Mask-Off and Hands-Off Racism in “Elite Squad”

Warning: This article contains discussion of anti-Black racism, violence, police brutality, and murder.

Recently, Ubisoft — and its subsidiary studio Owlient — produced a mobile game adding to the publisher’s line of Tom Clancy-affiliated games, titled Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad. This new release quickly met well-deserved backlash for the content. Particularly content included in its opening cinematic, shared online by YouTube user dustinscout.

The video, since shared across multiple social media networks, centers on an extrajudicial, international force known as the titular “elite squad.” They are tasked with defeating a shadowy, “faceless organization” named UMBRA that “wants to build a new world order,” whose icon very closely resembles the Black Power fist. According to French journalist Oscar Lemaire, subsequent cutscenes in the game reveal that “UMBRA’s final plan is triggering a global pandemic to fully destabilize governments and take over.”

By tying this symbol to an organisation that “claim[s] to promote an egalitarian utopia to gain popular support, while behind the scenes [organizing] deadly terrorist attacks to generate even more chaos and weaken governments” and “hacking social media to discredit world leaders and rally people to their cause,” the game’s narrative feeds directly into alt-right, anti-Black racist, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

“New world order,” for instance, is a well-recognized dog whistle for right-wing populist conspiracy theorists. They often accuse opponents of masterminding such protests not as a “true expression of the people,” but rather as a calculated stratagem employed by a secretive elite. They believe that the ultimate goal is to masquerade an organized authoritarian takeover as a mobilization for justice.

Such conspiracies have their roots in not just deliberate disinformation but overt anti-Semitism, positing that this cabal of elites may be Jewish-led. They are further echoed in targeted alt-right efforts to paint the Black Lives Matter and Antifa movements — efforts further propagated by the Trump administration — not as independent protests and activism mounted in response to violent injustice. Instead, these efforts are painted as organized, deliberate “terrorist groups” posing threats to United States sovereignty.

In response to the backlash, Ubisoft’s and Elite Squad’s Twitter accounts each posted apologies that share enough wording that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume they were drafted together. They each reference having “listened to players and the broader community,” and Ubisoft claims to have since learned that “imagery that appeared in the opening video sequence of Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad featuring a ‘raised fist’ was insensitive and harmful in both its inclusion and how it was portrayed.”

The Elite Squad Twitter account further Tweeted on September 1st that they “have removed the entire opening video sequence” from the game. This may seem to be a step further than Ubisoft’s initial announcement that the “‘raised fist’ imagery [would] be removed in the next title update” on September 1st for Android and “as soon as possible” for iOS.

Ubisoft’s apologies are simply the latest of a number of milquetoast, carefully crafted PR statements that ultimately demonstrate very little accountability. Not only do they not even scratch the surface of criticisms shared, they not only miss the point. They stand, in fact, at cross-purposes with a YouTube comment from an Owlient representative, the studio responsible for developing the game, which reads as follows:

“In the intro video in Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad, UMBRA’s propaganda posters feature a raised fist. This logo was chosen because it is a universal symbol of resistance—any resemblance to images associated with the Black Lives Matter movement is coincidental. Tom Clancy’s Elite Squad is a work of fiction and does not portray any real world events. However, we have listened to players who have pointed out similarities, and to avoid any confusion we have decided to modify the trailer in the next update.”

None of these three statements take any ownership for the larger issues with the game of which the appropriation of an almost identically mirrored Black Power fist is only an emblem.

The creative director for the game, and head of Owlient, is Charlie Guillemot, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot’s son. He was promoted to general manager of Owlient just six months after completing his master’s degree, in yet another show of well-established nepotism within the company.

Contracted writers joining the backlash were (one can only assume) deliberately misled about the content they would be helping to produce for the game, which has not been addressed in public or internal statements. The gameplay openly includes loot boxes that can be purchased with real money. This was added well after they have been decried as a predatory monetization and gambling mechanic harmful to children and vulnerable gamers.

The removal of the symbol from this opening cinematic does nothing to change the game’s premise, and Ubisoft has not responded to inquiries by press outlets regarding any story changes.

Such narratives do not only directly threaten the lives of civilian protesters mobilizing against violent anti-Black racism and police brutality. Equally, they contribute to murders committed by radicalized young white men who are then allowed to walk away by law enforcement until social media outrage becomes too vocal to ignore. Leaning into these beliefs does not play well as an act of benign unknowing or genuine ignorance, and one would be hard-pressed to buy into the “sincerity” of any apology, set against this backdrop.

As with any new release, multiple steps went into the design of this game, requiring multiple people to sign off on it at each step of the way. The matter is simple: Ubisoft has no leg to stand on with claims that it didn’t know something was wrong with the game’s content until social media users told them. They knew, and released the game anyway, and now seem to be acknowledging only the topmost layer of criticisms received to cover themselves. They are ignoring everything that their choice of “aesthetics” truly represents.