There’s some things I think he gets on the mark, but there’s a big disconnect between what he thinks should be happening in the game world, and what the actual state of the game world is. I’m not rewatching it, so this is my memory from watching the video a few months ago. There’s also a ton of information on the state of the world, and how the world got to it’s present state from the phone logs and “Echo” history recreations and other places throughout the game world. But it’s not immediately apparent to someone who just played the game for 8-10 hours.
The number one place where he fails is he has this idea that everyone should be arrested and receive due process. He is not seeing that this is a post-apocalyptic scenario where that simply cannot be done. Martial Law is in effect. The court system has completely broken down. Most of the judges and police are dead. I don’t have any actual numbers, but my impression is that maybe 90% of the population is dead. This is not just New York, although New York is the hardest hit, the game alludes to most of the major cities in the US and around the world having very similar issues. You can’t lock people up because there simply isn’t the resources to man the jails, and in fact one of the main factions got out of jail because the jailers were all dying off or unwilling to go to work because of fear of the rapidly spreading disease.
I think his view of what should happen is completely unworkable in the game world because of the lack of manpower and resources available to the government. Prior to the player being activated for “The Division” a previous attempt was made to do things more along what he would have wanted to happen. It didn’t work and everything collapsed. The initial attempts at a softer approach collapsed, and there’ signs of that throughout the game. We’re halfway to a Fallout scenario where there’s a complete loss of law and order, and everyone in the game is just doing there best to prevent the complete collapse of society.
What I think “The Division” gets completely wrong is their depiction of the “Rioters” faction. Essentially the Rioters faction is partly alluded to as gangs, and partly alluded to as just people who are desperate and willing to do whatever it takes to survive. A lot of the Rioters language seems gang related, but for example, I just listened to a phone log series where someone was a student. His girlfriend got sick, they took her to the hospital, she died and they wouldn’t even let see her body or let him know what they had done with her. He started getting desperate, and he relays a story to his brother (via telephone messages) about a bunch of people who beat up someone because they really wanted whatever he had in his bags, and then he ends by saying “I was one of the people who beat him up.” This story is told through a series of seven or so phone logs scattered across the world. There’s also a phone log about someone starving who talks about how people beat other people up to get the few remaining MRE (military meals-ready-to-eat) handed out by the national guard, and then he admits he was one of the people. So through the phone logs there’s a real sense that ordinary people are getting desperate and turning violent.
On the other hand, in some of the other logs there’s a sense that the rioters are hoodlums. And so the game tries to play it both ways. I think what becomes problematic is that the rioters are coded as anyone wearing a hoodie. Post Trayvon Martin, post Ferguson where the US DoJ determined that Law Enforcement was unfairly targeting African Americans, this just seems very tone deaf. You run into various people trying to break into Police Cars and they aren’t targets. You occasionally run into people even threatening each other, and they aren’t targets. But if you see someone wearing a hoodie, you kill them. I think the most problematic case is you see two people wearing hoodies over a body, and you shoot them. Initially I thought they were supposed to have killed the person whose stuff they were going through, but that isn’t the case. Sometimes you’ll hear a dialog that says something along the lines of “Damn it, someone has already picked this on clean.” Which means this poor guys are just scrounging for scraps same as everyone else. But if they’re wearing a hoodie, you kill them.
So overall Extra Credit in my opinion is wildly off the mark in terms of what he thinks should be happening in a post-apocalyptic New York. His solution was tried in the game world and failed in the game world as the crisis got worse and more and more people died and the infrastructure continued to collapse. We’re a long way closer to the total collapse of civilization than he is letting on. There really are very few options. Government resources are now extremely limited, Martial Law is in effect, the US government appears to be under the control of “The National Continuity Coordinator” which means that a great deal of the US government is gone. As the game alludes to, the job of the Agent is to hold on to what remains and to try to help society claw back from the brink. He or she is operating under some sort of controlling legal authority, so he’s not just some vigilantlie, but the situation is desperate and there’s still a good chance everything will collapse.
At the same time, Extra Credit is right that some parts of the game are completely tone deaf, and particularly in regard to the Rioter faction can be pretty questionable.
