Why did they make gamer Spider-Man love cops?

Down a surprisingly-clean New York alleyway, criminals are doing crimes. They open the back of their modest sedan, which we all know is the place where bad guys keep their drugs and guns. Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man—watching from above—air-drops five thugs unconscious, and ties three more to the walls with homemade squirt glue. As he swings away, he calls his best friend Officer Police Cop to let them know he's solved drugs forever. Then he performs maintenance on the NYPD's authoritarian surveillance system.

Much has been said about the relationship that Peter Parker has with the police in Insomniac's Spider-Man. It's a game where the main character, a vigilante, spends a significant amount of his time helping the police, having friendly chats with police officers, or doing work directly for the police department. A running joke in the game concerns Peter's parody alter ego, Spider-Cop, a hard-boiled version of Spider-Man whose narration muddles somewhere between film noir private detective and 1980s-style renegade police officer.

This portrayal of Spider-Man as someone bitten by a radioactive boot-licker has understandably been viewed as a bizarre and unnecessary misreading of the character's purpose. It doesn't fit. If Spider-Man is friends with the cops, why don't they do a better job of dealing with the problems he encounters? What better world is he fighting for if the police are already doing a great job? How can someone who fights injustice pal up with the New York Police Department, of all groups?

A controlled sandbox

Spider-Man isn't the only video game victim of ACAB (All Cops Are Buddies). Most of them, curiously, are open-world games, all with their own methods of police woobification.

Watch Dogs: Legion and Spider-Man both set up worlds where the authorities are a potential danger to our heroes, but avoid having to deal with the morally difficult matter of Evil Cops by replacing all the police with stand-in bad guys. Don't panic, everyone, the normally very good and helpful policemen have been unfairly replaced by Sable International and Albion, private militaries you can beat up and never feel bad. The Batman Arkham games create scenarios where the police are already out of their depth or forcibly missing, relegating your interactions to harmless cutscenes about coming to their rescue in the nick of time. Cyberpunk 2077, a game with punk in its actual title, presents the cops as a corrupt and evil force, but most stories directly involving Night City's police force are about helping the few good cops to make a difference, or observing corporation-funded thugs abuse their stolen authority.

A common thread across all these examples is a desperate, almost cloying desire to adhere to the status quo. Not because of anything that scares gamers, like politics, but as a natural side effect of the genre.

Video games are already heinously complicated, pseudo-living organisms that need to be built from scratch by dozens or hundreds of people to achieve even the smallest of meaningful tasks. Open-world games exponentially more so, given they need to function as some form of simulation, rather than just a fun ride or set of puzzles to be solved. Not only does a developer need to design for how the player interacts with thousands of objects in dozens of contexts, all of those objects could potentially interact with each other as well.

If a character speaks a line, 40 other characters might need to change their behaviour to match the new world state. If that line is a result of a player's dialogue choice, double every change. God help them if that dialogue choice leads to a second dialogue option.

Hard-fought complexity like this requires some sort of baseline, to prevent developers from losing their minds. There needs to be a normal state (or states) that the world can return to once any pushing and pulling from the player has died down. The gooey mechanical centre of an open world game necessarily benefits from minimal changes. If you're already going for maximum stability, then, it makes sense to frame your world in a way that discourages too much creative thinking, and to therefore design a setting that functions in much the same ways whether you blew up Evil Corp, ran over 40 pedestrians, opened an ice cream store or left your four most important party members to die.

Figuring out authority

Status quo isn't a natural state, however. People have tendency to want things like change and agency, a world that reacts to their miserable existence; if you seek to maintain norms, at some point you're going to need pressure. Rules. Guidelines. Expectations for the compliant and the boundary-pushers.

In the real world, the status quo is decided by governments (elected or otherwise) and other positions of power. Those decisions are enacted and enforced by an appointed authority that is given permission by those in power to tell other people what to do. In most places, you may know them as police officers. A cop is gifted authority by the state to insist on your compliance with local laws.

When playing a video game, status quo is decided by the developer, and enforced by the game's code. But players can't usually see the code, and rules without some sort of metaphorical face will either frustrate or fail to function. So games use affordances—qualities designed into the game that define or clearly demonstrate how it should be used—to direct player behaviour and expectations. A tutorial provides a list of controls and actions, explaining what to press and what the result will be; towering cliffs block off the edge of the programmed play area, showing players they can't walk further; NPC citizens scream and run away when players try to attack so everyone knows the world considers that a negative action.

Oh, and cops.

Police are great explanatory devices for all sorts of norm-setting. Most players will have experienced them in the real world, and understand what they represent. If you blow up a house with a rocket launcher and the cops turn up to arrest or kill you, the game is clearly indicating that it doesn't want you to do that without consequence. It also explains why other characters in a game don't break the rules all the time—we infer that they live under that same authority as much as the player.

That connection between these two ideas—the police and an interactive open world—gives the two concepts a strange, symbiotic relationship. Open-world games require a certain amount of status quo in place to function correctly, while a police force exists to maintain it.

Police involvement comes with a lot of baggage, however. Real-world police are frequently used as a tool not for the good of society, but as a weapon for power to wield in service of its own goals. Business as usual will always benefit some more than others, after all, and if the status quo brought you power, then your power is invested in resisting change. Recent instances of police violence related to Black Lives Matter and Free Palestine protests have made more people than ever aware of the fact that a police force employed by those in charge will inevitably only serve those in charge.

Games like Batman Arkham City or Watch Dogs may not want to grapple with messy and nuanced topics like police brutality or how the existence of a police force enables the oppression of marginalised people, but the inclusion of cops in the setting invites such questions.

The fascist boot of Spider-Cop

Why did they make Insomniac Spider-Man love cops, then? It would seem to be an attempt to both soften the image and role of police in that universe, and to integrate Spider-Man with the status quo of digital New York. Spidey isn't some mad vigilante trying to upend society as we know it, he's a Friendly Neighbourhood pal who helps the police to lock up the naughty boys and girls who want to rock the boat. The only authorities we need to worry about are those working outside of the state-sanctioned system.

All these games have that in common, twisting their interpretations of the justice system to make it seem okay for the police to continue to exist. Watch Dogs: Legion's Albion have replaced the police force, and the barely-anarchist rebels that pass for heroes all but say out loud that everything would be so much better if the normal police were in charge again. Cyberpunk 2077's various forces are bad because of corporations, not an inherently flawed system that supports and rewards corruption. Even a series like Grand Theft Auto, with its lip service goals of social satire, provides a system where the cops never change, and primarily exist to stop you, the player, from taking legitimately harmful actions.

It's particularly frustrating that these examples mostly come about as a result of shallow thinking or the necessities of game design. This is the only medium that allows us to effect change on the course of a story, and yet so many worlds are conservative and timid when it comes to exploring the possibilities of real change. Games should be messy, anti-authority, activist by definition. By having agency, players inherently threaten the status quo, and state forces like the police should be shaking in their jackboots about that.

Spider-Punk would never help the cops, that's all I'm saying.