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Can Games Give Us a Glimpse of the Future?

Can Games Give Us a Glimpse of the Future?

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is the upcoming sequel to Deus Ex: Human Revolution . Both are lovely first-person shooters that have a touch of darker political themes. The main character, Adam Jensen, is an embittered ex-security officer who narrates the game with a distinct film noir flavor. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is set two years after Human Revolution in 2029. Adam Jensen is faced with the aftermath of the ” Aug Incident ,” which resulted in millions of deaths and a backlash against mechanically augmented people. Jensen works for the Interpol-funded Task Force 29 that deals with augmented terrorists that have sprung up in response to this backlash. The title refers to this split between augmented and non-augmented people, and the game explores topics of fear, prejudice, and even apartheid.

I recently said that games shouldn’t be afraid to comment on real life events. This is kind of what I meant. I say kind of, because it’s not as blatant as I would prefer. Not everyone can equate prejudice against robotic augmentation with racism in the real world. There are some that will say it is completely different and an utterly justified fear. All of the augmented people really did violently attack a lot of innocents, so what’s not to fear? But that’s the thing, isn’t it? The media can take mistakes or incidents and manipulate the truth into an outright lie; a very scary one.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided can show us what the future might hold and what the past can teach us. For the future, it shows us the result of allowing prejudice to rule our political and social decisions. Augmented humans are ostracized and vilified despite it being quite clear that something more than a simple glitch happened that fateful day.

For an example in real life, take Trump’s supporters wanting to build a wall between the US and Mexico to prevent illegal immigration. Trump, in promotion of this, has been claiming that immigrants, especially Mexican immigrants, are taking American jobs when we need them most, and that they increase the crime rate wherever they go. Building a wall to keep Mexicans out of the country is the very definition ostracizing a group of people. “Taking” jobs and “increasing” crime rates vilifies Mexicans very closely, if not exactly, to what happens to augmented humans in Deus Ex .

The game acts as a reflection on our past as well, and the parallels that can be drawn are eerily close to home. For example, during the Cold War, lots of perfectly normal people were put into camps or arrested during events similar to the ones in the game. The reasoning was always the same. It was believed that these people were Communists. It was very easy to be considered a Communist back then; all you had to do was be part of a union at work or simply be in the possession of certain books, like 1984 . These things may not be a physical part of you like augmentations, but the metaphor is there.

Another example: a direct quote from the cinematic trailer for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided , says “We can be politically correct, or we can be foolish. But it’s gonna get worse and worse.” It’s reminiscent of when Trump comments in this news report “It’s going to get worse and worse. In my opinion, this is just the beginning. It will get worse and worse because we are lax and we are foolish — we can’t allow these people, at this point we cannot allow these people to come into our country.” In the speech the quote is pulled from, Trump is linking the Brussels attacks to Muslim refugees and migrants from the Middle East who have flooded into Europe as a result of Syria’s civil war and turmoil in the region.

Can Games Give Us a Glimpse of the Future?

I think it would be very easy to replace “augmented humans” with “refugees” in this case. If these parallels aren’t enough of an example, try another one: the image of the augmented humans behind fences looking somewhere between extremely angry and sad is very reminiscent of media’s depictions of the Mexicans at the US border, behind a fence or in prison.

It is important for art to reflect life in this way because it allows us explore various outcomes without true consequences, and to observe a situation through a different perspective. That Deus Ex: Mankind Divided manages to do this with such an important and relevant issue in today’s politics is, frankly, awesome. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided can show us what the future might hold and what the past can teach us in light of current events. In a way that the Call of Duty series has never quite managed, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided looks like it really hits these issues on the nose with phrases and visuals more than familiar to us from real life media.

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