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Like many people - judging by Ubisoft's declaration of record day-one sales - I have spent the last few days driving around Watch Dogs' next-gen vision of Chicago, raising and lowering bollards and searching in vain for something to wear that doesn't make me look like Neo in chunky knit. I've had some fun but, as is often the case, I think the things I've most enjoyed have been the incidental details. No, not Aiden Pearce's "iconic cap", but things like the billboard signs hacked to show internet memes, or the snatches of stolen SMS traffic thrown up by Aiden's profiler. "I'm doing vaginas tonight... Oh crap! Fajitas! Fajitas!"Funnily enough, I stumbled on that autocorrect-inspired gem while browsing Reddit on my phone during one of the game's many soporific cut-scenes. And the very fact that I'm still regularly looking away from blockbuster games at moments like these got me wondering: why are the things I find most memorable in open-world games often stuffed into the margins?
Watch Dogs isn't the first AAA game where the cut-scenes suggest the characters' clothes have had more time invested in them than the flaccid dialogue, of course, but this phenomenon of looking away during story bits is something I tend to notice more in open-world games, and I think it starts with the fact most of them are so enormous and expensively assembled. As a result, they often think it's important to play things straight in order to be taken seriously, when in fact the outcome is often that they are not taken seriously at all - or worse, that they fail to hold the player's attention.
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