Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

That is a great trailer actually. Really sets up how bad this has gotten and how vitriolic the entire debate is.

It also seems to be telling it's own little story.

I was rather skeptical of Eidos Montreal's ability to do justice to something with as much historical baggage as apartheid, but after this, I think they might just have a chance.

Laura Kate Dale (the one and only Queen of Butts) made a series of tweets about the (probably mostly unintentional) political allegories present in what we know of Mankind Divided. Particularly how it could apply to transgendered issues.

I recognize her! She was on Total Biscuit's podcast a couple times.

Transhumanism is kind of a shoe-in for implied thematic connections to transgender issues- like she says, the conflict involves a group of people who want to alter their bodies and them being prevented from doing so by wider society. However, it's worth noting that there are some fairly significant differences that make a direct analogy impossible- most notably the fact that, whereas getting a sex change is purely a matter of individual self-expression and doesn't actually change any socially relevant charactersitics of a person, getting augmented absolutely does and as such is a matter of universal social import. It's to Laura's credit that she puts in the caveat that she recognizes the devs of Mankind Divided aren't necessarily comenting on Trans issues rather than run with it like I'm sure a lot of other journalists would have.

I don't agree with her saying that having the Augs in this game commit suicide attacks against civilians is a "villain read", though. Terror attacks are things that happen in real life, and are associated with any number of political causes. It's just something that happens when a given issue becomes sufficiently polarized and contentious. Given what we know about the universe of Deus Ex, it's not at all difficult to imagine the conflict escalating to the point where Augs are blowing shit up. Hell, in the trailer we see security forces shoving Augs into ghettos, if things have gotten that bad I'd definitely expect to see at least a little transhuman terrorism!

edited 1st Jun '16 7:57:56 AM by Gault

Basically transhumanism is a applicability message in Mankind Divided?

The only thing I find slightly amusing about this is how essentially prosthetic limbs become an issue. But then again, you strap an arm onto someone and then make it so that arm can crush anything? yeah that's terrifying.

And of course you can't just remove these limbs like a prosthetic - they're grafted on.

And the hysteria thing isn't too hard to believe either - yes it's weird that EVERY aug went mental at the same time but people probably would brush over that just to say augs are evil or that they secretly conspired through the internet or something...

The video really drives home how horrible that event must have been (Sort of like the scene in Kingsman where they trigger the worldwide madness. So much Fridge Horror)

I find the ginormous body count of the disaster a bit...gratuitous (it would not take 50 million people dying to make this mechanical apartheid happen).

As a metaphor for transexuality, I really don't see it. Transexuals have little in common with augs. Opposition to transexuality comes from a belief that transexuals aren't "truly" the gender they identify as, where as Augphobia comes from...various sources. I could see parallels between it and Islamophobia, though.

There's a lot of applicability, though. What Eidos has managed to do really well is make the central conflict of the story feel like a real political issue. As such, it can be a stand-in for many issues. For example, some saw the plot of the 1st game as a metaphor for the abortion issue (which, as a supporter of transhumanism who's also very pro-life, becomes comically awkward for me). I myself like to look at as an imperfect metaphor for capitalism (where the rich get all the augs and thus get richer, while the poor don't get augs and thus get more poor).

It reminds me a bit of the xmen and the issue with using your powered people as a stand in for the oppressed. To paraphrase a half forgotten joke "it's easy to feel like a homophobe when the gays can shoot lasers out of their eyes."

I'm really excited to see if the game actually has something to say about the topics it presents. Like outside of the one quest where the doctor is sneaking that super expensive required drug out on the cheap HR didn't feel like engaging with the problems all that much.

Let's hope they do well.

And I love applicability in Sci Fi. So much to cover with no clear answer.

I do too. Few fictional universes take their commitment to exploring the social and political implications of future technology as seriously as the recent Deus Ex games have done.

Strongly disagree. The entire plot of the game revolves around which side of the Augmentation Debate you find more agreeable. The game even makes this clear by giving you NPC characters that each represent one side or another, and most of them have fairly good arguments.

With the possible exception of Hugh Darrow, each faction representative can lay claim to a solid intellectual basis for their position. Of course, I know which one I prefer, but it really isn't a very black-and-white sort of thing. It more depends on what your personal perspective and priorities are, and what abstract moral values you find most appealing.

I agree with your opinion of this game's themes vis-a-vis Trans issues, but I have no idea how you get Islamophobia out of that trailer. Islam is a religion, it's free worship a matter of personal conscience. It doesn't cause a change in your body in any way.

Looks like we might get something like Deus Ex Go before E3?

Oh the game says things about transhumanism but it it's very much on the tell side of show and tell.

Oh I lied about there only being one good sidequest. The quest where you find out a business lady took out a loan with the triad to get augs to stay competitive in her field is also a great showing moment. Moar of that, plz.

"Horrible catastrophe tangentially related to augmentation causes the incident to be blamed on the group entire thus causing major discrimination against them by society at large".

Tangentially related? The Augs-gone-crazed thing couldn't have happened if not for the fact that they had this technology implanted into them. That's not something you can say about any kind of terrorism. When in history has there been a serious risk of a subset of people spontaneously and without warning all going violently insane? Never, and the reason why is because, before the advent of augmentation technology and the neural interfaces that let a person's mechanical limbs talk to the brain, it simply wasn't physically possible.

That was a pretty good Show moment, sure. But the game does it in other ways too. All throughout the game, you can hear both main characters and random NP Cs on the street talk about what augmentations mean to them. There's the Detroit riots and Humanity Front, Belltower's augmented super-soldiers, and Sarif himself mentions the UN vote on whether to restrict development of augmentation technologies.

Human Revolution is incredibly consistent and thorough in it's portrayal of a world that's as dominated by a single massive issue as it's is, and you're just constantly immersed in it throughout the entire game.

Yeah the fact that you can hack a person into brutally murdering their significant other is a pretty big deal, not just a kinda "oh well we patched that" type deal.

I just wanted more of those moments, yah know? Divided looks like it'll be tackling these things more head on and I think that would make the story all the more compelling. Surely more interesting that chasing down whatsherface.

Fair enough. Though, really this is a difficult problem when dealing with Fantastic Racism-if the target of discrimination has fantastic attributes that are potentially dangerous, the bad guys run a serious risk of falling into Strawman Has a Point.

I actually don't think that there would be such a fuss over augmetics if they were used exclusively as prosthetics rather than "Hey, you can make yourself better!"

Part of the problem with having prosthesis only be replacements rather than enhancements is that there's no real standard per say. For example, why can't my arm be as strong as a relatively strong person? Or a very strong person?

A law against using cybernetics except as replacements still runs into the problem of when they're better than human organs. Also, since amputation only means you get better body parts, there'd only be so much incentive to protect your current organs.

Finally, and most obviously, would be competition. Places more flexible in the Aug department might out-compete ones that aren't. For example, a nation decides to enhance its soldiers, thus giving it an advantage over the anti-aug armies.

A more up to date version of "Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not." ?

Yeah. That'd be true, at least for a while.

But things have a way of evening out over time - and all top-tier nations armed forces would end up having auged personnel.

Thing about the Strawman Has a Point here though is that the fear of Augs was manipulated to make Darrow install a control method, which he did out of JEALOUSY (after he realised Augs wouldn't help him)

Anyway, he installed the system that CAUSED the augs to become dangerous. So, without that they wouldn't have posed a physical threat, just an economic one - why employ a mundane when some guy can bench an entire pallet of goods. Why employ a uni grad when you can have a guy who has a direct connection to the internet in his brain?

So the strawmen don't have a point - they created the crisis anyway - they don't actually hate augs, they just saw it as a means to an end. (Yes, Lucius De Biers is a pompous man who thinks in terms of old guard Illuminati - Bob Page was the one with the Batman Gambit style planning to eventually elevate himself to godhood and impose a New World Order)

I don't think the central relevant question here is whether or not Augs are just bad people. From what I can see in the trailers, it's fairly well-understood that the Panchaea Event- which, for lack of a better name, is what I'm gonna call Darrow's biochip-induced madness- caused Augs to lose their self-control. So, instead, I think the big question is: to what degree can Augs be said to retain their freedom of choice?

If the possibility existed for someone to turn you into a mindless weapon, wouldn't you inherently pose more of a risk to the population than someone for whom that wasn't true? That's new territory. Nothing like that has ever existed before simply because this technology has never existed before, and what we see in the pre-release media for this game- the aptly-named Mechanical Aparteid that defines the post-Panchaea Event world and drives the plot of the game- is countries trying to deal with this unprecedented state of affairs and the heightened security threat it presents.

And anyway, absent of any sort of involuntary madness, Augs actually do pose an increased measure of physical threat by simple virtue of their cybernetic limbs and implants granting them greater capabilities than the average unaugmented Human posesses. An Aug who hurts people out of a deliberate choice is just as dangerous as one who had no choice thanks to Darrow's biochip signal- arguably even moreso considering they still have access to their rational faculties. Darrow's engineered madness didn't make people think Augs were more dangerous than non-augmented people, his plot just threw that pre-existing idea into sharper relief.

I suppose, if we're being strict, Darrow technically succeeded entirely in his plan to show how dangerous augmentation technology could be, even if I ended up talking him into realizing that his reasons for it were embarassingly base and personal in Human Revolution.

edited 3rd Jun '16 12:48:49 PM by Gault

Reminder of the stream tomorrow.

Starting soon.

3 minutes!