Cage’s comments, which became a topic of discussion in video game outlets (cf. But my story’s about androids who want to be free” (qtd.
If people want to see parallels with this or that, that’s fine with me. They’re discovering emotions and wanting to be free. He maintained: “The story I’m telling is really about androids. The prominence of such themes in the game is in spite of claims to the contrary by its director, David Cage, who alleged that there “is no big message to humanity in this game” (qtd. It thus uses conventional science-fiction tropes to evoke parallels especially to the US history of oppression in order to “move us outside of our normal comprehension and allow us to see how race operates culturally” (Lavender 22 cf.
#DETROIT BECOME HUMAN FLOWCHART THE HOSTAGE ANDROID#
1 Yet one option players can choose to chant more clearly establishes how this science-fiction game’s extrapolation works: “Liberty for Androids!” In many ways, the entire game, with its central focus on three android protagonists, revolves around the posthumanist question of what defines humanity and how we could conceive of other lifeforms that go beyond the human. These slogans are reminiscent of similar demands for equal rights during historical civil-rights movements, especially in the United States. Fittingly, (.)ġ“Equal Rights!” “Set Us Free!” “We Are People!” “No More Slavery!”-in one of the chapters in Quantic Dream’s 2018 video game Detroit: Become Human, players are spearheading a march and can choose between these chants to express what they are protesting for. 1 One of the most recent parallels to US history might be the Black Lives Matter movement.This contribution thus suggests ways of both studying the connections of agency and politics in video games and culturally contextualizing this particular way of representing (a)political choices. To do so, I first present an approach to narrative, agency, and politics in video games more generally, before then discussing questions of agency and politics in Detroit: Become Human on three levels: in its narrative presentation, in how the gameplay politicizes player choice, and in how both the narrative and the ludic elements in the game complicate its interest in politics. I argue that it features and presents narrative choices in a way that encourages players to make decisions not solely for personal or empathetic reasons but also through a political contemplation, and I contend that the manner in which the game narratively presents individual agency and populist imaginations of “the people” complicates this political project.
In this article, I analyze the 2018 video game Detroit: Become Human as a potentially political text from the perspective of literary and cultural studies.
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