George Orwell got it wrong about Big Brother watching you. Instead, it’s lots of Little Brothers who are watching all of us via the Internet of Things, or making billions of everyday objects smart and connected.
That’s part of the premise behind the Ubisoft video game Watch Dogs 2, and it turned out to be prescient when it debuted back in December. At our recent GamesBeat Summit 2017, we went behind the headlines of hacking to look at what was real and what was fiction in the game about hackers and “hacktivist” culture in San Francisco.
Tech journalist Violet Blue and Watch Dogs brand content director Thomas Geffroyd spoke about the eerie resemblance between the video game and current events since the election of Donald Trump. Blue has a consultant on the game, and she drew from her extensive reporting on the real-life hacking underground. She felt like characters in the game were almost exactly like some of the people she knows. ture, was a consultant on last year’s Watch Dogs 2.
Geffroyd made many trips to San Francisco to meet hackers, and he also attended the Defcon hacker events in Las Vegas for years.
