After spending some considerable (and often unnecessarily extended) time driving around the environments of Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2, it becomes apparent that the hybrid genre it champions, that between First Person Shooter and free-roaming Role Playing, reveals something very telling about the new sociological terrain that videogaming is (or rather isn't) heading in.

For its primary selling point, Far Cry 2 incorporates a fully realised ‘sandbox’ environment into its design. Rather than follow the trend of First Person Action games, with their typically linear approach to progression, the game presents its world, a war-ravaged African savannah, in full open-ended, non-linear fashion. This is a gameplay feature more suited to the RPG tendencies of Oblivion or Fallout 3. Although there have always been crossovers between the First Person Action and RPG genres, and the previous Far Cry games demonstrated a somewhat non-linear approach to player progression through their jungle worlds, Far Cry 2 goes the whole way. Ditching linear strings of missions tied to specific maps, it sets its action in one single, vast world.

The presentation of this world is pretty much seamless: twenty-four hour night/day cycles, fire spreads through the grasslands in a realistic manner, and indigenous wildlife behaves realistically to the player’s actions. The narrative cause for him being there in the first place, however, is far less believable

The trailer for the game, shown at this year’s E3, demonstrated an imagined post-Mugabe Africa, one torn apart by civil war. The African voice over in the trailer presented the plight of the country and its people in a way that might reflect the nightmare of an unfettered Post Colonial dictatorship, in the grip of a power-hungry general. “How can such a man be stopped?” the African voice over asks. “They’ll send someone,” an American one replies. You, as the gamer, play as a lone mercenary, sent in to take out its leader and restore order. It’s at this precise moment where the game's seamless presentation is broken, at the point where the discourse between Africa and America is avoided, where the former is literally colonised on the trailer’s soundtrack by the latter. In gameplay terms, the game renders complex political problems apolitical, by representing them through a single first person perspective, reducing them to a privatised, entertaining and trigger-happy battlefield. While it may be filled with all manner of realistic environmental features for the player to drive and shoot through, the continual and often repetitive assaults by the same sets of average thirty-something men shows up the sparse perspective of social diversity.

If games are to take their realism seriously, why should they stop at the level of visuals or physics? Why not put the narrative to use in rendering the game world believable? Far Cry 2, despite its merits, merely furthers the notion of Hyper-Post Colonialism, where the landscape of Africa is merely the private playground of the intrepid foreigner. If games are to truly become the most popular entertainment pastime of the future as Microsoft's E3 conference suggested, then they’re going to have to rival the narrative complexity of film. I would be worried if games were to replace the cultural power of film, if this were to be the type of entertainment they would present us with: not necessarily mind numbing, but certainly avoiding the global issues of Post Colonialism that films like The Last King Of Scotland tackle head on.