What Far Cry 6 went wrong for Cuba

Another example of this “wink culture appropriation” is the way Far Cry 6 includes the concept of arrange or “switching,” the well-known Cuban way of improvising technology fixes to keep them functional. In the game, arrange is the framework for the system for personalizing and improving weapons – as explained by the game’s weapons expert Juan Cortez: “For a guerrilla, arrange you can’t handle what you have, it causes chaos with everything you have. “

On the one hand, we could applaud Ubisoft’s attempt to incorporate culture into the structure of the game beyond the level of the narrative, using the Cuban practice of arrange as a central mechanic, even if it’s not as different from the way the weapons are patched together in a series like, say, I’m falling out. On the other hand, the geopolitical and historical structures that underlie this Cuban spirit of innovation — namely, more than half a century of US trade embargo and the collapse of the Cuban economy during the “special period” of the early 1990s — are being ignored. in full or indicated only when passing Far Cry 6, for example, when Danny jokes, “If the Yankee blockade teaches us something, it’s how to keep things going when you have nothing.”

While informed players can capture these subtle references, it’s important to remember this arrange is a practice caused by both poverty and geopolitical isolation. As scientists like Elżbieta Sklodowska have shown, arrange arises from a real necessity, not just from creative ingenuity.

Like a rooster, the appropriation of arrange for the purpose of sweet push to the audience for Far Cry 6 misses the mark. In fact, this is a perfect example of the type of casual neocolonialism that is so often practiced by game developers today as they plunder Latin America’s cultural iconography for its most brilliant and sensational manifestations, using it as a “raw material” for the production of refined technological products.

Then, to close this cycle of neocolonial cultural appropriation, these video games are sold worldwide, including to consumers in Latin America, a region of about 300 million players in a market that generates more than $ 7 billion in annual revenue for Ubisoft and others. multinational game publishers.

The steps Ubisoft has taken to increase the diversity and accuracy of cultural performance in its games show that it recognizes the importance of these issues for both video game creators and audiences. But representation is only one aspect of the relationship between video games and culture – it certainly won’t hurt to have some Cuban or Latin American representatives in Far Cry 6 development and writing teams. As it is, game developers like Far Cry 6 select and select the elements of global culture that they think will work best with their audience. And despite their consultants on checks, balances, and cultural sensitivity, they often make decisions based on weary assumptions without realizing how the content of their games relates to a broader historical and cultural context.

Sometimes Far Cry 6 the developers just needed to know better — for example, when they decided to carelessly base their history on the practice of 21st century slavery in Yara. In the game, Castillo’s regime gathers dissidents and forces them to work in tobacco fields, turning slavery into another reflection of the dictator’s corruption and ruthlessness.

For a story in simulated Cuba, this is particularly insensitive to the central place of the transatlantic slave trade in the real history and culture of the island. Slavery has shaped Cuba perhaps even more than the United States: Cuba maintained this practice in 1886, more than two decades after its abolition in the United States, which was itself one of the last nations in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. Today, every third Cuban identifies himself as Afro-descending. To build a game around the topic of slave labor in simulated Cuba without thinking about this real story is irresponsible and we should expect better.