Hey, I’m Hamish and this is Writing on Games.
Detroit started off life as a literal tech demo; a seven-minute short film written by
David Cage in which we see an early version of one of our protagonists, Kara, waking up
as she’s being assembled, taking orders from a faceless voice that she nevertheless
quickly establishes a rapport with.
As she reads off a humorous declaration of her servitude and her limbs are attached,
she becomes subtly but visibly excited at the prospect of being alive, only for the
discussion with her friend to turn to shock as she’s immediately disassembled for showing
emotion.
And it’s only when she reveals that she’s scared of dying after the wave of euphoria
she’s just felt, that the voice grants her mercy.
It’s a perfectly contained, dare I say well-written story.
It uses its visuals in a compelling way, gradually revealing more of Kara’s perspective as
she develops and contrasting her natural whimsy with the sterile brutality she awakes to.
It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s hopeful, it’s an interesting way to present the human/android
question; something that over time has become such a trite sci-fi trope.
And most importantly, it doesn’t waste time on elaborating what the situation is.
She’s awake, she shows emotion, boom – she’s gone.
It gets in and out in seven minutes.
It’s neat.
According to Cage, it was the surprisingly positive response to this self-contained story
that inspired him to expand it into the world of Become Human.
And in doing so, he seemingly ignores almost everything that made that short what it was.
The subtle visuals and dialogue suddenly become the most heavy-handed imagery you could possibly
imagine.
The conciseness of its scenario turns into meandering through nothing-y situations, stretching
out every action into its most basic mechanical minutiae, showing a fundamental misunderstanding
of how games can tell their stories; all in service of delivering a message on the humanity
of androids about as potent as an old rock band decrying Bush as a bad president.
In other words, it’s a David Cage game through and through.
He’s always been like this; talking about the potential of games as some nebulous “emotional
storytelling medium” while in practice remaining about five years behind everyone else in the
narrative department.
And yet people keep praising his work, they keep throwing money his way, big name actors
sign up, he uses the most bleeding edge tech to produce these gorgeous looking worlds,
teams of hundreds of people bringing their A-game for this… nonsense.
A game that’s about as subtle with its Christ imagery as a goddamn brick to the face, a
game that reveals horrendous abuse through crayon drawings of an android in bits and
a wee girl in tears, a game that draws some unbelievably literal lines between its central
struggle and not only the civil rights movement but the goddamn holocaust and genuinely tops
it all off with questions such as…
OK maybe this part could actually be considered a legitimate spoiler so I’m giving you an
opportunity to skip to the time thing shown but oh my god it’s too funny not to mention…
…“what if all our divides could be healed through the power of song?”
It is wild, David Cage is a lunatic.
And honestly, it’s kind of amazing to witness the train crash.
After a tepid opening few hours in which it feels like very little actually happens (again,
typical of most Cage games), the shlock really starts to pick up and it led to moments of
my mouth being agape, head in my hands, rolling around with laughter at the earnestness with
which all of this is presented.
I may not have been expressing the precious emotions Cage so desperately wants to extract
from players, I may have been laughing directly at the game, but in a year in which unbelievably
polished games have failed to get much of a reaction either way out of me, at least
I was laughing.
To be clear, I had a good time playing this game.
And to Cage’s credit, there are some genuinely good moments sprinkled in there that show
marked improvement over his previous work, for sure.
Connor and Hank’s relationship is certainly the most nuanced I’ve seen in a Cage game,
where instead of going for the obviously positive options in order to improve the bond between
your straight-laced detective and his depressed, alcoholic partner like you might in other
games - “you’ll be OK, despite what you’ve been through you’re valued, etc.”
Hank’ll squint at you for acting the angel and prying into his business.
It means you have to navigate the more difficult in-between – avoiding being a complete dingo
but showing enough cynicism in order to demonstrate that you can read between the lines; in short,
you have to convince Hank of your humanity.
It made me yearn for a game that focused entirely on this emotionally complex, often legitimately
funny buddy cop dynamic, using the wider civil unrest as a grim backdrop for smaller cases.
Moments where characters’ stories would intersect had a surprisingly strong effect
on me.
I suddenly had to stop thinking about how I played each character separately and instead
try to weigh up those individual motivations against how I wanted the larger story to proceed.
This character wants to capture that character, for example, and I could easily make that
happen as I’m controlling both, but perhaps deliberately maintaining that cat-and-mouse
tension would make for a more interesting story.
Cage has always talked about putting players in the action and this is the closest he’s
ever come to that, it’s just that instead of fulfilling the role of actor focusing on
individuals, in these situations you’re more a director, controlling actual pacing
as you consider the bigger picture.
It just so happens that, ultimately, this is a Cage game and so of course these moments
are going to be few and far between in favour of some truly awful writing.
And I’m not just talking about the heavy-handedness of the dialogue or the imagery and symbolism
at play.
I’m talking instead about Cage’s continued insistence that games have to ape the storytelling
language of film in order to be a viable “emotional” medium, while also failing to utilise the
narrative strengths of either artform.
Let me give you an example.
Imagine you’re reading a movie script; it’s meant to be an exciting heist scene and it
reads “character is told to cut hole in window.
Character picks up bag.
Character walks with bag over to window.
Character puts bag down at window.
Character opens bag, etc.”
You’d be laughed out of any writer’s room for not just having a character say “get
the goddamn window” and then showing the window getting got.
It was the same in Heavy Rain, in which you’d wake your character up, you’d stand your
character up, you’d take a shower, you’d take a piss, and on and on with this utterly
meaningless busywork that did absolutely nothing to further the story.
Here, at least there’s some narrative justification to having what is ostensibly a slave go around
cleaning every part of a house, but given how the game has you repeating every action
long after you’ve gotten the point about what it represents; how it fetishizes giving
you absolute analogue control over the smoothness of your interactions even though all it could
ever do in a narrative sense is make opening a door or helping someone up look goofy as
hell, Cage can’t seem to decide whether he actually wants to tell you a story or if
he wants to impress you with his tech.
And it all brings us back to where it started; Kara was a demo envisioned by a man focusing
on one medium that he understands, resulting in a surprisingly focused and well put-together
end product.
Detroit: Become Human was meant to be Cage’s storytelling opus, and, perhaps ironically,
ends up feeling like more of a tech demo - albeit an entertainingly shlocky one - than the actual
demo that inspired it.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Detroit.
I know some people really like this game and if you do, that’s cool!
I just perhaps like it for different reasons.
As always, these videos are made possible by your unbelievably generous support over
on Patreon, so if you want to help the show, maybe consider donating – every pledge helps
more than you can possibly know.
Special thanks go to Mark B. Writing, Nico Bleackley, Rob, Michael Wolf, Artjom Vitsjuk,
Spike Jones, TheNamelessGuy, Chris Wright, Dr. Motorcycle, Harry Fuertes, Ham Migas,
Travis Bennett, Zach Casserly, Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Filip Lange, Ana Pimentel,
Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness, Biggy Smith, Peter, Christian Konemann, Cameltraffic,
Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, I've been Hamish and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.