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"  I know people are already excited about this gametheres Minecraft tributes and the game even has its own clothing linewhat do you think has people so interested in Watch Dogs before theyve even had a chance to play it? I think what we realized is that were touching a subject that really, really seems to resonate with people. Often in games, you dont have a chance to strike the timing with whats going on in the news and whats going on with our day-to-day lives. There seems to have been a lot of interesting coincidence surrounding Watch Dogs where I think people are interested in the effect of technology has on our society. Even more than that, every time were showing off the game somewhere, it seems that something spectacular was happening on the news. At E3 2012, we showed off the game for the first time, and that was [when] the whole thing about the NSA [blew up]. Of course, I hope its partially because the game looks really cool to play.   Watch Dogs is a technology-powered title that follows Aiden Pearce, who, through the help of hacking, turns the city of Chicago into his personal plaything. What was your elevator pitch to Ubisoft with these ideas, and what were some of the early ideas that would eventually become Watch Dogs? The elevator pitch was bit scaryto be quite frank. The very first thing I used to communicate the idea of Watch Dogs was a single slide on a Powerpoint. I remember it was hand and the finger, like it was about to press a giant big red button, and underneath it said control the entire city with the press of a single button. It was very focused on gameplaythat you would control different things in a very simple way. We wanted to add a lot of depth with the interaction without having something very overwhelming for players to play with.   As I was doing the full elevator pitch of that idea, I spent a lot of time going into the more perverse parts of human beings, trying to touch people on the ground level. I remember saying to the marketing department and Ubisoft execs, Imagine youre walking around and you look up the information on the guy in front of you and realize that hes known to be a pedophile, and you have a gun in your pocket. What do you do with that? Do you continue to walk? What if you take your gun out and shoot him? What do you think people around you are going to think of you? You look like a crazy guy who just shot someone for no reason. Its pretty spectacular that once you mess around with that idea. You bring players to a greater ethical code as you start second-guessing things that theyve been doing in games for a long time. It was fun to play that angle and see how they would react.       How did you research hacking and mass surveillance to make the game feel real? We did a lot of research online and read books on hacking. Also, the cool thing about hacking, and hackers in general, is while theyre not extremely media savvy, theyre very passionate on the internet. There are hackers who are now running their own magazines. Many are writing novels that are very directed to the hacker community. So you can read those things and see how they craft their characters and whats possible and what can be done.   On my side, Ive always insisted that everything you hack in the game should be possible in real life. Its a facteverything we hack in Watch Dogs is doable. Maybe not at the push of button, but we started to see that over five-and-a-half years. Ive read stuff recently that goes far and beyond what Watch Dogs is able to do in the game. For example, a month ago a hacker managed to remotely control a plane. He did it on a simulator because he would have been arrested if he did it on a real plane. A few years ago at DefCon, a guy demonstrated used a SCADA hack, similar to the Struxnet superworm, to open every cell in a prison and get inside their security system. Its pretty scary when you start looking at whats possible.   Smartphones were only emerging when we started, and [the research] also escalated in looking at whats next in the smart phenomenon. New York is using it for crime prediction. We know that Chicago is more and more connecting their surveillance systems to make it more efficient. Rio in 2016 will have the first real smart city system with IBMthats for the summer Olympics. All of that exists, so the idea of ctOS (the city-wide control center in Watch Dogs) comes from real life.  Its amazing that this game began just as smartphones were emerging. With technology changing so rapidly, what steps did you take to ensure Watch Dogs would feel contemporary when it was released? There was a bit of luck. When I say that it started at the emergence of smartphones, I mean we were at a time where there was only the first iPhone. It had just came out. We were in a building at Ubisoft filled with geeks, so we all had that phone, but none our friends or family knew what it was yet. We were already overly excited about the effect of social media on our societyhyperconnectivity. That was the conversation we had in elevators about the game, and then the iPhone comes out. Now it seems like its going to multiply our conversation by 25 right there.   I remember people coming to my desk and being like, Oh my god, Google Glass is coming out. We should have that in the game. I was replying, Does your mother know what Google Glass is? No? Then its not going to be in the game. In the end we tried to filter ourselves to never break the walls of relevance and believability.  How did you try to walk the tricky moral line between security and privacy in Watch Dogs? Once we knew that we wanted to talk about hyperconnectivity in a city, one of the first things we didnt want to happen kind of happened. We didnt want Watch Dogs to be associated with the 1984 George Orwell book. We didnt want it to feel like an evil corporation thats bad and suggests that technology is bad. We all love technology. We all love sending a text and immediately getting an answer. But we dont really pay attention to the bigger picture because were so happy with the small things technology gives us. So we tried to find a way not to say technology is bad, because thats not our feeling. Thats why we decided to give the phone to the player and say you will be the one exploiting the vulnerabilities. In the end, we wanted to use technology as a mirror of the player, so they can actually realize that its never been about the evolution or the innovation weve created thats the problemits about how its being used. That I think is a lot more interesting, especially for video games, because its interactive.   At times do you feel like your work on this game was almost prophetic? During development, the world saw the Snowden leaks and the conversation surrounding bulk data and mass surveillance explode. We were fascinated by it. To me, it was not surprising that we were reading those thingsI think what was surprising was the timing of it. It almost felt like Ubisoft was doing a campaign.   We knew all of that technology existed, it was just not fully official. For example, the NSA stuff was grounded in so much official denial that you never knew if it was a conspiracy theory or not. I think to realize and have the public realize that all of those things were true, weeks before we were announcing the game, was a bit ridiculous. We did have a few different moments where we would be in a room brainstorming something, and the next thing you know... tts on the news. There is a moment where we do a blackout in a stadium, and that happened at the the Super Bowl two weeks after we had the idea, so that was weird. People will play Watch Dogs and relate our ideas to events, but sometimes those events happened after the idea was defined. We did have a couple jokes around the office saying we should just stop brainstorming now.  Film, books, magazines, and art have all addressed these tough technological issues about privacy and the surveillance state. But video games have been pretty quiet on the issue until now. What can video games like Watch Dogs add to the conversation? I think as a game it will help ignite discussion and reflection. Every medium can help more people consider those issues and reach people who make those decisions, and put more pressure on them to make the right one.   When youre playing Watch Dogs, we want to use technology as a mirror of the player. The way I see it, the question Id like to explore is: Theres so much information on our phones that were creating a digital shadow of ourselves. The problem right now is that people are paying more attention to our digital shadow than our actual selves. Every corporation that designs things that will define how you live your day-to-day lives for the next few yearstheyre looking at what you did and what you bought without any form of contact. They never will consider why you bought this or why you went there. Thats scary. Its like saying that we will start building a world for people without caring who they are. Its an interesting question to ask ourselves. Do you want people to only care what you did and not why you did it?   Watch Dogs will be released on May 27th for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii U (Fall 2014), and Microsoft Windows. We&amp;#039;ll have a full review of the game at launch. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/a10492/watch-dogs-and-the-surveilled-city-16785663/>