Games like the text-adventure The Mask of the Sun (1982), the side-scrolling Aztec (1982), or the action-adventure Quest for Quintana Roo (1984) drew primarily from Latin America’s pre-Colombian past and invited players to become neocolonial archeologists of sorts-running through ruins, pillaging tombs, and killing wildlife. Indeed, the exotica of Latin American backdrops offered a far more alluring temptation for early video game developers in the 1980s. Later, they walked that statement back, assuring us that Far Cry 6 did indeed have something to say about politics and revolution just not in any way we might recognize. Early on, the company assured everyone that their video game about overthrowing the government in an imaginary version of Cuba was entirely apolitical. Of course, politics has never been Ubisoft’s strong point, whether it's regarding continued allegations of workplace harassment or the content of its video games. Yet of all the stereotypes dumped into Ubisoft’s latest effort at telling stories about Latin America, I’m most startled by its ongoing infatuation with inviting gamers (mostly from the Global North) to topple the regimes of Latin American states. The trouble isn’t just that Far Cry 6 plays too much like the games before it, but that the game is stuck in a caricature of itself. Aside from the common complaint that Far Cry 6’s gameplay is barely distinguishable from its predecessors, I felt a sort of deja vu as I read through accounts of the game’s haphazard handling of Cuban history and its decision to fill all the dialog with a bizarre blend of accented English intermingled with Intermediate 1 Spanish. So when the reviews for Far Cry 6 started trickling into cyberspace, I wasn’t surprised to read that the it rehashed all of the worst stereotypes we’ve come to expect from video games set in Latin America. Likewise, as a historian of Latin America and someone who grew up in a Mexican-American community on the US–Mexico border, the genre’s ongoing obsession with depicting everything south of my hometown as simultaneously exotic, corrupt, and tyrannical is tedious at best and enraging at worst. For games in the Call of Duty or Tom Clancy franchises, these details usually entail an express ride through a soul-crushing wheel of stereotypes and a kaleidoscope of ahistorical musings extracted from a fictional mashup of the Cold War and the war on drugs. While I’m always delighted to have 11-year-olds pulverize me in Fortnite, or to drop into a zombie-infested city for make-believe fun, when it comes to more realistic shooters I get hung up on the details. For quite some time, I’ve felt a deep unease playing shooting games set in the modern world.
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