In this week’s newsletter: Unrecord puts players in the role of a police officer, and looks every bit like real shootings – so how realistic is too realistic?
It looks like footage from a news report. A cop approaches a graffiti-covered, seemingly abandoned building, the sound of his own footsteps and his uniform brushing the mic and disturbing the silence. Only 30 seconds in does the trailer start to look more like a video game: the exaggerated gun reload, the way the cop effortlessly vaults a barrier. But at a passing glance – even at close examination, on a phone screen – it looks as if it could be real. Even when the cop shoots someone and they crumple immediately to the floor.
Unrecord, a “bodycam first-person shooter” being created by French independent developer Drama, made an impact with its shockingly realistic trailer last week. It looks so close to reality because of the natural lighting, muffled sound and shaky camera movement, and the fact that it’s being made in Unreal Engine 5, the cutting edge of video game graphics. The internet is replete with YouTubers screaming in all-caps disbelief about how close it looks to reality, while others are claiming it looks too good to be genuine, and must be an elaborate feat of fakery. And still others have asked: do we really want games to look this alarmingly realistic? Especially when that game is a cop story, and we’ve all seen more bodycam footage of real police shootings than any of us would like.
The conversation moved the developer to post a few clarifications on the game’s Steam page. (Unrecord is very early in development, with no release date on the horizon.) Assuring readers that the game is, in fact, real – “considering the high production costs of a video game and our global reputation at stake, if Unrecord were a scam, it would be a blockbuster scam” – the developer also attempts to assuage concerns about the game’s content and its obvious potential to cause discomfort.
“As a French studio addressing a global audience, the game does not engage in any foreign policy and is not inspired by any real-life events,” it asserts, in a dispiriting echo of Ubisoft claiming that The Division 2, a game about how the US military responds to the collapse of government, was not political. “The game will obviously avoid any undesirable topics such as discrimination, racism, violence against women and minorities. The game will have no biased or Manichaean take on criminal acts and police violence.”
This is a good time to reiterate that games are political whether they want to be or not. Even Wordle can be political. This is not a bad thing. Nobody is suggesting that cop games shouldn’t exist, only that they exist within the real-world context of police violence, and so players are inevitably going to bring their own interpretation to that.
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