Automata: The Storytelling of Detroit: Become Human

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Detroit: Become Human and moderate spoilers for Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Fahrenheit: Indigo Prophecy, and Mass Effect 3. It also discusses domestic abuse, including child abuse. If you are in an abusive household, contact a support organisation near you. For those in the US, you can reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1800 799 7233 or find them online at www.thehotline.org. If you are in the UK, you can call the National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247 or visit their website at www.nationaldahelpline.org.uk.

Many of the fraught debates over the soul of video games are simply second winds from other pressure systems blowing in. "What makes art valid?", "How much do critical accolades really say about quality?", and not to be forgotten, "Are auteurs the lifeblood of our medium?". When these discussions emerged in games in the late 00s and early 10s, they were stymied by a communicative rift between film or literary theorists and the gamers that borrowed their debate topics. Truths that the wizened elders of movies, books, and paintings had learned long ago were still sitting on the vine, waiting for us to pluck them. However, plenty of us carried on conversations about the optimal trajectory and ultimate fate of video games without those fruits.

Citizen Cage

One of my favourite quotes in games reporting comes from a 2001 IGN article:

"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex."

It's proof that misidentifying directors as one-man development teams is nothing new, but it wasn't until video games were set on a collision course with high art that auteur theory's hour came. I've wound the theme of the "Citizen Kane of video games" through my David Cage blogs, and back during the art wars, it was common sense to the troops that to get a Citizen Kane of video games, we'd need an Orson Welles. After all, he was supposedly what enshrined film as art. Yet, there were plenty of film critics and academics worried about the damage of viewing their community as a society of Orson Welleses.

Movie directors continue to be venerated as the authors of the pictures they push towards finalisation. All the while, auditors of the scene continue to point out that films, especially films with a small county for a crew, are collaborative endeavours. A description of movies as "by" the one managing the actors or crew goes down smoothly when we find it easier to conceive of individuals rather than complex crowd dynamics. It also abets marketers who can use actors, producers, and directors to compile recommendation pages for film. Liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Oblivion might be your speed. It had the same producer. Did Paranormal Activity keep your attention? Perhaps you'll like The Black Phone. I did. I did like The Black Phone.

But it's not like Peter Chernin was casting the bill for Oblivion or Jason Blum was on the ground painting and weathering props for The Black Phone. Every creative who worked on and off the set, from the costumiers to the lighting department, was a thread in the films' fabrics. If you think these contributors can be safely overlooked, just try making a film without them. I've been guilty of this reductionist attribution before, but in games, as in film, you can demonstrate that auteur status is something conveyed rather than inherent. You do this by identifying works of similar importance to the medium with differing levels of fame for their forepersons. Donkey Kong and Space Invaders are both load-bearing works in video games, but while we all know who designed Donkey Kong, who architected the mechanics of Space Invaders? It's relatively common knowledge who directed Quake, but who directed the first three Assassin's Creeds?

In the early '10s, these answers hardly seemed to matter. Like a greedy boy seeing another kid with a balloon, a contingent of gaming pointed over at film's unrealistic fetish for the auteur and said, "I want that". The desire for that import was the flagpole up which the legend of David Cage was run. To be fair to Cage, he has repelled the notion that he is the sole creator of the games he's contributed to. In a 2022 interview with Games Radar, he shifted attention to the crew behind him, saying:

"I never pretended I was the studio. I would tell staff that all the successes of the studio were due to the team, and all the failures were my fault. That's how I feel. I'm not responsible for the successes."

Undeniably, however, the promotion for Quantic Dreams' games lionised Cage as a visionary innovator of the medium. In that very same interview, Cage kind of admits that he leaned into it, even if he regrets it now:

"There was a time when having my name out there served the studio – it helped us be heard. I don't think it's the case any more. People only want to talk to me. And I'm sorry about that, because there are many interesting people here – more interesting than I am. And yet still you come here and you want to talk to me."

My repeat visitors will also recall that Cage called for the invention of the Citizen Kane of video games in an interview with Gamasutra and that in the canon of Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, he becomes the medium's Orson. The pristine later of enamel over him combined with the lofty artistic hopes for Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. The synthesis was that, for a generation, David Cage was the face of art game auteurship. This alabastrine aura was still following him around as recently as 2018, the year that received Quantic Dream's fifth game and the third in their micro-QTE cycle, Detroit: Become Human.

Diagnostics

While the French studio's previous games for Sony had all included at least a quart of sci-fi, each was set in a version of the present. Detroit: Become Human represents Quantic pining for their roots of The Nomad Soul and going full android. It puts you in the PCBs of three humanoid machines in a 2038 where routine labour is performed by synthetic lifeforms. These automatons, mothered by the corporation CyberLife, have put much of the human proletariat out of a job.

Kara is a CyberLife android and live-in maid for Todd Williams, a couch carbuncle who somehow manages to be an absentee father, even when in the same room as his daughter, Alice. Alice's hushed demeanour tells us that she's become used to frightening consequences for attracting Todd's surly glares. Like many children with aggressive parents, Alice finds there's only one thing worse than not being paid attention to, and that's being paid attention to.

While high on badass future drug, red ice, Todd becomes abusive, triggering Kara to overcome her safety measures and flee the broken household with Alice. Kara and Alice check into a motel, a theme park, and what appears to be a sanctuary for wayward androids, but the latter's manager, Zlatko, is actually running a replicant trafficking ring. Kara manages to deprogram Zlatko's CyberLife strongman, Luther, a guy who looks like he could eat an entire motorcycle in one sitting. However, with no safe residence in the US, Kara and Alice make for the border. The less-than-shocking truth turns out to be that Alice is also a CyberLife unit.

Connor is a computer man express-shipped to the Detroit Police Department by his handler, Amanda. His obligation is to investigate a cryptic pattern of synthetic humans freeing themselves from their protocols and endangering lives. Connor is paired with the beer-powered, androidphobic Hank. They're a classic duo: bad cop, positronic brain cop. On the beat, Connor witnesses casual violence towards his brethren, particularly in a sticky android brothel that he and Hank comb for a hidden killer.

Lastly, there's Markus. Markus is a carer for Carl Manfred, an esteemed painter in his autumn years. After the death of this grandfather figure, Markus becomes the prime suspect in his murder. He goes on the lam, landing in the android hostel, Jericho, named for the abandoned cargo freighter it's sheltered in. Markus rises through their ranks to remodel Jericho as an android rights collective and become its messianic leader. One laying-on of hands from Markus can free the synthetic mind. The refugees hijack a news corporation to publicly draw a line in the sand re: their exploitation. In a daring raid, they also free other androids from a domestic servant Apple Store and plaster their message on the terracotta brickwork of a public square.

The protagonists' lives intersect at Jericho. Kara and Alice make a pit stop in the ship, but so do half the androids in Michigan, leaving an organisation of meagre means an overburdened pack mule. Connor and Hank's investigating brings the wolf to the runaways' door, and SWAT raid Jericho, weapons-free. When the walls fall, none of the major characters are guaranteed to be spared. The corrugated steel is charred in a bonfire of the dispossessed. If there is still a Markus in the embers and if Jericho still follows in his footsteps, he leads them in the streets either in retaliatory violence or a peaceful conversion march.

As Connor, you may make an appearance at the CyberLife headquarters to try and override the consciousness of other Connor units, you might end up assassinating Markus, or it's possible you'll stay your hand on both. There is no reality in which the promotion of automated self-determination is not answered by police violence; this is what US law enforcement does with rights protestors. Detroit was oddly prescient with the second wave of BLM protests starting in 2020. However, through the composite gearing of your in-game choices, either you broach talks on android rights with the president, or the events of the game become the preamble to a human-android war.

Branch Conditions

Assuming this isn't your first rodeo, you'll notice the same concepts from the last two Quantic Dream games cycling back around like slides on a carousel. From Heavy Rain, we have the sullen cop disillusioned with their investigations, the hot-footed escape from a motel as the police start sniffing around, and a professional-sounding white guy with cropped brown hair who solves crimes with futuristic gizmos. From Beyond: Two Souls, we get the struggle to survive homelessness, and we can once again "enjoy" the trademark David Cage "women in mortal danger" sequences. Every blood splatter analysis and jump between rooftops, you carry out with the gesture-based controls you know and vaguely like. Given that Cage's haggard tropes continue to hang around like a bad smell, it may surprise you to hear that Detroit: Become Human was, in one way, ground-breaking. It still surprises me.

Branching narrative trees as we know them took root in the late 00s with Dragon Age, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and company. Yet, within a few years, they were met with blowback. Forums were atwitter with gamers complaining that these rudders did too little to set your heading. A watershed moment for this criticism was the Mass Effect 3 ending. Various Commander Shepards were chagrined that the fate of the universe did not get decided by their six years of choices, but by whether they entered the red, blue, or green door during the end sequence. That's how they felt; I'm sure if you've played the game, you have your own feelings about the ending.

Sometimes, players would partake in narrative software, daydreaming about what might have happened had they beeped instead of booped. But then they'd replay to find the same rough scenes, just with supporting characters holding different attitudes or being alive instead of dead. I believe those changes counted for more than sometimes perceived, but I also get why the frustrated virtual tourists were asking for more.

Detroit: Become Human is a button-operated puppet show in which whole scenes might be snipped off their strings or taped onto them based on your decisions and QTE-good-at-ness. It's one in a million to find a piece of art with as many gallows on which a character might be hung as this one. A director playing by the book would say, "Of course Connor can't die just chasing a criminal across a busy highway, we need him alive for the grand finale", but Detroit isn't here to fit its knaves with plot armour. It makes the androids a genuinely endangered demographic.

Crucially, chapters end with a summary that shows your climb across their tendrils and the alternate forks you could have taken. Telltale looked at post-match reports from action games and questioned why we don't summarise story experiences in the same gaps. Detroit follows suit, but pulls back the curtain on narrative design with a brashness that Telltale didn't. In doing so, it proves to the player that it really is allowing the flap of butterfly wings to create hurricanes. The player knows that their impression of influence is not an illusion, even on their first playthrough.

The plot summary at the head of this article was the hardest I've written. Each time I'd go to point out a mile marker in the story, I'd realise that it would only exist if you'd taken certain B-roads beforehand. You might have played through the game twice and seen me describe events you didn't know were possible. If you can't wrap your head around why a developer wouldn't let their story split like a cell, the more potential futures an audience can generate, the more development resources a producer needs to put aside for each. As for the players, many of them won't see an alternative to the story generated by their initial choices.

In 2024, former head of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shawn Laden, said that only 32% of players finish a game once. A 2019 study looking at 725 Steam games put that number even lower, at 14%. Not all games are created equal, and the percentage is probably higher for well-received story games, but by 2014, less than 50% of people had finished the Mass Effect trilogy and under 40% had put a bow on the first season of The Walking Dead. Those being the stats, it's brave that Quantic put their faith in a ludonarrative meant to be rewound after playing.

Although, if I'm allowed to nitpick (dear God, let me nitpick), I don't think the exit interview for Detroit's chapters should rate "completeness". We could consider a game "done" when we've scraped the last spoonful of guts from the bottom of its barrel, but it's healthier to say it's "complete" when we're satisfied with what we've seen of the plot and learned about the characters. If you're full, you shouldn't keep eating.

The Briefcase

It is instructive to remember that the progression flowchart is a container for a ludonarrative rather than a ludonarrative itself. If you want to see what I've got in my little Hitman briefcase of criticisms for that ludonarrative (beyond the "repetition" and "completion" barbs), let's start before the prologue. Let's start with the main menu. Chloe is an android who lives on this menu. Hey, it's cheaper than renting. When you click "New Game", she tells you, "Remember, this is not just a story, this is our future". It's arrogant overconfidence to think that you've predicted 2038, but also, the statement is not cognisant of the game it welcomes you to: one where there are many futures and not just one.

To go on, the possessors of the vulnerable in these stories are somewhat ogres. I can't be an authority on this topic. I am not a single female guardian in an abusive household or a human trafficking victim. But for what it's worth, I was one of the camp left with a bitter taste in their mouth by the Detroit preview at Paris Games Week 2017. In the dress rehearsal, Sony gave us Todd tearing a path through his living room to displace his rage onto Kara and Alice. In the game, once you've gotten to know the androids and the addict, I think it plays better, but divorced from the humanising portraits of these characters, it exploited their victimisation for shock value. Even in context, the shrinkage of Todd's character to a grunting orc feeds into the game's sensationalism.

When the writers of Become Human made the antagonists depraved greaseballs, it came from a good place. They are repulsed by predators like Todd and Zlatko, who think they hold the deeds to the bodies of others. But by scripting a guy to tell his cowering daughter, "Daddy's very mad" in a rattle so violent it sounds like his throat might pop out, or by having Zlatko stoop to telling a little girl her mother doesn't remember her in a sing-song voice, it makes the villains absurdly vindictive. It Hail Marys the protagonists' experiences beyond the end zone of reality, leaving a game that, as far as I can tell, doesn't talk to the memories of real victims of violence.

I also left Zlatko's with mixed feelings because it was somewhere a character underwent a complete U-turn in the time it takes to tie your shoes. Luther's ministration under his master had him unquestionably dedicated to enslaving other androids. Yet, as soon as he's outside in the cooling rain, washed of Zlatko's influence, he's giving a speech about how he's ride or die for robot rights. He'd be in good company with the waifs of Jericho, who can go from dismissing Markus to worshipping at the altar of Markusology after a single raid on the doodads factory. I wish they could donate a little of their transigence to Connor and Hank. While every chapter with Kara and Alice has the two finding a new tourist spot at which to nearly get lobotomised, Hank and Connor's levels keep squawking over and over that the two are struggling to find the rogue machines. Also, that Connor is eager to form a relationship with Hank, but that Hank walks alone, and certainly not with tin cans. Quantic had otherwise left this broken record writing in the past.

And how about the visualisation of this story, huh? I'm usually not the type bothered by a handheld camera. It can add a gritty delirium to photography, but something about the swimmy viewport of Detroit makes me feel like I've just been poisoned. Maybe it's because this is a video game, and I'm trying to track objects in the scene that I might want to jab at. Maybe it's that I need the ground to stay in one place when distant objects in the scene appear blurry. That myopia also leaves me (I'm gonna say it) less immersed in the world. The same goes for some of the slow-time events where our movements don't line up with the player character's manipulation of an object. Too often, we enter the requisite button presses for an action, but only afterwards do we see animations that pair with those gestures.

Colour Commentary

You might put it to me that more substantive than whether the camera is on a tripod or the characters jump the gun on their personal development is whether the writing does justice to the sensitive subject matter of civil rights. Fair enough. Detroit mimics the racists it aims to critique more than it realises. In fact, we can track every instance of it doing that back to one communal space: the plaza where Jericho sounds its first horn of defiance. As Markus, you approach wooden benches and temptingly fragile glass storefronts with an axe in one hand and a spray can in the other. But if you choose the path of dismantlement, the game's non-diegetic text tags that as "violent" behaviour.

There's no getting around it: the android demonstrations in Detroit are analogous to those of the black liberation movement. As if it needed confirmation, you can holographically spraypaint "Android lives matter" or "I have a dream" on the park seating. During the second ride of Black Lives Matter, defacing and felling statues of figures who perpetrated or abetted slavery held symbolic significance for the descendants of those slaves. Yet, racists who wanted to delegitimise BLM construed any property destruction during the protests as "violence" in order to make peaceful dissenters sound like they were hurting people and to stoke the narrative of the brutal, unruly black people who needed to be stomped into line by law enforcement.

Even though Detroit is a parable about the perils of confusing objects and people, in the public square, it's guilty of exactly that. Amidst the chaos of the jailbreak at CyberLife, Quantic loses track of who has nerves to feel pain and who just has a head full of bronze. It's all "violence". It's also in the quadrangle that the game busts out one of its more "yikes" slogans: "One planet two races". The two races referenced are humans and androids, but I think we might have some other races on Earth, like white, Asian, black, etc. In Detroit's slightly confused mind, it's a phrase equivalent to "I have a dream", or "Android lives matter". One more raised fist to daub in glowing scanlines. But can you have a phrase that works in the interests of civil rights while erasing all human races?

On ethnicity, Detroit ends up chasing its tail. It activates the android as a proxy for the black American. It's why the game is set in Detroit, called Detroit, even. Segregation didn't so much get abolished in the states as it did go from being enforced through legislation to being enforced through gerrymandering, finances, and zoning. The housing market has more to answer for than most in this regard, and Detroit, an 80% black city, is the country's most segregated. The Detroit PD also have a shameful and documented history of maiming that population.

Yet, when Become Human embeds the androids as African-American stand-ins, it loses track of the oppression against the black individuals they were written to embody. Markus and Luther are persecuted because the blood in their veins is blue rather than because their skin is melanated. In addition to decentering black experiences, this amnesia of racism means we can't know what the intersectional oppression of being black and an android looks like either. And do we really believe that the thicket of recriminations and advocacies that grows from the public plaza concurs with black history?

I love a game with a specific political take rather than one that invites in politics, hoping to be seen as an adult, but then spends the whole party avoiding them because it might be too uncomfortable to say something controversial. Detroit is not that game. It submits that there is an elevator up which activists can ascend their pleas to legally enshrine protections. They can also descend down it into war. Peaceful actions warm the coals of sympathy in the national population, which get you a seat at the legislative table. Inflicting pain and destruction freezes out any possibility of mass support, and that hostility ossifies into state violence. In Become Human, public solidarity is tracked by a morality-style meter. When a designer wants a large set of cumulative and similar choices to lead to a story outcome or outcomes, these meters are a far simpler solution than drawing out a Ygdrassil of a narrative tree. But even putting aside the debate over whether revolutionary or reformist politics is the best liberator, are these same stems that the NAACP or WSPU climbed?

More than any other controversions of discrimination, this game references those of the civil rights era. Again, there's the "I have a dream" line, there are the androids riding in the back of the bus, the names Markus and Luther sound like "Martin Luther", and we'll talk about allusions to the historic Selma march in a minute. There can be no serious opposition to the notion that these protests cracked the shell of segregation in the states. That they brought forth legal rights for African-Americans that the state claimed were inalienable and yet saw no need to extend prior. But to suggest that these changes came because the majority of the public was approving of civil rights protest is fishy.

Pew data from the mid-60s shows that the almost 60% of Americans were in favour of improved legal shielding for African-Americans, but almost 70% of them thought that law should only be enforced "moderately", and a majority of Americans did not sympathise with the forebearers of black freedoms at Selma. The March 7, 1965, Selma-Montgomery march, which haunts Detroit's police blockades, was a peaceful, destructionless march led by civil rights leaders to the town of Montgomery, Alabama. When the police met with the black convoy, they beat them bloody. I can't imagine a protest less objectionable than this one, so if this behaviour was considered beyond the pale, all civil rights advocacy would have been, which Gallup polling bears out. The mainstream opinion was that nonviolent protest was hurting the black emancipatory cause rather than reinforcing it.

As I pointed out in my Division essay, there were also a lot of moments where destructive resistance was a catalyst of progress. Stonewall, the suffragette movement, the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests, and the counterforce to apartheid to name a few. Soon after Detroit: Become Human, we also received a lesson on how a race rights movement can win the support of the public and still be denied its demands. Despite the impression you might have gotten from the media, polling showed slightly more Americans supported Black Lives Matter than not, but there was no ceremony where BLM representatives were invited to the White House to hash out the next round of civil rights legislation.

I'm not setting Detroit the impossible assignment of depicting both the success and failure of violent resistance at the same time. But I do want you to leave with the knowledge that its Newton's cradle of political influence is not the only one posited. I also wouldn't want anyone to use Detroit as a manual on how to change the system from the inside because if you did, you would disapprove of any protest tactics not endorsed by the masses and potentially all demonstration. Marginalised groups protest conditions imposed by a society that maligns them, but if the society maligns them, it will denounce the marginalised's demand for self-determination, no matter what form it comes in. Therefore, to conclude that a show of defiance by the oppressed is not successful unless it has the approval of oppressors is to shut down protest by the oppressed generally. That may feel like a criticism that Detroit cannot come back from, and it certainly is a doozy, but dammit, they got me defending the David Cage game again, or at least, telling you it's a little more complicated than Detroit begging a dubious civil rights analogy.

Class Inheritance

Seen from afar, Become Human was a migrainously on-the-nose civil rights exemplum. It was the kind of historical fiction that, content to merely copy out the history books, neglected to provide emotional or social insight into them. But from afar, you can't see the details on any face, and that included Detroit's. I have to clear this up: Detroit: Become Human has confrontations and morays that make it soluble with the mid-20th century black rights struggle, but as I hinted earlier, there are other scales of power being weighted here. Connor is about as autism-coded as a character comes. He's formal and forthright in his communication, but struggles to reach across the social divide to understand and befriend his human partner, Hank, and Hank finds Connor clingy and objectionable because of his androidisms.

While fetching paint for Carl, Markus can encounter and may be assaulted by a gaggle of android objectors, smarting from having their jobs pulled from beneath them by synthetic labour. Markus's predicament is that of many immigrant labourers in rich countries today. The outcasts of Jericho are also effectively refugees. They are discarded metal ensconced in discarded metal, but they're also non-citizens on a beaten-up ship vying for citizen status. Then there are the two Traci units at Club Eden. They are in love but are kept at arm's length from each other by sex work that demands they intimately service everyone but their partner. Like many real sex trafficking victims, if the Tracis disobey their master, they may end up with a bullet to the body.

Quantic's low-level systemisation also wraps convincingly around domestic servitude. Kara walks in the footsteps of other women before her, effectively handcuffed to the stove and washing machine. Her creators and owner see her, a female model, being literally made for housework. The fence posts in the yard are her cell bars. Like other women without material independence, Kara is especially vulnerable to domestic violence, and like many women in a domestically violent household, she is the last line of defence between an abuser and a child. As is typical for media about synthetic humans, Detroit uses the object status of androids as a larynx through which to speak about other objectifications. "Female objectification" gets used synonymously with "sexual objectification", but as a physical barrier like a riot shield or a line of bollards, Kara is a woman objectified in a securitising sense.

Detroit knows what the feminists have long told us, that objectification is a precursor to violence because no one can be told they've hurt someone else if they kick a desk leg or punch a bag of sawdust. Objectification is inherent to oppression because the only way to ethically justify self-serving, unprovoked violence against a population of people is to say they are not people; they are objects. Yes, the synthetics riding in the back of the bus and the chalk-white "Androids lives matter" sealed into thin air are on the nose. However, I don't think Detroit is being ridiculous when it imagines that if we decide to play Hephaestus and create a silicon slave class, we may naturally model them on the servant classes of the past: women, sex workers, black people. If the emergent class also turned out to be people, we would set on them all the same wolves that previous societies did to their underclasses. Equally as naturally, the androids seek transcendence of that diminutive societal role by employing the techniques that improved the station of those before them. History repeats. Although, it is unclear where exactly the CyberLife line learned black liberation slogans.

The impelling and edifying nature of history is a big reason why the right-wing wages war on higher education, and, at this point, just education in general. If the downtrodden were to learn about the emancipatory tools of previous generations, they might be able to use them to impale the hand that chains. That impalement is possible, in part, through an understanding of the vector pointing from capitalism to discrimination. The going liberal explanation of discrimination is that it is a crack in the hearts of the racists/ableists/homophobes, etc. and therefore, all that we have to do to overcome division is to overcome prejudice. No doubt, that is a part of the mission of equanimity, but as noted in plenty of android rights fiction, including Detroit, societies stamp classes of people as made for cheap or free labour in order to cut costs. When the call comes to align that society horizontally rather than vertically, the counterpoint attempted by the conservatives, but also many liberals, is that with oppression being the basis of the economy, it would be economically impractical to grant people their warranted rights.

There are people who, to this day, argue that pay for women in housework, admission of immigrants to their country, raising the minimum wage, liveable benefits for the disabled, reparations for descendants of slaves, and a whole host of other equalising measures are idealistic sophistry because the money isn't there. Of course, the money is there when it comes time to pay industry bosses or fund the military. It just mysteriously disappears when we argue that people should be able to feed their kids or that if Western nations really regretted slavery, they would provide restitution to the people whose lives it still stains.

It's the same in Detroit, where androids are not just kept as chattel because humans hate them. Really, Markus and his species' demotion to objects means that many humans cannot view them as enemies in the same sense they'd view another person because you cannot feud with an appliance. The greater incentive for the humans to continue relegating CyberLife's units to property is that if they don't, they lose their housemaids, production line assemblers, carers, prostitutes, and PAs. This exposes the contradiction in the liberal wishes to uphold status quo capitalism and stay in the good graces of human rights movements. In fact, the conception of progressive politics as universal kindness dominates among liberals because it doesn't require any significant challenging of your material beliefs or lifestyle. It does not require friction with other people.

Detroit's world, like ours, is one where justice requires the privileged to not just play nice with others, but give something up, even if it's just their emotional comfort. What they do when that's asked of them is the real test of conviction, and I'm not so sure that they default to a giving attitude, despite what this game says. Detroit does try to pose a question of self-sacrifice to you, too, but it can't really find a luxury for your computerised lent. When you finish the story, the android who appears on the main menu, Chloe, asks if, after what you've seen, you'll let her go, never to appear again in your clean room. This is not the same decision that the Detroiters have to make wherein they would relinquish their walking, talking dishwasher or oven because Chloe doesn't do anything for us besides make occasional comments on the switches we flick.

Chipset

The game's subtitle makes it clear that to demand self-determination is to "become human" and imagines the vital shunt towards this goal being the will to protect those around you. Kara breaks her programming to defend Alice, Connor moves to safeguard humans from criminals, and Markus wants nothing less than to save all of androidkind. In their struggle to throw off the yoke of forced labour, the androids of Detroit more closely resemble campaigners of African-American abolition than those of the civil rights era. The labour component even links them somewhat to the polyracial working class of the impoverished city of Detroit. But no two marginalised groups experience pixel-perfect copies of another group's tribulations.

Social groups are defined by some combination of their unique psychological and material circumstances as well as how their personality, physicality, and values are perceived by outsiders. Those variables are never going to be the same for two groups, so the exact nature of their oppression is never going to be mirrored. For the androids in Detroit, their unique subjugation is filtered through their status as electronics that grew into people. Through the game's story, we see where the same management protocols produce fundamentally different acts when applied to people rather than electronics.

For example, if you have a tracking device implanted in an item, that could constitute "find my device" functionality. If you have a person born with a tracking device in them, that's stalking and personal surveillance. If an unfeeling electronic cannot injure a human, that's a safety measure, but if a person can't injure others, that's a barrier to self-defence. Housing items at the back of a vehicle is storage, but if they become sentient, that's segregation.

The android enclosures and no-go zones in 2038 are borders, just borders within a nation instead of outlining it, and ultimately, you can't prevent people from crossing a line unless you say you're willing to meet them with force when they do. The border is that threat of disability and pain. We might see the android demands to control their own labour or to love who they want as transgressions of social borders; borders which must likewise be enforced by the application of bodily harm. That harm is applied by domestic abusers, police, security guards, and others, but all humans benefit from that violence, whether or not they're the ones personally inflicting it.

Erase

Both Detroit and the presentation of Quantic Dreams' art raise the question of who gets to be represented as an autonomous labourer. In Become Human, the public sidesteps a debate over whether a group of people should control their own actions by not recognising them as people. That's how the CyberLife product catalogue continues to be justifiably marketed. You're not buying a slave because a slave is a person who is forced to work, and this is not a person.

Now, it would be hyperbole of the highest order to say that the Quantic Dream employees are slaves or suffer the same dehumanisation that African-Americans did during the Civil Rights Era. That's not what I'm arguing. But there might be congruities between the mindset I described at the start of this article and the passenger in the head of CyberLife customers.

Under auteur theory, the labour of anyone but the helmsman of a project goes unidentified. As Cage clarified, this is a marketing strategy; a profit strategy. Marketing requires simplified representations of products and their production because it needs to be able to use the minimum bit width to communicate technologies and brand values. If a team of labourers makes the product too complex to conceptualise, then reduction requires the erasure of those labourers. Therefore, commercialism attributes art to one person or a few people, even as games are made by hundreds. When we ignore those hundreds, we disrespect the autonomy of the creators who collaborated on that art, and as with the androids, we open them up to exploitation, as they disappear and the essential nature of their labour is degraded. Is it any wonder this is an age of mass layoffs? Thanks for reading.