Video game bugs may annoy and amuse, but they can also be strangely revealing. I've encountered plenty of minor and major errors in Hangar 13's Mafia 3, a hard-to-love but undeniably ambitious open-world crime sim, set in a thinly disguised remix of 1968 New Orleans. A few hours into the story, I was driving out of the bayou when the game's shadows went haywire, spinning around objects as though the sun were a police searchlight. Later, I somehow managed to impale an unconscious bartender on a stool, terrifying an old woman so much that her coffee cup became magically affixed to her hand as she ran for the exit.
And then there was that time I peered into a prostitute's dressing mirror during a raid on a rival gang's brothel and saw a corpulent, buck-naked white man, trapped like a frozen chicken in a purgatory of PS2-grade pixels. I'm not sure what the game's African-American lead Lincoln Clay made of this - the result, it seems, of a glitch whereby reflections lag a few seconds behind the action - but in that plump, affable spectre I belatedly recognised myself: another in a long line of privileged, complacent white guys, lurking in the background with his hands on the levers and buttons of the world.
This may sound melodramatic, an attempt to force my own political conscience on the game - but Mafia 3's greatest achievement, I think, is that it creates and sustains a space for such musings. Racism, intolerance and disaffection of all kinds are everywhere in Hangar 13's New Bordeaux, threaded into the emergent dialogue and art to an unprecedented degree. Opt for a stroll along the riverfront after clobbering a snitch, and you may stumble across a group of black dockworkers debating the merits of non-violent protest. Enter a jazz bar in the French Ward, with its faded wooden shutters and background simmer of stripclub music, and you might overhear an evangelical diatribe about interracial marriage.
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