“Press X to fight oppression.”

June 1, 2018 8:59 AM

Detroit: Become Human review: a beautiful vision of the future gets stuck in the past [The Verge] “Like many socially marginalized groups before them, their demands are simple: they just want the same rights as everyone else. Just in case the historical and modern parallels haven’t hit you over the head hard enough enough, your character — the head of the group — can lead them in chanting the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “We have a dream!” But the protesters in Detroit aren’t people of color demonstrating for their human rights. Indeed, they aren’t human at all, but rather sentient androids. And if it seems like a bad idea to bluntly map the complexities of race, slavery, and the civil rights struggle in America on to the struggles of fictional robots — well, it is.”

• Detroit: Become Human review: Robotic in all of the wrong ways [Ars Technica]

“For a game so focused on presenting a seamless interactive cinematic story, the most striking thing about Detroit: Become Human is its exposed seams. Like the world’s most slickly produced choose-your-own-adventure book, the latest David Cage game lets you play with narrative conventions and mess with the inherent connective tissue of the story in some intriguing ways. But that underlying story ends up so fragmented, so poorly executed, and so clunkily written that it’s very difficult to appreciate the narrative playspace.”

• Detroit: Become Human is like something my Alexa would come up with [Kotaku]

“A science fiction story is only as interesting as the society it imagines, but Detroit’s theoretical future is unfortunately dull. In this vision of 2038, people still use personal computers and play MMOs, magazines still reside on touchscreen tablets, and cars are basically just futured-up versions of the self-driving prototypes we see on the tech blogs of today. The sole fantastical element is the fact that there are advanced androids everywhere, a transformative technology that serves to make the rest of the world feel all the flatter. Detroit is so eager to get to the hot robot morality action that it largely neglects to fill in the small, surprising details that make sci-fi futures so fun to ponder.”

• Detroit: Become Human tackles civil rights without a grasp of history [Polygon]

“Perhaps director and lead writer David Cage, whose work at his studio Quantic Dream is best defined as “foreign-made, interactive interpretations of maudlin Hollywood drama,” focused on themes as heady as prejudice, discrimination, social inequality and domestic abuse in the hopes of calling attention to these serious issues. And, yes, to do so is certainly well-meaning. But Detroit: Become Human fails to either challenge or reflect upon the ramifications of abuse or the history of the civil rights movement, around which its three storylines cohere. Instead, we’re given surface-level storytelling with serious, historically complex topics thrown in as set dressing. I wonder if Detroit’s creators seek to elevate a message of social justice, or if they hope the message will lend importance to the game, giving it a weight and seriousness Cage has sought throughout his career. The answer is probably a bit of both.”

• Detroit: Become Human: meticulous multiverse of interactive fiction [The Guardian]

“Indeed, the way that the story bends and morphs around the player is much more interesting than the story itself. Decisions have weight: do you pursue a rogue android across a busy highway, or let it escape? Do you choose to go against an android character’s programming, or comply with its human masters? Main characters can perish, cutting off their narrative completely. Whole scenes – hours of play – can be missed because of a single, seemingly insignificant decision. The variety of choices, and where they lead, is staggering. Detroit: Beyond Human opens up the bonnet, allowing players to see their path through the game on a branching tree diagram, and return later to direct their characters towards a different fate. Once the credits rolled, I could look back at what I had missed; I doubt I had even experienced a fifth of this intertwined, spider-webbing multiverse the first time around.”

• Detroit: Become Human: “An ambitious, wonderfully executed piece of storytelling” [GamesRadar+]

“What really helps you understand the depth of the experience are the end-of-level flowcharts, which show you all the choices you made, the consequences they had, and the potential outcomes you missed. While at first appearing to be a clumsy way for the writers to boast about how much stuff is in the game, it quickly becomes a spark for your curiosity. You want to know what might have happened if you’d taken a different path, and it can be staggering to see just how much of the plot you missed because of a single decision you made, or an encounter you failed. Much has been made of how all the main characters can die, but a greater fear for me lay in wondering what might have been. It’s an exceptionally smart way to encourage several replays of the story, and the nature of how involved you get means that many will choose to experience the whole thing again, instead of just picking at individual scenes to see what they can change.”

posted by Fizz (43 comments total)

[press X to sadness]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:03 AM on June 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

Honestly, the most efficient way to devalue any Civil Rights movement is to base it around quick-time events.
posted by FatherDagon at 9:05 AM on June 1, 2018 [6 favorites]

I don't have a PS4, so I've been enjoying streams of the game, mostly through a very satiric and humorous lens. So much of what they're wanting to say as a political statement just falls flat and/or absurd. It's made for some hilarity.
posted by Fizz at 9:13 AM on June 1, 2018

Press X to Completely Misunderstand Because You're A Mediocre White Man
posted by zerolives at 9:15 AM on June 1, 2018 [11 favorites]

You know the X-Mens trick of totally beinga metaphor but not really being enough of a metaphor you can pin it down and so that makes it really interesting and adaptable?

Doesn't seem like this pulls that off.
posted by Artw at 9:17 AM on June 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

I will say this though, the game is beautiful. It's approaching that uncanny weirdness where I'm sort of grossed out by how real things are.
posted by Fizz at 9:21 AM on June 1, 2018

David Cage really does seem to me like he's trying to make games that feel like prestige films, and he always nails that specific sort of tries-to-be-woke-but-is-extremely-racist Crash or Spanglish or The Blind Side Oscar attempt.
posted by The Bridge on the River Kai Ryssdal at 9:22 AM on June 1, 2018 [9 favorites]

the end-of-level flowcharts,

Huh, this is a design choice I haven't heard people discussing but interests me. Like, usually in these branching-narrative games, the extent of what your other choices could have lead to remains more obscured.
posted by RobotHero at 9:25 AM on June 1, 2018

My roommate bought this game, and I walked through the living room while a white woman walked him through the customization options. A little while later, I walked through the living room while his avatar - a white male android - experienced a cut scene in an elevator. And shortly thereafter, his first conflict, with another white male android.

Then some more scenes. A homeless man is holding a sign saying that androids took his job. A line of androids are waiting by the side of the street. Close-up of a white female android with a pensive expression.

Detroit, y'all.

Maybe I'm being dismissive. I haven't played the game. But it certainly struck me.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:25 AM on June 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

In this vision of 2038, people still use personal computers and play MMOs, magazines still reside on touchscreen tablets, and cars are basically just futured-up versions of the self-driving prototypes we see on the tech blogs of today.

Of all the criticisms here--how far in the future does Kotaku think 2038 is? Because in 1998, I was using a PC and playing video games and cars were still basically recognized as cars, and in 2018 I am still using a (nicer) PC and playing (way nicer) video games and my car has a backup camera and Bluetooth and is otherwise basically the same car. So yeah, it's bizarre to me that this is the criticism and not "I am deeply dubious that we are going to have realistic androids with feelings in 2038". Twenty years is not that long, and if anything I think one of the big problems here is that it's too soon. If you want to do [insert future thing here] as a metaphor for race, and you put it in a time period where race itself is probably still going to be a huge issue, and then you don't deal with that...

I'm sure 2038 still feels incredibly far away if you're 17, but at 37, I'm just like, 2038 is the kind of future like "I hope I own a house by then", not "I wonder if people's robot servants will be self-aware by then".
posted by Sequence at 9:30 AM on June 1, 2018 [17 favorites]

Press X to Completely Misunderstand Because You're A Mediocre White Man
zerolives

Are you saying David Cage misunderstood in making the game, or that critics of the game are misunderstanding?
posted by Sangermaine at 9:37 AM on June 1, 2018

I think the wave of sentient robots on the past years kind of took off any wing this would have on its' sails storywise. Between Westworld (debuted last year after a troublesome development cycle that delayed it ), Real Humans (2012) / Humans (2015), Almost Human (cancelled 2014), and even the Augs on Deus Ex for the hamfisted social metaphors (2011 and 2016), this feels it is coming at least a couple of years later to the party without bringing anything new other than the David Cage, uh, "shine".

David Cage really does seem to me like he's trying to make games that feel like prestige films, and he always nails that specific sort of tries-to-be-woke-but-is-extremely-racist Crash or Spanglish or The Blind Side '00s Oscar play.
Since Fahrenheit (which was an OK adventure game, but rushed as fuuuuuuuck to the point of spoilage and not as good as the classic adventure games or even Shenmue, which I'm not a great fan of) I have the impression he really wanted to make movies, but couldn't even clear the minimum requirements to write a pitch to get funding. In videogames it's easier to hid those.
(Also probably worth pointing out when the French press accused Quantic of a toxic work environment, he almost literally pulled the "black friend" card twice)
posted by lmfsilva at 9:38 AM on June 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Jim Sterling's video [NSFW] goes on for a while about how he's pretty sure that Cage painfully desires to be an auteur filmmaker but can only manage to slum it as a game auteur because he's just not talented. Crash is a good point of reference, I think, in terms of being a probably-earnest attempt by a white auteur to grapple with something he just doesn't understand. Jim's video is also good for showing off the "gameplay", which is incredibly stiff and unimmersive. It's very much the flip side of Edith Finch.

Anyway, if you only have time to read one of the above written reviews, Allegra Frank's at Polygon is very good.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:13 AM on June 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

If each storyline in this game had been written and directed by a survivor of the kind of hell it depicts, I would be interested. Right now, and into the future, it is not the role of rich cis white men to tell other people's stories. It is the role of them to sit the fuck down and let other people tell their own stories. Maybe rich cis white men can fund the production, but creatively they need to opt way the hell out. I say this as a relatively rich, kinda cis white man.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:15 AM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

this feels it is coming at least a couple of years later to the party without bringing anything new other than the David Cage, uh, "shine".

I do generally feel for game developers because a game that might be in production for 3 or 4 years has no way of knowing how the gaming market has shifted, whether everyone will still want team-based first person shooters or if Battle Royale will still be a thing.

That being said, this doesn't excuse shitty politics or social commentary. If you want to make a statement, it's on you as a writer/producer to be considerate and try to think about how your message will be received and it should be respectful.
posted by Fizz at 10:18 AM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that was clearly not his fault, he was just slower to get his product to the market than those shows I've mentioned, plus movies like Ex Machina (2015) and Blade Runner 2049 (last year) that touched the same subjects.

His problem is that he's not that good at what he's doing, and given Quantic's gameplay-light games, he can't compensate for arriving late at a market that has a lot better written, barely less interactive alternatives.
posted by lmfsilva at 10:42 AM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Of all the criticisms here--how far in the future does Kotaku think 2038 is?

This is a constant problem with all futurism. We're 17 years late for a moonbase, jupiter mission, and cryosleep. And I seriously doubt Alexa can run a spaceship yet.
posted by lumpenprole at 11:12 AM on June 1, 2018

Ok so maybe we don't have moon bases yet. But I think people of the past would be suitably wowed by how advanced our advertisement technology is!
posted by Pyry at 11:24 AM on June 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

Alexa could, TBH, Run most aspects of a small car right now. Except maybe the not crashing into unexpected road crossers bit. A spaceship would be considerably simpler than that last.
posted by Artw at 11:32 AM on June 1, 2018

Alexa could, TBH, Run most aspects of a small car right now. Except maybe the not crashing into unexpected road crossers bit.

Yeah, I'm thinking we need to be a bit more careful with our AI. Mostly because of this: Google Assistant fired a gun: We need to talk
posted by Fizz at 11:45 AM on June 1, 2018

> Press X to Completely Misunderstand Because You're A Mediocre White Man

For real. Let's break this one down:
The Verge - Andrew Webster
Ars Technica - Kyle Orland
Kotaku - Kirk Hamilton
Polygon - Allegra Frank (Finally!)
The Guardian - Oliver Holmes
GamesRadar - Andy Hartup

Not that all of these reviewers are particularly negative or try to add their two cents about how the story handles social issues, but I'm illustrating the point zerolives was making.

Personally, I have some problems with David Cage and don't expect much from him and Quantic Dream other than delivering an entertaining interactive experience. So, my "thematic nuance" bar was already pretty low. With that said, I'm still waiting for Austin Walker and Waypoint to join the fray.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 11:51 AM on June 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

All of the horrible things that used to happen because of runaway AI in Science Fiction are old hat now we have have it, and now we have an entirely new, more mundane and much more crappy set of problems, a significant proportion of which are to do with advertising.
posted by Artw at 11:54 AM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

The social dynamics are..... yeah.

The three main characters can all pass for white. I initially read Marcus (the male android who isn’t the cop) as white-passing black, and the reactions of other white LetsPlayers indicate they had a similar “not quite white” read on him, but he’s definitely white passing.

The only female main character’s story centers around her being a caretaker for a child. The violence directed at her is also very gendered: domestic abuse and sexual trafficking. There are no warnings for the incredibly violent and intimate quality of the violence on her track, and the LetsPlayer I watched actually stopped playing to process with her Stream afterwards because it was so disturbing.

Kara’s story has also been dominated by men outside of the child she is protecting. I’m trying to think of a time she’s interacted with a woman so far and come up blank. I’m trying to think of a time a woman has spoken to a woman and am also coming up blank. It would be amazing/depressing if a game of this size can’t pass the Bechtel test because all of the female characters are periferal and Kara needs to be abused continuously by men because that’s what the writers think women’s stories have to be.

The first unambiguously Black character you meet is explicitly coded a criminal and will end up dead no matter how long you manage to keep him alive. The second Black man you meet is a fugitive. The third you meet slots into the “hulking, silent Black man threat/protector” to Kara’s “vulnerable white woman” complete with her recoiling from him in fear when she first meets him. Given this is all in the context of a slave narrative, complete with a fucking Underground Railroad analog - ew.

Two Black women have shown up so far, one as an enigmatic guide to a white man and the other as an enigmatic guide and healer to a white passing man. Yeah.

In Marcus’ story he’s met a woman who might be coded Latina (again, ambiguous) and if so she’s a shoo-in for the “fiery Latina love interest” to Marcus’ “white-passing rebel protagonist” vibe. She’s been rude to him “for no reason” already, so we’re all set for “male author rewrites women he wanted to date” fun.

The class dynamics are also pretty vile. Almost all of the people doing direct violence to androids are coded as poor. The only people being kind to Androids are coded as wealthy, and in one case that kindness is ambiguous.

The “rich white guy with a body slave” is so far literally the kindest person so far, so much so that his son became jealous, despite the historical reality that rich white men who owned slaves visited the most violence on their slaves, even if it might be though their agents and not directly. Rich guy also is explicitly rich through being a famous artist, so he’s set up as this pure martyr above and inspiring the narrative. Given reality, it’s really gross.

All in all, this manages to fail along class, race, and gender lines, often by replaying middle class white male narratives without exploring them. The only reason sexuality isn’t included by me is that so far it hasn’t really come up (but I have an Android brothel in my future, so yay?)

That being said, it’s an excellent vehicle for actual analysis and discussion of false myth versus reality. His wrongness is the kind of wrongness that privileged people need to justify themselves to themselves, but it’s so ham-fisted that it will most likely make even the privileged feel uncomfortable.
posted by Deoridhe at 12:03 PM on June 1, 2018 [18 favorites]

I find that Naughty Dog's cinematic aspirations pay off better than Cage's.
posted by reiichiroh at 1:28 PM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Y'all know about "Judgement Day", right?
posted by CCBC at 1:34 PM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

the end-of-level flowcharts,

...usually in these branching-narrative games, the extent of what your other choices could have lead to remains more obscured.

[The Flow Chart will remember that.]
posted by straight at 1:36 PM on June 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

I find that Naughty Dog's cinematic aspirations pay off better than Cage's.

Different things? Naughty Dog goes for the blockbuster. Quantic tries to get into Sundance. But, yeah.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:46 PM on June 1, 2018

Of all the criticisms here--how far in the future does Kotaku think 2038 is? ... I am still using a (nicer) PC and playing (way nicer) video games and my car has a backup camera and Bluetooth and is otherwise basically the same car. So yeah, it's bizarre to me that this is the criticism and not "I am deeply dubious that we are going to have realistic androids with feelings in 2038".

I think the point is that those things don't go together. If we ever have fully-intelligent androids, whenever that is, then computers, video games, cars, and a whole bunch of other stuff would be radically transformed. They would be transformed long before that on the way to getting there.

It's like imagining a world where everyone has cell phones but hasn't developed any other technology that uses radio waves.
posted by straight at 2:01 PM on June 1, 2018 [4 favorites]

In general I think that the "robots who look like humans and think like humans and are starting to feel human emotions too" is a narrative that has been pretty well depleted of interesting things to say at this point. But the transitional robots between now and humans-in-all-but-superficial-details is an area that hasn't been explored nearly as well: what happens when we have roombas as intelligent as dogs? What happens when a $4 billion dollar smart cruise ship decides it wants more autonomy?
posted by Pyry at 2:32 PM on June 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

What happens when the social media ranking algorithm set up to maximize advertising revenue develops no interiority whatsoever but destroys democracy anyway is probably more interesting than any variant on pinocchio at this point. Not to actually live in though.
posted by Artw at 2:37 PM on June 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm illustrating the point zerolives was making.

I'm pretty sure zerolives was talking about David Cage. ("Press X to...")
posted by kmz at 2:49 PM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm just like, 2038 is the kind of future like "I hope I own a house by then", not "I wonder if people's robot servants will be self-aware by then".

Offhand, I think there's a much better chance that we'll have self-aware robot servants than that I'll own a house.

But otherwise, a lot of elements of daily life are going to be recognizable. The basic elements of city and home structure are not going to change all that much. I mean hell, cities and houses and lifestyles from the 70s are recognizable.

On the other hand...

And I seriously doubt Alexa can run a spaceship yet.

The overall memory of the Apollo spaceship was around 72K. It literally used wires wrapped around magnetic cores. I could run the Apollo missions off my Android phone, and have more than enough room for Pokemon Go and Microsoft Office.

But then the calculations for spaceflight are simple. duplicating self-awareness and consciousness, now that's hard.
posted by happyroach at 3:46 PM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Hmm. Its just occured to me that the SecUnits of the Murderbot series ride in the luggage. Somehow that didn't seem like a clumbsy Rosa Parks analogy though.
posted by Artw at 4:15 PM on June 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

I am eternally grateful that in about a decade we've managed to go from 'David Cage is a visionary game director doing things no-one else is even trying' to 'David Cage is a hack'.
posted by Merus at 8:39 PM on June 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Hmm. Its just occured to me that the SecUnits of the Murderbot series ride in the luggage. Somehow that didn't seem like a clumbsy Rosa Parks analogy though.

A big part of that is because it's written from Murderbot's perspective, and they most definitely don't want to be in front. With the humans. Being social. Murderbot is blissfully free from either the "Pinocchio Syndrome" or the "Kill all Humans" cliches.
posted by happyroach at 9:37 PM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was hoping that maybe after Heavy Rain (or at least, how people have regarded it over the past few years, in contrast to the frankly baffling praise it received around release) people would be amused by the incredibly hacky prospect of Detroit: Become Human but would be too smart to buy it. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of people feel that "Hey, this is going to be a total garbage fire of a game and also definitely very racist and it's written and directed by a guy who abuses his employees and threatens reporters" naturally leads to "Let's be sure to reward him with our money!"

I guess any decision is justifiable as long as we got our lulz?
posted by IAmUnaware at 1:46 AM on June 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

One of the more trivial problems with mapping the human rights struggles of sentient humans on those of manmade machines is that it undercuts the tension and ambiguity that's supposed to drive this narrative and prejudices the reader/viewer/player to the side of "these machines are absolutely conscious and human, the end". You're basically a racist if you disagree and don't think the androids or AIs in these kind of stories are alive in any meaningful sense. That can be sort of okay if the creator is thoughtfully trying to use androids as an analogy for oppressed peoples (though, why not create something about actual oppression then?), but usually it's the other way around: the struggles of oppressed people become an analogy for how we treat non-conscious machines that model human behavior in increasingly complex ways.

Which now that I think about it is more than trivial and makes this trope actually pretty goddamn racist.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 4:44 AM on June 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

People seem really enamored of "should resistance be violent? yes/no" and I was very suspicious they'd take a similar approach here.

I'm skimming this guide of the different paths the story can take and there are repeated references to the human opinion of androids relying upon whether you're violent or non-violent.

And yeah, I feel like the powers that be would like to boil all discussion of resistance down to this one question. If you answer "non-violent" they promptly lose interest because it no longer effects them.

I kind of want a management game of the Montgomery bus boycott where you're organizing car pools and stuff.

Given two things, shouldn't these androids be advocating for dismantling of capitalism? First, people are complaining the androids took their jobs. Second, the androids don't have rights of their own because they're seen as property. Shouldn't they be able to team up against the android owners? But I can't find anything that sounds like that in the path guide.
posted by RobotHero at 9:12 AM on June 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Come to think of it, I like that as a story. Like, you'd have these Luddites going to smash the machines that have replaced them, and then the machine are like, "You know, maybe we should work together."
posted by RobotHero at 10:07 AM on June 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

But Bioshock Infinite taught us that if there were a workers rebellion it would end up being exactly as bad as the regime it replaced.
posted by straight at 6:43 AM on June 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

With that said, I'm still waiting for Austin Walker and Waypoint to join the fray.

Not Austin, but here's a Waypoint piece by Yussef Cole:
'Detroit' Siphons and Squanders a History of Marginalized Struggle
posted by ODiV at 12:57 PM on June 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

The framing on this story reminded me of what I was talking about.

People kicking these food delivery robots is an early insight into how cruel humans could be to robots

The Pessimists Archive had things about people being enraged by the automobile. Throwing stones as it passes. Shouting "get a horse!" etc.

There's this temptation to go all crouton-petting regarding the robots while ignoring the dynamic between people who do and do not own robots.
posted by RobotHero at 9:08 AM on June 14, 2018

The Casual Inhumanity of How Detroit: Become Human Uses Black Culture
posted by RobotHero at 5:10 PM on June 14, 2018 [1 favorite]