Just days after it’s revealed that IBM used NYPD surveillance cams to develop skin-color-profiling using unsuspecting New Yorkers, Insomniac’s Spider-Man game unlocks its map by... requiring you to get all the NYPD’s surveillance towers back online. How heroic. 
Literally me just now: “Hey honey, here’s my college dorm! Look there’s your work! Oh wait... a surveillance tower like the one that was parked in the middle of Crown Heights for years ominously watching everyone... and it’s... my mission.”
The Spider-Man surveilllance towers use Oscorp technology instead of IBM so I’m assuming they’re going to be an evil problem. But this is still hard to stomach 15 minutes into the game, and some kind of twist is all that would prevent this from being 100% copaganda.
One of the long-time strengths of the Marvel universe is that it’s set in recognizably real-world locations, which has allowed commentary over the decades on everything from Henry Kissinger to the Contras, the passage of the ADA, Clinton policies and more.
Private tech being used for NYPD surveillance—exactly what’s depicted in the game—is a political issue that activists here have been fighting for years. I’m curious whether this game will have anything intelligent to say on the subject, but not hopeful. rollingstone.com/politics/polit…
And Spider-Man is an odd choice for a hero to be buddying around with cops; they’ve been suspicious, hostile or chasing him as much as thanking him. It’s not the first time he’s had a female NYPD friend, although Jean DeWolff’s example makes me suspicious of fringing!
Anyway, if it continues in this vein of “help the cops with surveillance so that you can spot all the crimes to stop before they happen” maybe the mascot of this game should be... Peter Porker?
Relevant old tweet from a time when I didn’t think all the various “scanning towers” in games would literally just be represented as cops scanning the real-world buildings you live and work in
Plot thickens: in the first side-mission you have to stop Wilson Fisk (you know, the criminal politico and sometimes-mayor who in this game also has a Trump Tower parody) from surveilling New Yorkers. Right as you’re helping the police (already infiltrated by Fisk!) do the same.
This is either a game that’s gearing up to make a statement about surveillance, or a game that’s like “uh... we made Spider-Man... into a cop... ‘cause we needed a bunch of random spawn sidequests & stuff? And a way to scan for them? You know, scanning towers like in every game!”
This is the only game (out of a few dozen, I guess) that’s ever crashed this PS4 so I’m either playing it too close to launch or this criticism is having an effect.
Update: I unlocked all the surveillance towers; so far all it opens is a mission to make sure they’re not being interfered with (!) and then prevent Kingpin’s henchmen from staging a prison breakout.
Now J. Jonah Jameson (who has a Alex-Jones-esque ranting, red-faced, conspiracy-slinging radio talk show) is complaining that the police surveillance towers are violating civil liberties but that Spider-Man is of course worse.
I'm taking a break after beating up hundreds of anonymous "thugs" (are they homegrown NYC thugs? Or moved here for Fisk jobs?) So far, this game's rhetoric of surveillance seems to be "surveillance is a sort of technological utility like electricity! It's bad in the WRONG hands!"
"Electro might shock you but you don't want a city-wide blackout, do you?" Similarly, the cops are "the right hands" in this game (so far...)--surveillance can be used by criminals and that's bad. But Spidey and the cops need it to STOP crimes! Gosh.
The only person who's complaining about surveillance is J. Jonah Jameson, whose likeness to an unhinged talk-show conspiratologist grows with every clip I hear. Pretty strong suggestion that it's unreasonable / try-hard / self-serving.
Nobody else seems bothered by the fact that these are Oscorp surveillance towers. (Tell me if you get to the end & this actually becomes an issue in the inevitable villain reveals?) Not a real shocker; in actual nYC so many are "mmm, Google/Apple privacy is sketch AF, but eh."
It lapses into propaganda for me when it's "fine" for government and big business to collaborate in spying on the public. The ACLU and other orgs are fighting these slow encroachments all the time; a game dealing with this is taking a stance on a controversial issue.
It all feels a bit like an afterthought--or as others have mentioned, like notes for a Superior Spider-Man scenario! Villains playing with hyper-security pull this in fiction all the time. But it's certainly not the only way a narrative designer could have "skinned" zone-scans.
