Mafia 3

So a bunch of gameplay was released for Mafia 3, the upcoming open world game from 2K and Hangar 13. This one is differing from earlier entries in the series by starring a biracial Vietnam jarhead instead of an extra from season 3 of The Sopranos, and there's been a lot of talk about the game's depiction of the protagonist's race as the game is set in New Orleans circa 1968 - cops will apparently act aggressively towards you in upper-crust neighborhoods, sometimes even forcing you to leave certain areas, and they operate along the lines of the usual video game police force, i.e. expect to get your brains painted on the curb if you so much as stand in front a cop and block his path.

What's strange about this approach is that, by all accounts so far, the police in Mafia 3 are much more limited in their interactions with the player than in previous games, which featured a surprisingly well-layered system of wanted states, both for cars and on foot, plus fines for stuff like speeding and running lights (along with bribes) that all combined to make the police feel like a real part of the game world. And if the state of polices relationship with black people today is any indication then you would think that driving citations and petty harassment via traffic stops would be the chief interaction between these two groups. Yet the developers opted to remove that layer of mechanics and opted for a more direct, GTA-style psycho cop style instead - I wonder if the traffic stop thing coupled with the black protagonist made things a little too real?

Also, just a note on the actual gameplay: Jesus, this game is violent. Lincon's animations coupled with the time period and the setting give me major No Country for Old Men vibes - you're really just playing as Anton Chigur here, right? Driving around an idyllic southern city, inflicting graphic acts of sudden death on other criminals (all of them white), I also can't help but be reminded of this piece. A video game where you play as a black man, killing truckloads of cartoonishly southern white guys, in a city with a less-than-excellent racial history? And what are your options for interacting with this criminal underworld? Destroy the leaders and take control/raise your own empire in the place of the enemy's - in other words, keep the status quo of crime and violence going but with different names and faces. By the end of it thousands of virtual people will be dead and everything will be exactly the same as before, but we'll have had a lot of fun in the process!