something to the previous government. What it is is not clear, but when everything is all Checkpoints and ID Tags, those former hacktivists are all too happy to wish for the days of the British Monarchy back. Sure it was an empire that basically ruined civilizations all over the world for hundreds of years, but gosh it was nice when the boot wasn’t crushing us right?

I wandered the streets of this fake London for what seemed like hours. Wondering what it was all for. Disrupting propaganda, stealing cars. No matter what I did the changes to the city were ones that were solely cosmetic. The same people walked every different street. Muted conversations filled the few small bars I could walk into. Everyone waiting for me to walk up to them and hold down the R1 button.
Contact added to team list.

Just wait long enough. Around the next corner you turn in the city will be Them. Ready to solve your problem and bring you into the resistence. Don’t worry, they’ll come. All you have to do is keep waiting.

While we wait, we can buy a t-shirt.