Earlier today I said that Watchdogs is surrounded by several controversies. One of the major ones were the alligations of the game as racist, which as I explained is not. The other allegation, based on the assumption of racism, is that the game makes a crude reference to the tragic case of Trayvon Martin which made national headlines a few months ago. This comes due to the existence of a screenshot featuring an NPC called Kavon Fortin, a 21 year old drug dealer who wears a hoodie. Horton Atonto's original message was as follows:
“It (the Profiler) pulled up a criminal record of him for larceny too, and something about child support … Idk the mechanics of @watchdogsgame’s naming system but fwiw ‘Kavon Fortin’ showed up as an attacker on a criminal convoy mission.”
Outlets like Crave Online sensationalize the image with colorful headlines, and online news outlets such as TYT argue that this is a terrible insult. The assumption is, of course, that "it would seem unlikely that this name would be matched to this character model unintentionally" (quoted from Crave Online). Indeed, if this reference was on purpose, it would be hideous. The good folks at TYT explain:
However, it's not the case that this is a racist commentary against Trayvon. It's not true that Kavon Fortin is coded into the game as a permanent persistent event. Kavon is not a racist commentary. Why not?
1. Kavon Fortin, the black 21 year old hooded druglord, is a randomly generated character who shares no characteristics with Trayvon Martin other than superficially. They're both black and they both had hoodies. That's where the similarities end. Trayvon was a 17 year old kid who went to school and drank iced tea and was attacked by a vigilante. Kavon is a fictional character who sells drugs and violently assaults people for money. One could argue that because the names are similar and they sort of look the same they are the same, just like the off-brand imitation sodas Dr. K or Super Cola are sort of the same as Dr. Pepper and Coca Cola because they sound similar-ish have red cans and look the same. And sure, if the game had purposefully placed Kavon there as a parody of young Trayvon Martin, that would indeed be horrible and make the game racist. However, I haven't met Kavon in my playthrough. No one I know has met Kavon on their playthrough. I'm willing to wager that no one other than Horton Atonto will find Kavon Fortin. Why? Because Kavon Fortin is a randomly generated character.
2. Kavon Fortin is a randomly generated character. The way in which the Watchdogs NPC random character generator works is as follows (this is a very simplified explication) :
*The game has a database.
* In that database there are different categories.
*These categories include: first name, last name, income, race, gender, top-ware, bottom-ware, head-ware, religious affiliations, nationality, level of education, income, employment, hobbies, and many others.
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* Some of the elements in the database have a higher element to be produced depending on some demographic elements than others. For example, a randomly generated male NPC has 100% possibility of having pants as bottom-ware, while a female NPC might have a 50% possibility of using pants as bottom-ware. A white NPC is more likely to have "John" as a first name than a minority character. A character found in a wealthy section of the game is more likely to have higher education and income than a character from a poor section.
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*When the player is to encounter an NPC, the game randomly generates one. The game, essentially, makes choices. It says "let's make a dude. Make it, I dunno, make it Hispanic. What region is this? The middle class section? Put him in a suit and make him earn... I dunno... 60k a year seems fine. What is the major Hispanic religion? Catholic? Yeah. Let's make him Catholic. Now make him, I dunno, he likes anime and... what other hobbies are in this list... he's a peace activist and um... likes movies. Call it Edgar... um... Gonzales. Yeah. Edgar Gonzales. Yeah. That works. A middle class hispanic otaku cinophile peace activist called Edgar Gonzales. Good enough."
In Horton's playthrough, the game created a black drug dealer NPC wearing a hoodie, and from the names database it randomly selected the names Kavon Martin.
How do I know that Kavon was randomly generated? It was reported as such. Oh, and the devs stated that it was a randomly generated NPC.
So how racist is Watchdogs? Again, not really. It does force players to come face to face with their own notions of race and racism, and what seems to me is that those who say that Watchdogs is racist may just be at least mildly racist themselves - or at least hold some beliefs regarding race and gender that are not universally true. But I'll be discussing about how players confront themselves in Watchdogs over at Pop Trends later today.
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