Detroit: Become Human is a perfect example of how to mishandle science fiction. It steps into the near future, attempts to utilise parallels or allegories to promote messages, and then pulls its punches the moment it might have something to say. As a result, you are left with a beautiful game with good ideas, but plays things far too safe to stand out.
I feel like Detroit misses what could have been a really good idea (one I wrote a short story on in the past, albeit without robots) and that's "what if everyone buys into this?"
ReplyDeleteFor example what if everyone including the androids completely buy into the idea that they are property, and the story has to work with that angle until we reach the end of the game where they're all granted their independence. If this idea were to be realized you wouldn't need all of the racially inspired sections that have the subtlety of a brick to the face, and you wouldn't have the easy way out of the androids realizing they can be free with just a 5 minute conversation. I never really bought the idea that the robots in the game all saw themselves as property because they all came off as too human, which to me led to wonder why nobody in the setting seemed to care that the androids had clearly defined emotions and senses of selves.
I believe I've mentioned it in the past, but there was a very interesting series called Geneforge that brought up this idea as well. In it there's a group called Shapers who have the ability to create life from nothing (including sentient, near-human life) and they view what they create as their property. With a snap of their fingers they can kill their creations and make a new one, altered in any way they see fit. As such their creations also tended to view themselves as property since their lives were literally created and destroyed by somebody else. The only way for them to escape this control was for their master to die, which of course was rather difficult to cause in many instances, with most of the shapers creations believing that even if their master died, it would be impossible for them to survive without their master's help.
The series focused on the creations of the shapers realizing several things, that it was possible to live without their shapers, that the shapers were not the gods they thought they were, that any children they could have would not be under the control of the shapers in the same way (and so could not be killed instantly as their parents were) and that the shapers still viewed their children as their property, even if at that point there was fundamentally no difference between them and the shapers. It's quite a long series made up of quite long games but that doesn't mean it's not an interesting journey from one to another, since they happen in very different locations and time periods and with very different characters. It's also a series with player choice where you feel actual weight and consequence to those choices. Unfortunately having played that it just made Detroit: Become Human seem rather shallow by comparison.
Well, i'm definitely adding Geneforge to my GoG wishlist now, because that's definitely the sort of thing I was hoping to see here. That in of itself has so much more depth, detail and complexity behind it than just using it as a parallel for equal rights. Hell, Detroit doesn't even get that right a lot of the time, as it relies so much on past imagery or parallels that it ends up emulating previous successes over building toward new ones. It's not helped by the fact that the androids are treated as humans in all but name as well, with no differences or varying morals.
DeleteAh well, perhaps we'll get lucky with the next one.