Tom Clancy Book Review
Magnhild Lachowicz
The Division is a cold, cold game. Yes, it's literally set in a version of New York gripped by winter snow flurries, and the remnants of a killer virus - as themes go, that's chilling enough. However, I'm also talking about the calculating and rather stat-led way the game conducts its business. There's no real warmth to any of The Division's systems or stories, and this is one of the few shortcomings of an otherwise excellent online shooter.
In terms of plot, things are kept simple enough. There's a virus spread by infected dollar bills, and you join the action as a secret Division agent, activated to keep some semblance of law and order in a city that has been ravaged by death and crime. You're actually part of the 'second wave' of Division agents, after the first one failed... for reasons that become clear as you shoot through the game's 40-50 hours of story/side-missions. Whereas many other Clancy games contextualise their uber-military narratives and throw in a little conspiratorial intrigue into the mix, there really isn't much of that spice in The Division. As such, there's little sense of progress outside levelling up and grinding for more gear.
However - like the actual shooting and RPG systems themselves - it's technically excellent. Level design is top-notch, and action areas feel expertly crafted to perfectly suit the game's solid cover mechanics. That's a fancy way of saying that the places where you shoot all the dudes are really neatly put together. You'll often find that cover is thoughtfully placed to allow you the chance to make a risky run for a better angle on a group of bad guys. More than that, mission areas are perfectly suited to smart team tactics - you can plan ambushes and react on the fly to enemy movements, all while maintaining those all-important lines of sight on your foes. Most of my mission playthroughs were with random, silent allies during my time in The Division and everyone instinctively knew how to make the most of cover, how to coordinate strikes on enemies, and how to spread attacks during boss fights. The world design is that good.
Combat itself is decent, and works perfectly in tandem with the environment. The Division is all about creating angles - get into the right spot and you can hose an enemy with ease, but if they dig in and you start a straight, cover-based shoot-out things get much trickier. Navigating between cover-points is a joy too, thanks to the easy 'see and go' system. Weapons? Yup, they make the right noises and feel (on the whole) pretty balanced. There are, however, a couple of downsides to the action. Firstly, bullet-sponge enemies aren't to everyone's taste, and The Division's enemies are VERY spongey. While I'm reasonably happy pouring ammo into regular enemies, there's something tiresome about endlessly plugging away at bosses and elite foes. This game is at its best when you're constantly moving and killing, tactically out-manoeuvring enemies to win each encounter. But boss and elite battles feel more like a war of attrition, as you dig into cover and slowly whittle their health to zero before they can do the same to you. It's a real problem when the end-game is all elite, all the time.
The second real problem with The Division's combat is what I'm calling a 'lack of magic'. And it's here where I'm going to be horribly predictable and mention Destiny (you knew it was coming, so don't look so shocked). Everything in this game feels both literally and figuratively grounded. Your movements are, quite rightly, restricted to anything real human beings can do - you crouch behind cars, lean out, maybe vault over an obstacle or two... but that's it. In Destiny (and games like Titanfall and Black Ops 3) you're super-powered, and able to zip around the environment both vertically and horizontally. You can pause in mid-air and shoot, or wall-run around foes, or double-jump as a desperate dodge for cover. Next to these games The Division feels very static, very vanilla.
Not only that, you can't shoot lightning out of your hands. Yes, yes - that's a very reductionist way of saying that The Division's perks are incredibly restrained next to the special abilities found in other persistent shooters. And I know this game is all about degrees of realism, but it feels an awful lot like The Division is desperate for some violent magic, but is only able to sneak a little in via credible means. I've got a gun, for example, that heals me a bit when I kill enemies. That's the kind of frustration I'm talking about, because it's essentially 'space magic', but slipped subtly into the game under the guise of 'maybe futuristic tech maybe'. This game can't have outlandish perks, and that's one reason it feels restrained and a little dull next to its competitors, despite doing all the technical stuff exceptionally well.
Again, it comes back to this lack of magic or spark. The Division doesn't want for customisation options or actual stuff to do - you can fiddle with your loadout for hours, or grind for slightly better gear for months - but there's very little that makes a significant difference to how the game actually plays. Essentially, you're keeping pace with the increasing damage demands of the bullet-sponge enemies, and the quantity in which they appear.
There is one element of The Division that is truly excellent, that genuinely sets the game apart: the Dark Zone. Eschewing traditional multiplayer for something more tactical, this game uses raw human nature to create a PvPvE experience that's wonderfully tense and utterly infuriating (in a good way) all at once. In the Dark Zone it's you and uneasy allies against a collection of increasingly tough enemies that drop better loot than most foes in the regular game. Problem is that the gear is contaminated, so you need to call in a chopper to extract it... making you a prime target for everybody in the area. This always creates a unique type of stand-off between you and other players. Sure, you need to work together to repel any attackers, but what then? Do you help your mate extract his gear then load yours? Or do you shoot them in the back and take it ALL? I don't care how nice you are, how solid your friendship... you're always going to feel that urge to take it all, or that creeping paranoia that your friend is plotting your demise. It's such a wonderful, brilliant system, and easily The Division's smartest, most enjoyable feature.
It's one of the few significant glimmers of warmth, of humanity, in an otherwise cold game. There's little doubt that The Division understands how to be a persistent MMO-shooter, but it perhaps lacks that understanding of why players continue to log-in to its competitors months and years after they start playing. Even the end-game, which is technically sound, lacks the variety or substance to entertain long-term. Perhaps the introductions of Incursions will change everything, but given the game's limited flexibility in terms of both functionality and themes, it seems more likely that these missions will simply be longer, tougher versions of what's already on offer. In the interests of fairness, I'll certainly revisit this review in a few months when I've had the chance to test a couple of Incursions. Until then, the cold facts are that The Division is a competent shooter, an accomplished RPG, but an ultimately limited experience that's unlikely to remain your gaming obsession of choice for longer than a few months.
For the last twelve years, I have been the editor of the CCCC-IP Annual, and it feels strange and exciting for me to write a review of a publication I have led for so long. I took a yearly IP report founded by John Logie and have consistently worked to bring what may seem like dry, inconsequential details of case law, university IP policy, and plagiarism cases to life for the field of rhetoric and composition studies. I have tracked news stories about copyright, authorship, and intellectual property and crafted generative CFPs each year. I have made open invitations to anyone in the field to contribute to the Annual, not only those whose primary research interests are in IP, and several have accepted. Over the last several years, colleagues have suggested that I build on the work of the Annual in some way, do some form of synthesis, and this review is my response to that encouragement.
A review is an established genre with a purpose: to help people figure out whether or not a book or other artifact is something they want to read, watch, or otherwise experience. Academic reviews have the added purpose of situating a text in a scholarly conversation and contextualizing its contribution to the knowledge in composition studies. What I offer here is to some extent a review specifically of the articles about plagiarism in the Annual, but it is also similar to a retrospective, a genre closely associated with the journal Composition Forum.
"Intellectual property law, policy, and research" is a wide tent of subject matter, and authors have focused on a range of topics such as open access publication, copyright infringement litigation, trade agreements, instructors' ownership of course materials (particularly within online courses), plagiarism detection services (notably Turnitin), environmental/animal issues, and reviews of longer publications from advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
This is not a review in the traditional sense of reviewing an entire work of scholarship. I'm not going to review all the articles in all thirteen volumes of the IP Annual. Instead, I want to center on the interesting work that the IP Annual authors have done about plagiarism; taken together, the articles about plagiarism constitute an insightful contribution to the field of rhetoric and composition. Plagiarism is, of course, a long-standing research emphasis in composition pedagogy, with decades of scholarship demonstrating the theories and practices of understanding, accounting for, and anticipating plagiarism in writing courses. The IP Annual has published thirteen articles over the years devoted to plagiarism. Some have examined classroom contexts, and others have analyzed high-profile public plagiarism cases. These were almost always in public discourse outside the context of the classroom, dealing with a variety of writing and speaking contexts and genres not captured in writing courses. These cases, when examined as a group, make it clearer than ever that discovering and exposing plagiarism is deeply fraught and does not arise out of a pure motive of defending academic integrity. Far more often, discovering and exposing plagiarism involves notions of expediency, profiteering, corruption, hypocrisy, uncertainty, sabotage, power, and privilege.
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