I can't go two pages on the Internet without getting smacked by a Far Cry 3 ad. I don't play many AAA games and especially not many first-person perspective non-strategy games (the last one was Fallout 3, the next most recent one was probably Jedi Knight 2 or summat) so I may be just unfamiliar with the genre. But I like games that feature exploration and I'd heard so many good things about the Far Cry series I took a look.
The trouble is, the Unfortunate Implications I see just seem to increase the more I learn about this game, and while I may not be the most plugged-in media hound I see very little commentary on these implications. Pretty much the only commentary I've found has been here: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/04/what-i-loathe-about-far-cry-3/
Three of the biggest things I've seen in promotional material and reviews have set off red flags for me, and I'm wondering if people who have actually played the game have seen justifications for these things:
1: Basic setting- a bunch of white, somewhat wealthy American kids get menaced by a vaguely ethnic pirate, who kidnaps them and tries to sell them into slavery (a phenomenon that basically doesn't exist but has been an urban legend for decades used to keep people afraid of the outside world).
2: For some reason the natives need a white man not just to help them, but to lead them to victory. And naturally they choose the protagonist, who starts the game with zero skills relevant to the job, but presumably because of his white-people moxie he can be expected to overcome that minor hurdle. By the end of the game the protagonist has out-natived the natives, becoming better at everything they do than they are themselves. I can understand the appeal of an adventure with exotic, unknown peoples, but why does this game have to have the "Avatar problem" of turning the hero into a demi-god?
3: Supposedly a big part of the protagonist's motivation is rescuing his girlfriend from being sold into slavery (again, a phenomenon that basically doesn't exist in the real world). According to a trailer I saw, the game bragged about the player's ability to visit prostitutes. Now, the fact that the protagonist needs to take a break from saving his girlfriend to wet his wick is bad enough, but there's a tremendous hypocrisy here.
See, while white slavery in the form of abducting middle/upper-class American women to sell into slavery doesn't really exist, human trafficking of impoverished women for the sex industry is a very real problem. Now maybe the prostitutes you can visit on the islands are all indigenous women who haven't been smuggled in, but women working at that level in the trade, while not actual slaves, often live lifestyles that border on slavery. For the protagonist to basically benefit from the sexual pseudo-slavery of brown women while on a quest to liberate a white woman from slavery, to make light of a very real form of human slavery in order to make the protagonist seem more manly while taking seriously a mostly imaginary form of slavery- it sounds very disturbing.
Now maybe all these red flags are unfounded, and maybe there are mitigating circumstances throughout the game that make these problems less of a concern. But it troubles me that I've seen so little discussion of this. Games tend to be narcissistic in nature as they make the player essentially the center of the gaming world for their entertainment. But it seems increasingly that American AAA games peddle a narcissistic fantasy for young, middle-class Americans that contain unfortunate implications about the rest of the world. And it bothers me that they get a pass.