Bolivia Initiates Diplomatic Action With France Over Portrayal In Fictional Video Game

from the un-bolivia-ble dept

There's been something of a trend recently in which the digital realm of video games have begun penetrating reality. This has taken several forms, from many countries attempting to dress up their real world military capabilities using video game footage, to infractions within the gaming realm resulting in real world criminal charges. This has come to be in part because gaming has become a dominant form of entertainment for so much of the population and in part because of how realistic games have become.

But neither seems to be much of a factor in what I think is a first: Bolivia has filed a dipolomatic complaint with France in response to the country's fictionalized portrayal in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands.

The Bolivian government has filed a formal complaint with the French embassy about a video game produced by a French company that portrays the South American country as an area controlled by drug traffickers, authorities said. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Interior Minister Carlos Romero said Bolivia had delivered a letter to the French ambassador and asked that the French government intervene, adding that Bolivia reserved the right to take legal action.

"We have the standing to do it (take legal action), but at first we prefer to go the route of diplomatic negotiation," Romero said.

Now, the setting for the game is a fictionalized version of Bolivia where, contrary to reality, large swaths of the country are controlled by Mexican drug cartels that are wreaking all manner of havoc over the land. The key part of that would be that it's fictional. As in not mirroring reality. You know, such as pretty much every other work of fictional art that has ever been created.

Oh, also, Ubisoft chose Bolivia for the setting specifically because of how much it appreciated the beauty of the country.

In a statement to Reuters on Thursday, Ubisoft said the game is "a work of fiction" and that Bolivia was chosen as the background for the game because of its "magnificent landscapes and rich culture."

"While the game's premise imagines a different reality than the one that exists in Bolivia today, we do hope that the in-game world comes close to representing the country's beautiful topography," Ubisoft said.

I don't know what the workload of the Bolivian diplomatic corps looks like, and I frankly don't care. There simply must be more relevant work to do than shaking a diplomatic fist against the home country of a video game company over an artistic work of fiction. I have no idea what Bolivia's end-game was in trying to get France to intervene in Ubisoft's work, but I'm sure it wasn't the actual outcome, which is to have Bolivia look both petty and silly, as well as hostile to art and free speech.

I'm not sure what standing Bolivia thinks it actually has to do anything about this, but I'm fairly certain that such standing is every bit as fictional as the Bolivia from the game.

Filed Under: bolivia, diplomacy, france, ghost recon wildlands
Companies: ubisoft