For quite some time, I've felt a deep unease playing shooting games set in the modern world. 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 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. 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. 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.

In March 2020, game creators at Ubisoft's Toronto studio had just finished wrapping up the "primo moments" of Far Cry 6's scenes with Breaking Bad's villain Giancarlo Esposito and Coco's young dreamer Anthony Gonzalez when Covid-19 became very real, very quickly. The borders between the US and Canada were about to shut down, and the team was anxious to bag the footage they needed before getting the American actors safely and quickly on a plane back home. The first-person shooter game hinged on performances of the A-list actors, Esposito and Gonzalez, who play Anton and Diego Castillo, a president-dictator and his son from Yara, "a tropical paradise frozen in time." Esposito and Gonzalez made it out of Canada just before the first lockdown, but Ubisoft was still facing a dilemma. The game's release was set for less than a year away, and the whole opening scene--arguably the most important sequence of the entire game--hadn't yet been shot.

Reviewers were granted a mere week to play a title most players will enjoy over the course of several weeks or months. That's not a good way to assess a title of this scope. You might overhear a piece of dialogue, or find a handwritten note, that changes your read on the game's political valence, for better or worse. You might love how the cars handle, or the fishing minigame or hunting for treasure. But these are all obstacles to reviewing a game that could take 40-plus hours to beat.

Esposito is a prominent actor, known for villainous turns as Gustavo Fring in "Breaking Bad" and Moff Gideon in "The Mandalorian." The character he plays in "Far Cry 6," dictator Antón Castillo, and the game's fictional setting of Yara have drawn comparisons to the political situation in Cuba. Khavari released a statement in May clarifying that, yes, "Far Cry 6" would invoke political themes, after an interview in which he said, "Our game doesn't want to make a political statement about what's happening in Cuba specifically."

I hope everyone had a great weekend. I spent the last few hours of my Sunday watching embattled games publisher Ubisoft tease its latest games, including Watch Dogs: Legion and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, while sidestepping controversy regarding allegations of misconduct, ingrained sexism and sexual harassment. Hours before the showcase, several more senior executives left the company. Given the whole 45-minute stream was recorded in advance, it's disappointing, but not shocking, that the issues weren't mentioned, let alone addressed. The stream didn't reveal any major gaming news we didn't already know about.

We are now more than a month past the point when E3 2020 would've ended. It lives in your heart, in your soul, and on your television. Today we finally reached the "1PM Monday Afternoon" slot, a.k.a. Much of what Ubisoft showed at its faux-press conference, we already knew about--Watch Dogs Legion, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and the recently leaked Far Cry 6. But hey, they managed to keep Tom Clancy's Elite Squad under wraps (for what that's worth), and the Assassin's Creed footage looked pretty neat.