Montreal-designed video game features Occupy-themed terrorists

BLOG POST posted on January 8, 2012 by Tim McSorley

Ubisoft is one of the world's largest video game companies, and is known for producing blockbuster first person shooter games, including the Rainbow Six series, based on the work of novellist Tom Clancy.

Often rooted in plot-lines ripped from the headlines, the latest edition, dubbed Rainbow Six Patriots, due out in 2013 and produced out of the company's Montreal and Toronto studios, may raise eyebrows. The latest installment will pit the elite military squad against a band of homegrown terrorists who in the trailer have this to say:

"This is the day we've been waiting for... This is for the jobs you streamlined, the debts you collected. This is for the homes you foreclosed on, the bailouts you took. We are..."

...the 99 per cent? Nope, but you can be forgiven for making that assumption.

"We the True Patriots. it's time for  a new balance of power."

These words are spoken before a group of men in suits, weilding guns, attaches a bomb vest to a Wall Street executive and throws him out a window, exploding below and taking pedestrians and apparently a few taxi drivers with him. They are the main enemies is the latest edition of Rainbow Six, in which players face "a new and very real threat called the 'True Patriots,' a highly-trained, well-organized revolutionary group that claim the American government is irrevocably corrupted by greedy politicians and corporate special interests," according to a Ubisoft write-up.

It's just a game, but it raises some questions. As pointed out on the blog Game Overthinker:

[It] carries an unmistakable implication that they've looked at the current zeitgeist and determined that their audience is more inclined to see the activists as potential terrorists and Wall Street as a threatened victim in need of protection. Is their calculation correct? Does the "Rainbox Six" audience look at OWS and see the American Al-Qaeda?

It also unmistakably takes the rhetoric of a movement that has gone to great lengths to convince the public that it is non-violent and dub it over gun-weilding men who apparently have no qualms taking out innocent bystanders along with corporate CEOs.

Apparently the scene of the exploding CEO gathered cheers at its Spike Video Game Awards premiere, but playing the game means stoping the bankers from blowing up...

So what do you think - should we the Occupy movement be concerned at video-game co-optation? And how long til someone makes a version where you play as the True Patriots?

Full trailer: