The Ringer Is Also Upset That A Video Game About A Teenager With Spider Superpowers Didn't Do Enough To Address The Current Climate Around Law Enforcement

“Is your video game WOKE enough bro?????”

Donnie’s blog earlier was so good.  That dweeb Tom Ley (you may remember him as the white guy named Tom who lectured Liz Gonzales on what real racism is like) saying Spiderman sucked because he helped the cops out too much.  Well it turns out it wasn’t just a localized story.  The Ringer picked up on that viral social justice fire as well and god damn did they take it hard to the paint.  They are very, very bothered that this fictional fantasy world where a teenager gets superhuman abilities after being bitten by a genetically modified spider doesn’t do enough to address the very real issue of policing.

…The gag underscores the game’s strange optimism about modern policing. It’s a reactionary outlook that some skeptical players might highlight as copaganda, a term coined to describe media efforts to flatter police officers and spare them from skeptical coverage. But the game’s characterization of the police gets a bit more conflicted, bewildering, and fascinating. In the game, Spider-Man interrogates thugs, solves mysteries, and stops crimes. There’s a core story line that pits Spider-Man against his rogues’ gallery, including Kingpin, Doctor Octopus, and Mister Negative. But Spider-Man is an open-world game, designed to lure players into freewheeling exploration. Ideally, the player will break from the core story line every now and again to patrol Manhattan and stop crimes in real time. From Harlem on down, Manhattan is Spider-Man’s mega-precinct. So he swings from one active crime scene to the next, thwarting burglaries, muggings, narcotics deals, bomb threats, and hostage standoffs. Then he reports his findings to Watanabe and transfers his roughed-up suspects to police custody.

Peter Parker romanticizes policing, and so Spider-Man asks the player to humor the character’s law-and-order obsession through its narrative and gameplay. To reveal portions of the game’s map, players must bound across Manhattan and repair the dozens of surveillance towers that Oscorp Industries?—?a devious conglomerate?—?has installed to serve the NYPD. In fact, the towers resemble surveillance equipment that the NYPD now uses, in real life, to sort suspects and other people of interest by physical tags, including skin color, based on closed-circuit footage. Spider-Man does occasionally hint at the potential for civil rights abuses?—?it’s Oscorp technology, after all?—?but the game has rendered ubiquitous surveillance stations and drones as an otherwise benign, irresistible fact of modern life in a big, crime-ridden city.

As a reminder, Spiderman is a kid who jumps from building to building in a 3D pixelated city by shooting webs out of his palms.  Not to be confused with like, a Spike Lee Joint or a Michael Moore documentary.   There are very important conversations to be had about the city’s worsening relationship with law enforcement and how both sides need to be respectful of the other.  Personally my Xbox is not where I go to have those.

Thoughts and prayers to the Spiderman development team and Playstation for losing out on the middle aged Woke Man demographic.  Q4 numbers are going to take a pounding.