Gaming
Games
How to write Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Lead writer, Mary DeMarle, on controversies and why story games make us shoot people.
My beard is augmented
© Eidos Montreal
Pac-Man would never have understood today's video games. There he would lie, tucked up snoozing in the early morning light, dreaming dreams of blobs and corridors, when he would be roused by an insistent nudging. Groggily, he would blink himself awake, the worried face of Mrs. Pac-Man artifacting into bleary, pixelated focus. Clamped in her trembling mouth, a copy of today’s newspaper. Pac-Man would squint at the headline:
OUTRAGE: YELLOW MONSTER HERDS GHOSTS TO GRISLY DEATH. PSYCHICS CALL FOR BOYCOTT.
Years later, his career, reputation and marriage destroyed, Pac-Man would look back on those lazy, blissful mornings and weep. "When did people start getting so upset about video games?" his gaping mouth would flap, incoherently ‒ the damp-stained walls of the motel room offering only stoic silence in reply.
Video game controversies have become a depressing regularity with big budget new releases. But their ubiquity raises a question: where do we ‒ and where do games writers ‒ draw the line between being controversial and talking about controversy? When a high profile game like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Eidos Montreal's cyberpunk stealth-em-up (releasing on PC, Xbox One and PS4 on August 23), describes its theme of societal segregation between humans and cybernetically enhanced transhumans as a "mechanical apartheid", how does the team respond to the backlash, and justify the term's use in the first place?
Bionic legs? Not OK. Giant mech suit? Totally
© Eidos Montreal
"I don't think [the backlash] was necessarily a surprise," says Mary DeMarle, lead writer on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. "I know that, even within the team itself, there were people who were very against using that term. But other people were like, 'That is exactly the right term for what we're doing'.
"We hope that we don't offend people ‒ we know that we don't live their experiences ‒ but we need to be able to look at our own world and allow [ourselves] to see where we're going as human beings. We can't shy away from it."
Even in its promotional materials, Mankind Divided is setting up exploration of some thorny issues. Besides the mechanical apartheid quote, its trailers focus on the radicals at the poles of its central conflict.
On the one hand, we have the police crackdowns – the shots of heavily armoured police beating down augmented civilians and dragging them off; the omnipresent AI newsreader, Eliza Cassan, warning of the dangers of enhanced citizens; the anti-Aug propaganda posters. But on the other, we have the terrorists delivering eloquent speeches defending violent uprising. "We will not sit idly by and allow our rights to be eroded… We will not be herded into ghettos."
In an echo of the original Deus Ex's twist, we're being shown terrorists and murderers not as interchangeable targets of Jensen's guns and nano-blades, but as freedom fighters, as three-dimensional. It's a bold, even provocative message in a time of real-world terror attacks.
"One thing we've always felt is that Deus Ex is supposed to be throwing up a mirror to today," says DeMarle. "We talk about the license being the near future, so we always want to look at themes that are relevant and that people are experiencing today. We want to show them to you from all different sides, and give you the opportunity to decide how you feel about it. So, as a writer, the one thing that you're very aware of is that you're dealing with a difficult subject and you're trying to show all sides of that issue, and allow the player to make up their own mind.
Most Augs are no match for police in combat suits
© Eidos Montreal
"So, when you're not playing the game and just looking at snippets taken out of it, it's probably quite true that you could look at it and say, 'Oh my God, this game is promoting terrorism!' But you could look at a different element and say, ]Wait a minute, no it's not, it's actually showing something else'. That's the heart of what we do. So, when we're writing, we do have discussions internally, like 'How far do we push this?' You kind of cross your fingers and approach it with as clear a viewpoint as you can, hoping that your own internal bias isn't getting in the way."
Both Mankind Divided's layered depiction of terrorism and its social segregation revolve around one big story point. At the end of Human Revolution (spoiler warning, though what comes next is in the Mankind Divided trailers), one of the game's villains exploits a security flaw in much of the world's augmented population, which makes them all go temporarily crazy.
The Aug Incident was a worldwide catastrophe both in terms of human cost, and the blow to the public perception of augmentations. Where in Human Revolution augmentation companies could run sunny commercials offering to make people better, faster and stronger, now much of the public is distrusting ‒ even downright frightened ‒ of augmented humans. But in an eerie parallel to the current migration crisis in Europe, different countries in Mankind Divided are reacting in very different ways to the disaster. What DeMarle and Mankind Divided's writing team are focusing on are the extreme cases.
"The Aug Incident happened worldwide," she explains. "It was a tragedy for the whole world. But different areas of the world are dealing with it differently… We've focused our story on areas of the world that are having a very negative reaction, that were potentially more [badly] hit by the augmented catastrophe, and saw a lot of violence and death on that day."
It's a depressing picture of Humanity 2.0. The gameplay demo that was shown at last year's E3 ‒ in which Jensen arrives in Prague just in time to watch pro-enhancement terrorists blow up a train station ‒ is filled with tiny glints of environmental story reflecting public fear and irrationality. In the walk from the train to the station ticket hall, Jensen and another augmented agent are stopped not once, but twice, by police. As they walk, they pass rolling news screens running stories on the A.R.C. (the Augmented Rights Coalition) and augmented passengers being bag-searched on the platform.
The irony? The police conducting the checks are futuristic super soldiers. Some appear in bulky, heavily armed exosuits. In a sane, rational world, it would be the police enforcers, not a twenty-something traveller with a bionic leg, that would have people in uproar. But Mankind Divided's Prague is not a sane, rational place.
"One of the themes in the game is reason vs. emotion," says DeMarle. "When you look at it, one of the things that drives a lot of people is fear. And security is a very important issue for people, and having had this massive, unexplainable attack by people who were half-human or had had parts of their bodies changed, people see that as, 'We need security! How can we be safe? We don't want to enable humans to use the technology within their bodies, but we still have to be able to stop the awful power of someone who has that technology, so let’s develop an alternative form of security, like technologically advanced combat suits'.
"So, someone could probably very reasonably tell you, 'A suit is being controlled by a human who is never going to lose control. We're still in charge of that technology, as opposed to having that technology take over us'. It's the kind of twisted logic that comes out of fear vs. emotion."
Then there's Jensen himself, of course. The E3 2015 gameplay demo showed a chunk of a mission in which Jensen must infiltrate A.R.C. territory to capture its leader. You can play stealthily and non-lethally, clinging to the edges of the environment, or you can punch a hole straight down the middle. Either way, though, it's clear the people you're fighting aren't soldiers.
The enemies here are regular people with guns and ‒ almost incidentally ‒ one or two bionic prostheses. Just by virtue of Jensen's vastly of superior firepower, DeMarle and Mankind Divided's writing team are showing these people are victims in more than one sense of the word.
Many Augs have been pushed into slums in Prague
© Eidos Montreal
"Deus Ex is all about shades of grey. The world is made up of shades of grey, but a lot of people don't like to see them," says DeMarle, of the plight of the game's resistance fighters.
"On one side we have the leader of the Augmented Rights Coalition. His whole argument is that, 'You're treating us like terrorists. You're treating us like the evil causing this. But you're failing to see that we were victims of something, and that these augmentations were important to save our lives. Are you asking us to give up life because of this?' But then on the other side you have radicals who refuse to see that, and want to cast everyone in one light. That's the root of the story," DeMarle continues.
"The world is trying to figure out what kind of political stance it should take on augmentations. The whole reason that cybernetic advances began is because of medical advances that were trying to help people. When you look at it today, people get artificial hearts ‒ they need this. People are getting artificial cochlears in their ears so they can hear. Eyes are being improved. All these things. And some of these are medical necessities. We can take that and say, 'OK, a lot of people have no choice but to be augmented'.
"And now, because of something that happened in the political world, because someone was able to take advantage of flaws in technology and cause this massive tragedy, people are starting to say, 'We shouldn’t have this anymore, it's too dangerous'... So, you've got fanatics on both sides who refuse to see one side of the issue."
In a way, it's almost a shame that the issues that Mankind Divided is exploring have to be explored down a set of iron sights. As with other recent games that want to tell stories and explore something deeper than the inside of a bad guy's skull ‒ Uncharted, The Last of Us, Tomb Raider ‒ the laws of videogaming state that every now and again, you have to stop doing story for a minute and have the protagonist shoot at henchmen from behind a wall.
DeMarle agrees that balancing those competing priorities can be tricky.
"In my opinion… it is one of the big problems in writing games," she says, candidly. "We have to recognise that we're playing a game, that we're entertaining people. When we're writing a story like Mankind Divided, one of the things I'm always reminding the writers, is that we're people who want to get the story. We want to give every tidbit of information that we can. But, there are players out there who don't care about any of that, and we have to build something that has multiple layers, so that those who want to get the story can, but those who don't can still understand what's going on. Sometimes that comes with expectation that there are certain things that probably won't make sense."
But hearteningly, not everyone who's given a rocket launcher turns it immediately towards the nearest 2029 police officer. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided isn't a walking simulator ‒ but there are already people playing the game who are putting Jensen's living toolbox of spikes and explosives to more touristic uses.
"It's interesting," says DeMarle, when we ask if a Deus Ex game could ever do away with violence altogether, and survive on story alone. "When you look at the playtesters who're playing the game right now, there are the ones who use those augmentations not to mow people down, but to explore and gain access to more information. They spend hours just exploring the environments and pulling out all the environmental storytelling and all the secrets without ever trying to kill anybody. So I think it happens already."
For more gaming coverage, be sure to follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
