In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the hot global industry is “Human Enhancement Technology” – biomechanical prostheses designed to aid and assist humanity. These prostheses, which are often called “augmentations,” include fully-functional, lightweight, metallic limb replacements and less noticeable supplements to the brain or muscles to enhance strength, reaction speed, social abilities and more. Ideally, this body customization would bring about a veritable new Age of Enlightenment worldwide. In Deus Ex, political and economic conflicts instead drag the world into a semi-functional, poverty-stricken nation of haves and have-nots. It’s within this socioeconomic war, and the player’s part in it, that the game best epitomizes the human side of cyberpunk, a newer literary subgenre of science fiction.
The Merriam-Webster definition of cyberpunk is broad, but an acceptable springboard for discussion. The primary entry reads “science fiction dealing with future urban societies dominated by computer technology.” A second use of the term is “an opportunistic computer hacker,” which alludes to the type of independent tech specialist typically used as a protagonist or foil character in cyberpunk literature. To find a more concrete definition of cyberpunk, it can help to take a step back and compare it with its nearest sister genre, steampunk.
Steampunk, which dominates pop culture at comic book and anime conventions, is popularly portrayed as 18th- and 19th-century adventure stories with many current innovations that are powered without the benefit of electricity. In steampunk, everything – from automobiles to jetpacks – is fueled by steam power or another pre-electric fuel source. The result, aesthetically, is a plethora of copper tubing, small gas tanks, valves, readout meters, clockwork and leather, often adorning commonplace heroes and grand villains. In steampunk, the technologies available to its setting have been outpaced in a race with mankind’s ideas and good nature being introduced to the free market. Scientific goodwill and resourcefulness have reached much further than some of our taken-for-granted available resources. Cyberpunk, then, is what happens when the other participant is winning the race.
With cyberpunk, technology and invention outrun benevolence and societal stability. The essence of cyberpunk conflict is the aftermath of unrealized potential. The public, having heard about the limitless possibilities of biomechanical enhancement like cures for disease and physical impairments, now finds itself disillusioned by broken promises. Ordinarily, this disillusionment is the first precedent for the setting itself. Often, the privatized and exorbitantly expensive nature of biomechanical enhancement causes the jaded view of the everyman in cyberpunk. It can even result in many of the conflicts of its stories, although not by necessity. For example, this wide gap between the haves and the have-nots is part of the basis for the 2013 sci-fi film Elysium, which features traces of cyberpunk elements. In Elysium, the protagonist – Max – must fight his way from Earth to Elysium. Earth is a worldwide slum; Elysium is a utopian space station for the super-rich who have left Earth to die off in poverty and ruin. On Elysium, every home has a medical device that keeps its residents young, cures cancer and lets the lame walk. Elysians blindly fail to see why such devices should be wasted on Earth, and Max flies up on a hijacked ship to cure himself of a recent radiation exposure. Throughout the film, political commentary reminds the audience of the nightmare of severe economic inequality that philosophers like Karl Marx feared would come to fruition in the western world.
In cyberpunk literature and film, the world remains as full of pain and death as it does today. Despite the smooth talk of private industry leaders who influence politics and commercials showing dreams come true, most citizens can’t afford to replace their deformed, handicapped or missing body parts. Elements like incompatible software, high prices and even already out-of-date hardware put a damper on the idyllic tomorrow promised by biomechanics. Unfortunately, it’s too late to go back. Society has been so integrated with brain implant chips, reflex boosters, super-strength and prosthetic limbs that to simply sever all mechanical enhancements would cripple the populace even further than the industry-caused financial gap. Much like a young person after he or she is first burnt by a politician’s broken campaign promises, average people in a cyberpunk story are just as cynical and disappointed from bolting under-performing machinery to themselves and, subsequently, having their lives more impacted by a life-long debt to a private medical/engineering firm than by the tech hard-wired to their own flesh.
All of this only sets the scene for the world of cyberpunk, predetermining essentially nothing mandatorily for its characters, locations, themes, conflicts or narratives. Although most would define Blade Runner as having cyberpunk elements, it succeeds as a detective story just as well as it does anything else. However, since cyberpunk is usually set in the aftermath of augmentation’s failure to deliver mankind from disease and age and death, it is most easily lent to socioeconomic strife or tales of political corruption in the digital age, and here enters Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, gamers play as Adam Jensen, head of security at Sarif Industries, a lead researcher and developer in human enhancement technology. Jensen is a young Clint Eastwood-like ex-SWAT member in a complicated relationship with a doctor who works at Sarif Industries. Its CEO, David Sarif, bought a failing automotive factory in Detroit and established his company there, seemingly turning the once-imploding city into a beacon of human enhancement and economic prosperity. The company’s headquarters is attacked by a group of highly-trained soldiers and Adam’s girlfriend, Megan Reed, is killed. Adam is nearly killed as well and is brought back more machine than man by his own employer, David Sarif. In Human Revolution Adam Jensen uses his tech and SWAT skills to unravel a global conspiracy of corporate espionage and political puppet mastery.
Human Revolution features a first-person perspective, aside from when Adam takes cover to avoid enemy attention or gunfire, at which point the camera pulls out to a third-person view to better show his surroundings. Developed by Square Enix, it also allows players to earn “Praxis Points,” which are in turn used to purchase upgrades to Jensen’s augmentations as players see fit. Augmentation upgrades range from the ability to see through walls to using an invisibility cloak that lets Adam stealthily navigate the game. After the game’s prologue, which serves as a tutorial and leads to Adam’s near-death experience, Adam goes on his first mission, in which he solves a hostage crisis at the hands of an anti-augmentation extremist group known as Purity First. Purity First have attacked a Sarif Industries factory and plan to sabotage the company and its prosthetics manufacturing from within, and Adam must stop them before being flown by helicopter back to headquarters. Even before showing players much of the world outside, the game has introduced them to two militant-level conflicts surrounding human enhancement, which lend significant weight to the topic.
Next, Square Enix lets players loose into an open-world “hub” of the city of Detroit, where they learn about the atmosphere of the game. Hub areas in games resemble small action-free levels where players typically interact with non-player characters, or NPC’s, to learn more about the world and its story, get main and side missions, explore the environment and buy and sell weaponry and supplies at stores. Most hub levels in modern gaming, be they in the Deus Ex series or other games like Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines or Rockstar’s State of Emergency, are self-contained but naturally branch off to mission levels. For example, in Human Revolution, one mission takes place inside the populated but otherwise useless police station in the middle of the Detroit hub. Similar missions take place in normally innocuous parts of the city like back alleys, the slums and apartment buildings.
While exploring the hub, gamers inevitably arrive at the Detroit headquarters of Sarif Industries – Adam’s place of business. Interacting with the NPC’s and picking up files that lay about can provide an extraordinarily rich backdrop for the game. Adam hears and reads about his own boss, David Sarif, who was mentored by a genius of prosthetics named Hugh Darrow, and the empire they’ve built on artificial limbs and other augmentations. An information kiosk in the lobby of Sarif Industries’ Detroit headquarters gives an overview of the company:
“Proudly headquartered here in the heart of Detroit, Sarif Industries specializes in the design and manufacture of advanced mechanical augmentations for human implantation. In other words, we help people achieve their dreams by allowing them to reach their full potential. Currently employing over 1,500 people, we are dedicated to innovation while upholding a reputation for unrivaled excellence.”
There are six information kiosks in the lobby which play pre-recorded educational dialogue at the push of a button. They detail Sarif Industries’ place in the city (see above), the company philosophy, a privatized augmentation clinic known as LiMB (Liberty in Mind and Body, International), a prescription drug that augmented people must take for their bodies to accept their augmentations and the backgrounds of David Sarif and Hugh Darrow. These 30-second audio clips help immerse players in the cyberpunk world of Human Revolution. For example, LiMB claims to have helped 8 million augmented people at 1,900 branches, and Sarif Industries are a major sponsor of the clinics – hinting at the secret dealings between two corporations. Another kiosk promises that Sarif works “with good government policy and lower costs” to provide augmentation to an increasing amount of citizens, which sounds as political as it does commercial. It goes on to say that “more accessibility to augmentation technology means a world with more opportunity.” This statement is the precursor to the dystopia of cyberpunk: big promises that, judging by the outside world, have so far failed to deliver.
The Sarif Industries kiosk with information about the prescription drug for the augmented, Neuropozyne, reveals more objective information about human enhancement technology: “In the early days of Human Enhancement Technology, scientists encountered a serious obstacle: new limbs were being rejected by recipients, resulting in complete, systemic failure,” it says. “Human immune systems would invariably recognize the implants as a foreign invader and attack.” Darrow Industries created Neuropozyne to convince the body to accept the augmentations. This conflict of medicine and technology catalyzes many side quests throughout the game. Once, Adam finds himself investigating missing Neuropozyne from Sarif Industries. Two of his colleagues are smuggling it out and giving it away to patients in need who can’t afford the drug on their own, and Adam must decide how to handle the situation. One colleague reminds Adam how nasty “Rejection Syndrome” is, leading to potentially fatal paralysis, among other symptoms. Again, this is the result of mankind’s technological reach exceeding its prosperity.
These themes aren’t exclusive to cyberpunk, despite how well they work within it, and the team developing Human Revolution knew it. Adam can enter several LiMB clinics throughout Human Revolution. The first, in Detroit, finds several patients anxiously awaiting their procedures and all too eager to chat with Adam about them. One makes a subtle – but distinct – reference to Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. 2001 is a sci-fi tale of humanity becoming too dependent on its tools and technology; in one disturbing scene in its 1968 film adaptation, between an astronaut and a spaceship AI, the AI faces computer death and confides in the astronaut that it is afraid. He asks the astronaut if having his motherboards removed will hurt, and if he’ll dream. In Human Revolution, a patient asks his doctor the same questions about going under anesthesia for his procedure. “Will I feel pain, doctor? Will I dream?” The game makes countless use of themes like technophobia and the juxtaposition of mankind and robotics, so the nod to the classic story fits like a glove.
Another sci-fi nod comes when Adam overhears a police officer explaining the plot of the 1980’s film Robocop to his partner. The movie is never named, but the first officer says “I can’t believe you never saw it. It’s about a cop who gets shot up and rebuilt as a cyborg. It takes place in future Detroit.” Adam is clearly going through the same dilemma. Since the comparisons were almost inevitable, it’s likely the team inserted the gag as a tongue-in-cheek wink to its audience, if not a deliberate analogy to remind gamers of the heavy sociopolitical themes in that movie.
The game continues to dissect cyberpunk like a frog at every turn. Outside Adam’s apartment, an anti-augmentation human challenges him theologically: “God created you in His image; why would you desecrate yourself?” She’s not the only “human purist” to cite scripture during the title – even some augmented humans make Biblical references to defend their reaching their maximum potential and doing Christlike work of healing the sick and enabling the lame to walk. Even another stranger dismisses a baseball player’s recent achievements as owing more credit to his machinations than his talent. These notes of religious, sportsmanlike, moralistic, economic and sci-fi implications are early indicators that Square Enix had to consider every angle of sociology when building its world, leaning heavily on the economic inequalities of a Marxist dystopia to provide its conflict.
Before long, Adam journeys to the Hengsha province in China to investigate a lead on the attack, where the writers provide another clear example of the economic gap between the rich and the poor. First, he overhears two female NPC’s as they smoke cigarettes on a street corner and lament their fates. They work for Tai Yong Medical, a prestigious and leading augmentation outfit in China, but can barely afford to live in the slums. People assume the women are prostitutes because of their domiciles –the only affordable housing is in a run-down hotel. This gap between the rich and the poor is blamed on one unimaginably rich family who one woman claims spend their lives “taking from the people and giving nothing back,” their fingers in many pies of corporate and government life throughout the city.
Unlike Detroit, where terrorist cells like Purity First and anti-augmentation special interest groups like The Humanity Front appeal to the “natural” way of life, Hengsha boasts human enhancement technology as being an accepted facet of human existence, even one to flaunt. Here, the pressure to get augmented is stronger than the pressure not to, and it fuels Human Revolution’s most interesting large-scale conflict: augmentation by force.
In Hengsha’s LiMB clinic, other patients speak to Adam if he approaches them, and all of them imply that Human Enhancement Technology is a necessary evil in their world. “Finally. It’s going to happen. This is going to take me places,” one young man says. Another declares that “it is sad, but to rise in Hengsha requires augmentation.” A young woman says “Please…I know this will open many doors for me, but I am nervous.” They’re making the clear statement that the choices are either to get augmented or be left behind, which is the dark side of the technological advancements in cyberpunk. The tech is there, but the balance is not.
For one side quest, a bartender at a Triad-owned nightclub enlists Adam’s help to force money from a saleswoman who borrowed a large sum from the gang to afford the social enhancement augmentations that kept her business open. Adam speaks with the woman and she says they’ve been extorting her, with interest, for far too long. The game gives players the option to force her to pay, force the Triads to leave her alone or pay a large one-time fee to buy them off, but the point is that she was faced with the decision to get augmented or be left behind, just like the Hengsha LiMB Clinic patients.
A brothel shows gamers the most extreme example of life with forced enhancements. The hotel is run by a ruthless drug dealer, Diamond Chan, who is paid up with all the right people in law enforcement and the mafia, and he has coerced many of the call girls into getting augmentations. It’s implied that augmented girls “bring in more money,” though details are left to the imagination. Diamond Chan also uses his girls’ enhancements to track them with built-in GPS systems; he keeps them under his control by offering them Neuropozyne to keep the augmentations’ Rejection Syndrome at bay. Those who refuse to undergo the surgery have gone missing, and Adam saves one before agreeing to remove Diamond Chan from the equation. A working girl convinces Adam that if he can frame Chan and have him arrested, or kill him and make it look like an accident, the girls can take measures to ensure their safety and security in the future. Again, this overarching pressure to obtain human enhancement presents itself. In the brothel mission, gamers see the darkest side of forced cybernetics, but the aforementioned LiMB Clinic patients and the businesswoman who became financially involved with the Triads are only milder examples of the same notion: society is ramping up the acceleration in mankind’s evolution, consequences be damned, so get augmented or get left behind.
None of these problems could exist if cybernetic prosthetics had been integrated into first-world society the way that innovations like automobiles, chemotherapy and the internet have been – in a word, mostly successfully. Instead, Human Revolution and cyberpunk at large are the outcomes of some technology being “too much, too soon” for a struggling world.
Even Human Revolution’s procedural progression implies a self-made or existentialist methodology complete with branching pathways and narratives dependent on player decisions, with an element of limitation lurking underneath. These pathways are determined by Adam’s augmentation upgrades that are bought in limited quantities with Praxis Points, which are awarded to players as they level up with experience points by completing tasks. Since Praxis Points are so limited, players must decide how to play – stealthily or noisily, lethal or non-lethal and so on. A player who has bought Adam the cloaking system and the ability to run silently, for example, can sprint through an open room full of terrorists without being noticed. Another player who has invested in Adam’s computer hacking skills may be able to reprogram the terrorists’ camera and turret systems to neutralize every enemy in the room from a remote terminal and fail to notify backup – all before Adam even enters the room. Ironically, all these branching pathways of procedure lead to the same story outcome, for the most part: imagine many roads winding up and meeting at the top of a mountain. This false sense of player freedom is also what cyberpunk is built on. Gamers quickly learn the limits of their options and could become a bit disappointed with their actual control over Adam’s fate, despite the allure of open-ended methods to learn it. Just like the citizens Adam meets who regret the inability of augmentation to solve all of life’s problems, players are sure to knit their brows at some of the closed doors in Human Revolution, although it’s still an effective experiment in cyberpunk and a terrific game.
In realizing a video game’s living world, developers must use excruciating detail in making every aspect of that world work for the benefit of the experience. When Square Enix built Deus Ex: Human Revolution, they spent years assembling thousands of pages of story and concept art to painstakingly portray a cyberpunk world: one where just because we could, we did, and where technological innovation runs laps around the communal ability to self-sustain. This is evident throughout the game, but most noticeably in the contrast of corporate and residential areas of Detroit, the protests and riots against receiving bodily enhancements that can replace limbs, the naïve acquiescence of getting augmented without understanding its consequences and the cattle-like nature of brothels in China. Cyberpunk is set after man’s failure to deliver on grandiose promises of a better tomorrow, and every aspect of Human Revolution is a shining, prosthetic example of it.
Deus Ex: Human
Revolution. Dev. Square Enix. 2011.
PlayStation 3 Game Disc. Square Enix, 2011.
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