Watch Dogs Is The Most Accurate Cyberpunk Game Ever

thegamer.com:

Whenever people imagine a dystopian future, they conjure up images of rain-soaked, neon-lit alleys, androids that walk among us, and people with cybernetic implants that allow them to transcend what it means to be human. Slap on some Asian iconography and a few evil megacorporations and you’ve got the template for Blade Runner, Cyberpunk 2077, The Ascent, Deus Ex… the list goes on. Reality is unfortunately far more dull and insidious than the sci-fi we love. We may dream of taking down the big bad CEO with our cool robot arms, but the dystopian future is here, and Watch Dogs nailed it.

Despite its dystopian sci-fi setting, I don’t often see Watch Dogs mentioned in the cyberpunk video game canon. In a Chicago not unlike the one we live in today, the main caveat is how connected the smart city is. We already have smart homes. Soon we’ll have smart apartment blocks, smart streets, and eventually, smart cities. At the centre of it all is a centralised operating system, CTOS.

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It may seem absurd to have entire cities running on one network, but at the moment there are only two operating systems in mainstream use, Windows and macOS. We have antitrust laws in place that should prevent Apple and Microsoft from merging, but laws can’t keep up with technology, so who knows what will happen in five or ten years?

Meta already owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, three of the West’s most popular social networks. They’re all under the roof of one company, so a single breach not only affects selfies and catching up with friends, but slows business for much of the global South, which uses WhatsApp Business as its primary work software.

As companies keep swallowing each