Job Simulator is nothing like a real job for a reason
A few years ago, a scene in the UK TV soap opera EastEnders presented a father talking to his children as they played videogames in their living room. To some viewers, it was nothing out of the ordinary. To those of us who’ve grown up around games, though, it felt something like a taunt. We could see the children holding what seemed to be PlayStation controllers, but what we heard were the primeval honks and bleeps from the 1982 Atari VCS version of Pac-Man. You can imagine the meeting in the EastEnders edit suite. “The kids are supposed to be playing with one of those computer things – why doesn’t it sound like it?” “Uh, videogames sound more like movies these days, boss.” “No, no, make it sound more like a videogame!” The amendments in the resulting broadcast satisfied precisely one person, while we at home reached for the knuckles of the person next to us on the sofa, having bitten entirely through our own.
Getting it all a bit wrong isn’t the preserve of videogames. Military types sit through action movies grumbling, “Come on, do these people really not understand the physics of miniguns?” And take TV series Mr Robot, which is at its least convincing when it’s portraying hackers as slick specimens performing outrageous manoeuvres that simply wouldn’t stand up in the real world. The hitch in these cases, clearly, is that absolute authenticity wouldn’t be as engaging in the context of fast-moving storytelling.
It’s a problem for the Watch Dogs series, whose audience is highly sensitive to sanitised riffs on tech issues. Certainly there are elements of the new game that carry a whiff of the Hollywoodisation we’re used to finding elsewhere. Unfortunately, hacking is very often a crushingly boring pursuit in reality, only rarely involving women that look like Carly Chaikin. So, taking control of drones skimming the skies of San Francisco, or sitting alone, in your underpants, brute-forcing password cracks? Watch Dogs 2 goes for the exciting option – and with no trace of the grating sounds of a crappy 34-year-old arcade conversion. Our report begins on p66.