Detroit: Become Human

[magistrate]

A while ago, I watched Markiplier play Presentable Liberty, which is quite possibly the worst-constructed game I've ever seen. The graphics are (I think intentionally) terrible, the sound design is generic at best, the writing is clunky and heavy-handed, the gameplay looks excruciating (and is at times so incredibly boring that Markiplier just cuts it out of the video entirely), the plot is entirely composed of plotholes (which the game mechanics actively make worse) and hackneyed, obvious tropes, and...

...and despite all of this, Markiplier finds it – and I find it, watching Markiplier – an inescapably affecting experience.

So anyway, a bit ago, I followed rionaleonhart into Detroit: Become Human fandom-adjacency, because Riona is an excellent person to vicariously experience fandoms through. And... okay, Detroit: Become Human is not as bad as Presentable Liberty. Or possibly it's worse, because it reaches higher and thus has farther to fall.

Unlike Presentable Liberty, it's extremely well-executed. The graphics are good, the acting is good, the branching decision trees and their effects on the narrative are ambitious (though the game still looks extremely railroady at points), the soundtracks – three soundtracks, one for each playable character – are utterly gorgeous, the characters are frequently engaging, the environments are frequently lovely, much of the scene choreography is captivating and moving, the script... has numerous, numerous issues, but also frequent sparks of excellence, and...

Aaand the plot is made of plotholes, and structured upon a thematic scaffold which pokes through the skin of the story like a horrifically broken set of bones, in a way that's really quite excruciating to see.

The plot of D:BH is basically this: in the near future, androids have become pervasive in American society, and have pushed a lot of people out of service positions and other "unskilled" labor jobs, causing massive unemployment and widespread resentment. And then several of them start spontaneously generating free will (becoming "deviants"), usually in response to some kind of traumatic event like being set on fire by humans who hate them. Against this backdrop, you play, variously, as:

1. An android detective designed to find out why androids are developing free will, and stop it from happening,

2. An android who's been raised like a human (sort of), who thinks it's high time for all androids to develop free will and stop being "treated like slaves" (or, er, like machines), and

3. An android whose traumatic event is witnessing child abuse, who wants to escape all this malarky and find a place where she and her kidnapdopted child can be safe.

Right away there are some issues with lack of nuance in how the world is set up. People never seem to question the fact that "Hey, androids make everything easier!" leads directly into "So there's massive unemployment" and not into "...so we can easily provide for more people"; most of the humans in the foreground and background are there to be Generic Oppressors; we see very little variation in human-android relationships (it averages aboooooout one non-hostile human-android relationship per storyline); there are all kinds of fascinating questions about how humans interface with technology which are relevant today with all our non-sentient machines, which never even seem to be considered in the game; that sort of thing. The story world very much feels like it's been trimmed down to tell the story the writer wanted to tell.

And the story the writer wanted to tell – and this is the big problem – is a sweeping civil rights allegory, except that David Cage seems to think that the rhetoric and mechanisms of civil rights struggles are interchangeable, and that he can scrape the surface of the USA's history of chattel slavery and the 1960s Civil Rights era and just kinda lay it on top of the world he's created. Which is not how any aspect of history works, let alone one as complicated as a civil rights movement.

And, I mean, there are fleets and fleets of supporting problems, which all contribute to the overall flaming mess. For example:

* The game is never quite clear, on whether all androids have will and emotion from the getgo and are just forced by circumstance to suffer in silence, or whether free will and emotion are emergent properties of the complexity of androids functioning in the world, or whether generation of free will is a spontaneous event. (This is a RATHER BIG QUESTION for the ethical questions the game is trying to raise. And the answer seems to be, "What's best for this paragraph's pathos?")

* One character's arc is deeply riddled with questions of complicity, which all get swept under the rug if the player chooses a heel-face turn later in the game. (As the game renders it, it's not even an "I was just obeying orders" moment, it's a "No, it was literally not me making those decisions, it's all good.")

* Through much of the triumphant-march-to-freedom arc, not only is it possibly that your player character is brainwashing people to follow them, it's also entirely possible that the issue of them being sentient beings it might be possible to oppress and not machines which cannot meaningfully experience oppression is one that you're triggering, without any regard for how it'll affect the world, the political situation, or the individuals in question. (Like, if I break into your house and uplift your computer, and then flip out at you for not respecting the sentient rights of your uplifted computer, I'm not sure the moral issues are as clear-cut as I'd be acting as though they were.)

* And there's the issue of a massive civil rights revolution going from "Literally no one knows we exist as people, and everyone hates us as machines." to "We won recognition from the government! Yay!" in basically five days.

AND ONE COULD GO ON.

All in all, Detroit: Become Human is a game which raises fascinating questions, then fails to answer any of them. And then attempts to engage with questions which its worldbuilding consistently fails to support. I hate it, I love it, I desperately wish it were better, and because I am me and potentia is potentia, I seem to have been bitten hard by the braintic bug. Goddamnit.

...but that may be an entirely separate post.