Confederate Wing

Yet for all of these upgrades, Adam Jensen is not a machine either. He has thoughts and ideas. He can be creative and he can express human emotion. When he feels anger, he raises his voice. When he is annoyed, he becomes sarcastic and dismissive. When he is overwhelmed, his speech assumes the inflections and irregularities expected of someone in anguish. Although he may now be as susceptible to software viruses as he is to the common cold, he is driven by revenge and not by programming.

Adam Jensen blurs the line of what it means to be human. While the common question the unending forward march of technology often asks is when artificial intelligence will rival the human intellect, Deus Ex: Human Revolution asks at what point a person loses their humanity through technology. With all of his implants and augmentations shattering the limits of his natural potential, is Adam Jensen still human? Is he something more? Something less?

This is the question which frames the world of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. In the year 2027, Sarif Industries is on the verge of a technological breakthrough which will revolutionize human potential. Pharmaceutical giants have already been playing god with the human genome for years, but the results are less than ideal. The human body often rejects drastic augmentation, and the necessary corrective procedures and medication can enslave families to corporations for life. This innovation is poised to upset the current ethically nebulous balance of the world. Sarif believes that everyone should have the opportunity to become better than human. Pro humanity movements such as Purity First believe that mankind should not play God. Other shadowy corporations in competition with Sarif are pursuing their own agendas with private military operations. Adam Jensen is caught in the middle.

Many videogames are concerned with telling a story, but so few of them are interested in exploring a theme. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is one of these games; the theme of not just what it means to be human, but what the influence of technology means for our souls. For Sarif, himself a devout futurist with a cybernetic arm, there is no cost too great in the pursuit of technological advancement. The work of his company has the power to improve human potential universally. Though he may be involved in shadowy military contracts to pay the bills, the public face of his company balances the ethical scales by championing the right for every citizen to reap the benefits of his life improving work.

Regardless, part of the wider world views Sarif and those of similar inclinations as if they were false prophets, having become gods on earth from the marvellous machines they have created. This central conflict gives the title of the game weight beyond curious colloquial clumsiness. The popular phrase is Deus Ex Machina (pronounce each syllable and the the “ch” as a “k”), the Latin rendering of an Ancient Greek idiom rooted in classical theatre. A deity would be hoisted above the stage by a crane or other such device in order to resolve the action with their godly powers, a technique modern audiences tend to recognize as egregious contrivance. Sarif has become a god thanks to his technology, an allegory perhaps none too subtly extended to Adam himself; less because he is the first man and more because Sarif did not save his life nearly as much as he constructed him from nothing.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution grounds these lofty ideas in moments where Adam is free to explore the rough outlines of an open world, generally consisting of less than one single square kilometre of streets, buildings, and sewers. From a narrative perspective these areas are shams, dotted with meaningless side-quests whose only gratification are experience points and which mostly distract from the overarching storyline. Perhaps this is no different from the side-quests in most open world games, but Deus Ex: Human Revolution is fundamentally linear. The story only develops in straightforward missions taking place outside of its tiny sandboxes, not within them.

Why, then, would its developers bother with devoting such time and energy into crafting cheap facsimiles of an open world? Surely it would have been better to invest those resources in refining its core elements, improving its brazenly broken boss fights, or fleshing out its resolution to be more than just a multiple-choice question?

In defence, perhaps Deus Ex: Human Revolution sought to capitalize upon the singular ability of videogames to offer audience directed thematic exploration. If a book or a movie decides to examine an idea, ultimately its participants only receive the ideas its creator intended with anything beyond being a textual leap of faith. In a video game, a theme can be presented and explored through the devices and structures central to its progression in the manner of literature or film, while the potential exists for further consideration beyond the ostensible. For over four years, Bioshock has been the gold standard of this possibility. Its players receive its core philosophies and ideologies through the narrative and mechanics central to the game, which can further be reinforced and explored by taking the time to consider the propaganda posters and advertisements lining the walls, to name but a single example.

In this light, the narratively empty and inconsequential sandboxes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution take on greater thematic resonance. What better way to be exposed to the ideas than to discover them yourself? Adam doesn’t necessarily need to hear the word on the streets as he reacquaints himself with the world from which he’s been absent for six months in recovery, but moments like these colour the world and help the player realize that transhumanism may not necessarily be as entirely altruistic as Sarif thinks. Only the privileged can afford to play with the technological toys able to improve their natural abilities, while the impoverished and lower classes feel increasingly inadequate and insignificant in being unable to compete with their augmented aristocracy. As William Gibson once said, “the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Without these occasional glimpses, the player would have no awareness of the broader social issues at play, or rather no impetus to consider them. The people populating the linear game are mostly terrorists, mercenaries, cops, scientists, and the occasional significant figurehead, all of whom are presented in isolation from the wider world. Without the consideration of how the blue-collar and those beneath them are affected by Adam’s activities, the ideas of Deus Ex: Human Revolution become polarized and dull. Social struggles and philosophical quandaries are more engaging than corporate power plays because they have universal appeal. Or rather, the question of whether or not it is a good thing to play god with technology has far more weight when you can see its effects on a human scale.

I’ll admit, before playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I thought it was ridiculous to consider that futurism and the potential of technological innovation could be anything other than unerringly beneficial, as if it should be nothing less than a moral imperative. But the possibilities in boundless technology to fracture the world by sharper divisions in not just wealth and social status but also by natural ability do raise some fascinating issues.

However it must be said that Deus Ex: Human Revolution explores the ethics of augmentation better than it does the morals of it. The game makes an attempt to test the corrupting influence of seemingly absolute power on the actions of the player, but having been conditioned to view morality in the medium as strictly black and white, most players would likely equate non-lethal stealthy pacifism with good and guns blazing frontal assaults with evil immediately. Admittedly, it’s difficult to gauge just how sophisticated this mechanic is as my Adam seldom had his sneaky humanitarian approach acknowledged. But when the ending cinematic rhetorically asks how easy it would have been for him to abuse his augmented abilities, the question swiftly devolves into the trite “might is right” argument.

Yet while I doubt that “might is right” is the intended philosophical focal point for a game with as many intriguing ideas as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I do see a certain elegance to its conspicuous inclusion in any outcome of the four ending sequences. Many of its ideas are adapted from classical thinking, the foundations of which are a mythology built on the principle that the most powerful deserve the most authority, as exemplified by Zeus and the Olympians forcefully overthrowing the previous generation of gods. Even the man directly responsible for the condition of this fictional earth in 2027 fancies himself a modern Daedalus as he watches the manifestation of his genius threaten to tear the world apart.

There are many ways the conversation can go when Adam meets this man and asks him what right he has to do what he has done, with every result offering a distinct justification for the way he has chosen to exercise his might. But whether through persuasion or otherwise, absolute power soon falls to Adam, and the player can decide how they wish to exercise their own will. The room of four endings may disappoint our gameplay expectations, but its thematically more powerful.

Gods do not labour, they need only will their whims into existence and the world is shaped accordingly.