This is interesting (Possible Mankind Divided spoilers)

[Izanagi009_v1legacy]

Errant Signal just released a video on Mankind Divided and his thesis is an interesting one

The basic thesis is that Mankind Divided is ultimately shallow in it's exploration of themes because it doesn't explore the themes that it supposedly comments on. The main issue that Signal argues is that there is a power fantasy intrinsic to Adam Jensen that makes it impossible to explore the issues because it would mean diminishing the player's power. He also argues that the side comments made in the streets are far too unnuanced and paint people as bleeding hearts or genocidal jerks

I would like to hear people's opinions on this

 

[Dizchu]

I was about to make a topic about this, actually. I think this is a problem that a lot of triple-A games have, this idea that making any sort of political statement independent of the player's actions is a bad thing. It doesn't help that "keep politics out of muh vidya games" is a popular sentiment these days, one which discourages a lot of these discussions in the first place.

One of my favourite games lately (maybe one of my favourites of all time) is Undertale. What makes Undertale so good is that it commits to a certain moral statement and rewards the player for doing what it sees as "the right thing". The choices you make are meaningful not because "all choices are equally valid", but because they have a massive impact on the play experience. The same with the old Thief games, they explicitly reward stealth over violence (unlike recent titles such as Dishonored). Compare this to Fallout 3 where you can nuke a whole town because "why not?" Are there consequences? No, not really. Not for the player.

Mankind Divided is at least better than The Division in the sense that it is actually aware that it is dealing with controversial political themes, but they seem to have skimped out on the "controversial" part. It doesn't want to step on anyone's toes because it'll detract from the "badass power fantasy" template it has been forced into by industry trends. Judging by the backlash to the criticism The Division got I have a feeling that this sort of "treating serious subjects with baby gloves" trend will continue for a while.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

We saw this coming. It's the same issue they had in HR. They tell you your oppresses, but your not really. There is so much they could do, so many downsides they made up for augs, but they place the player above it.

I really want to see a game where they don't hide away the actual trouble from the player. Let the player have to budget out for injections. Let them get arrested and manhandled by the cops rather then being stopped for a few seconds. Like just do the whole thing over as someone other then AJ.

 

[happyninja42]

I think it should be pointed out, that Mankind Divided was supposed to be a much larger game, and was cut by order of Square Enix. So it's possible the exploration of the situation was/is something that was part of the game, and had to be cut. Perhaps it will come up more later in the game, with the inevitable sequel.

I personally would've liked to have your actions have an effect in game. Given you are in a city where the fear of augmented people going apeshit is a very real concern, if you decide to let the blood run in the streets, it would've been neat to see that actually reflect in the city. But it doesn't. I decided to roleplay it out, and enjoyed it, the idea that I was a walking death machine, but was making an effort to play down my ability to cause rampant destruction. Because if I did indulge in the very activities that the people feared, I would just bring down more pain and grief on innocent people around me, that didn't have military augs to defend themselves. It helped flesh out my No Kill playthrough of the game, and I enjoyed it.

 

[Dizchu]

Plus I won't really call Undertale on having a good moral statement, it's basically "don't kill sentient creatures if you have an easy alternative", are there actually be people who would argue against that?

Oh of course "don't kill people if there's an alternative" isn't a mindblowing moral statement, but what Undertale does specifically is challenge gaming conventions that players take for granted. Of course killing is wrong, but video games have trivialised the act of killing enemies and leveling up as a result. You have to apply your real-life sensibilities to a video game and play against your instincts, that's what makes Undertale so good. You have to think outside the box to succeed.

In Mankind Divided it's the other way around, instead of breaking video game conventions to tell the story it has to sacrifice its story to adhere to video game conventions.

 

[Blitsie]

I haven't watched the video yet and I'm only about seven hours into the game. But judging from what I've seen so far I can see what people are getting at.

The most striking thing I've noticed is that they're laying it on quite thick on the surface level, in an attempt (so far) to avoid having to dig deeper into the themes they present. The problem with that is it makes everything way too black and white sometimes for what's supposed to be a rather gray world.

I also noticed they're really riding the "you're a super badass Interpol agent, so you get special snowflake clearance and no one will bother you unless plot demands it" spiel to keep you detached as more of an observer with limited effect on the world rather than also an aug living there, having to deal with the crap coming from a society deeply fearful of you.

Overall, it seems to me like the game is trying to intimidatingly bare its chompers here, but its no use because the whole thing is pretty toothless really. Meh, I'll come change my post once I get further in the game and it proves me wrong or so.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

I don't get it, the game had the political statement "racism is wrong" with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, all prejudiced people are saints who never do wrong things, all police are authoritarian dickbags and if there are actually prejudiced people who are bad it's due to them being puppets to white people the real masterminds. Any other themes are drowned out just for this one singular theme, it's just the game trying to cram itself to current political situation and killing any interesting sci fi element remaining, no power fantasy needed, just bad writing.

Did you get to the second half of the game? You know after the Martin Luther King-expy had died and was replaced by the Malcolm X-expy who used a group of military-auged terrorists and a violent cult of augs to make bombs for him? The latter half of Mankind Divided pretty much gives the whole "Augs are dangerous"-rhetoric a point, because for the second half you are chasing after auged terrorists who plan to violently eradicate an attempt at giving augs a safe haven.

The biggest problem of the game is that Adam Jensen is above most of the actual oppression, due to his advanced augs and his current employer. There can be no compelling experience of oppression when the player accepts that it is just scripted scenes while knowing they could Typhoon every single policeman in Prague to death. That and the fact that for all its' portrayal of a divided society, MD never actually gets around to making something of it. It is a backdrop that is very fleshed out, but the focus is on hunting Illuminati and being an international man of mystery, which makes the whole backdrop kind of moot.

 

[meiam]

Did you get to the second half of the game? You know after the Martin Luther King-expy had died and was replaced by the Malcolm X-expy who used a group of military-auged terrorists and a violent cult of augs to make bombs for him? The latter half of Mankind Divided pretty much gives the whole "Augs are dangerous"-rhetoric a point, because for the second half you are chasing after auged terrorists who plan to violently eradicate an attempt at giving augs a safe haven.

The biggest problem of the game is that Adam Jensen is above most of the actual oppression, due to his advanced augs and his current employer. There can be no compelling experience of oppression when the player accepts that it is just scripted scenes while knowing they could Typhoon every single policeman in Prague to death. That and the fact that for all its' portrayal of a divided society, MD never actually gets around to making something of it. It is a backdrop that is very fleshed out, but the focus is on hunting Illuminati and being an international man of mystery, which makes the whole backdrop kind of moot.

But the aug terrorist weren't dangerous because they were aug, they were terrorist who also happened to be aug (and were controlled by the big bad guy). It's more the character you meet, every aug you meet is a poor oppressed soul and every cop you see is a dickward, even the most sympathetic cop are huge asshole. The game never actually dwell and consider the actual problem. Like, imagine two year ago a certain minority group just went batshit insane and started rampaging, and since then some would still sporadically go on rampage, every time there's some form of discrimination they would feel pretty justified (I sure as heck wouldn't want to sit next to one, cause even if they're a nice person that's irrelevant, they can still go berserk, just like I wouldn't want to sit next to an infectious person). But the game never actually went there, every anti aug person is just a huge racist, they never actually bring forth any of those sensible, logical argument, no they just spout incoherent racist rant. No subtlety, no attempt at actually exploring the actual events, they just cram the theme down your throat. Then you could also add on to that the fact that from HR it really seem like most successful people were aug, not surprising consider aug can significantly boost someone mental capacity, make them amazing negotiator but cost a huge amount of money, but apparently the entire world elites just rolled on there side and did nothing?

So when the theme is so ham-fisted, it doesn't matter what the game does from a gameplay point of view. I strongly believe that video game can tell great story trough gameplay, but that take subtlety, something which the game clearly lacked. Beside any attempt would just have made it worse, imagine a cop arrest you and ignored your papers, well most player would just shoot him and any reinforcements, so cops would just become one more target like any others.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

But the aug terrorist weren't dangerous because they were aug, they were terrorist who also happened to be aug (and were controlled by the big bad guy). It's more the character you meet, every aug you meet is a poor oppressed soul and every cop you see is a dickward, even the most sympathetic cop are huge asshole.

Except them being aug is explicitly part of their agenda, meant to drive the schism between augs and non-augs. The end game of the Illuminati in the game is to whip up an anti-aug frenzy so that they can capitalize on the ensuing chaos.

Look, it is not that I don't see the point you and other are bringing up and in many ways it is a very valid point. In its' attempt to drive home the point it occasionally gets ham-fisted. But the game is also quite able of subtlety in conveying some of the finer aspects of the point. All those rich auged people you are talking about? Those are the people that Rabi'ah are being built for. The woman in the subway that is promoting it reveals that the "job for aug workers"-thing in Rabi'ah is nothing but a giant lottery that preys on poorer augs, while later e-mail conversations reveal that the cost of living in Rabi'ah is so prohibitively high and the actual number of residences so small (40,000 compared to 7 million augs) that it is essentially just intended as a remote, gated community for ultra-wealthy augs.

The problem is that the subtler points get drowned out in the white noise that is the constant blunt delivery of the main theme. That the main theme is pretty unsuited for what is essentially a secret agent conspiracy story is another huge mark against it. In the end, I am quite wary of too widespread criticism of the way the game handles its' augs/racism-theme, because I've read several opinion pieces from people subjected to daily racism who thinks that Mankind Divided actually catches the atmosphere these people live in daily. If that's the case I feel distinctly uncomfortable, as a white person not subjected to racism, in saying that the game is being too blunt or too heavy-handed or not nuanced enough. Because the truth is that I wouldn't know a damn thing about the nuance of being subjected to racism and how it would color my day to day life and I am inclined to trust people that are subjected to it above my own uninformed opinion.

 

[Dizchu]

I don't think there is a way to make Jensen, or the player, really feel oppressed in game without it becoming "ghetto simulator". And even if they could it would make the fame even more one sided than it already is.

Half-Life 2 did a great job of portraying City 17 as a totalitarian state. Moments like the classic "put the can in the trash" part show how powerless you are and the first third of the game is specifically about escaping the city. Later in the game when you acquire more weapons and support from the citizens you take on the oppressors head-first. It's not awfully complicated but it's done very effectively.

Wolfenstein: The New Order is similar, even though the game is very self-aware about how overpowered the player is there are points in the game where that power is taken away and the sheer horror of the situation you're in is experienced first-hand. Now admittedly HL2 and Wolfenstein deal with far less nuanced antagonists than Deus Ex, because those games were about alien occupation of the planet and Nazi occupation of the planet respectively. But they show that it's entirely possible to depict oppression and still have the ability to let the player have their power fantasy.

Developers shouldn't be afraid to take control away from the player, and by that I don't mean by literally taking control away from them but by restricting their actions. But that goes against the "play it your own way, the player's always right" mentality that goes into a lot of game design these days.

 

[Dizchu]

Not really, besides the "put the can in the trash" always stroke me as "look at our environment physics", you can't simulate oppression if you want any effective gameplay, what you CAN simulate is being powerless. Both things are only superficially similar, since the mere knowledge in a video game (or any media) that you or the protagonist have a power to change the situation breaks the image of the oppression.

Oppression is not the same thing as lack of hope, though lack of hope does play a big part. Many of the people who fight against oppression in the real world do so because they believe the world can get better, but that goal might be very difficult. That's the challenge when it comes to writing a story when the audience knows that there's usually a resolution to the conflict, you have to make them believe that the obstacles the protagonist faces are legitimately threatening and when your player character is supposedly from an "oppressed class" yet goes through the game with many privileges that does the story a disservice.

Oppression is when the populace/person spirit is broken, when the thought of working against the situation is effectively gone and the only hope is to obey enough to not stick out, "Inside" might be one of the few games that did it well, especially with the ending.

Not necessarily, all oppression requires is a constant state of cruelty and unjust treatment under some sort of authoritarianism. The lack of hope contributes to this but obviously it's not always the case or else revolutions would not happen. Nobody would fight against oppression if there was no hope of getting rid of it.

 

[Dizchu]

I think the problem is that the term is slowly losing it's meaning, oppression is slavery, holocaust and soviet Russia, not countries banning a bathing suit or having a trigger happy police.

Oppression is segregation, criminalisation of homosexuality, government propaganda that demonises minorities, state-endorsed discrimination, theocratic laws, abuse of human rights, etc. Just because oppression can be milder in one place than it is somewhere else does not mean the word does not apply. If homosexuality is criminalised in one place and carries the death penalty somewhere else they both meet the criteria of oppression.

 

[stroopwafel]

I agree the real world analogies to the whole 'augmentation debacle' are fairly hamfisted but as for the actual plot of MD itself I don't think it was ever the point Jensen himself was meant to be the subject of persecution or marginalization. The game makes it fairly obvious that while the aug incident was a worldwide phenomenon the particularly viscious backlash we see in the game is fairly specific to Prague considering this city was a central hub for aug workers due to national policies and all kinds of construction projects. There is an obvious undercurrent of hostility against augs(espescially reflected in the cops) but at the same time there is no legislation that gives these cops a mandate that violate the basic human rights of augs(other than perhaps segregation in the subway but even here it is more seen as a preventive security measure for fear of another incident).

Society is obviously at a 'tipping point' in MD and could still go either way. Prague simply became this pressure cooker due to the high concentration of augs and thus the destruction of the aug incident was felt particularly severe here. This translates into distrust, segregation and a police force that would rather throw every aug in a slum. I think the game handled this balance fairly well. Jensen is simply an outsider send to investigate in this context but he is a member of interpol and thus with far higher clearance than any of the street cops you encounter. Again, cops with no legal mandate to act like douchebags. This anti-aug tension runs through the entire game and there is a real sense of gravitas on Jensen's shoulders to prevent another attack considering this would definitely tip the scales(ie the human restoration project).

I think the game handled it's messages well but I think the marketing and real world analogies hurt it a bit b/c it creates a kind of false expectations. Also, I really enjoyed the game but I also wished the story didn't center entirely around the post aug-incident social climate and had a bit more diverse story to tell than ''solve terrorist mystery in a world that now hates augs''. Golem was the best part of the game in my opinion and it would have been enough to show the effects of the aug incident from the last game. I kind of missed the whole 'technology is on the move' vibe that made the last game so imaginative and intriguing. Still, it's a great game though.

 

[Dizchu]

But the examples you gave still fall in line of what I said, where criminalisation of homosexuality happens gays won't hold prides or announce themselves as gays in any public platform and in case of demonized minorities they will not even have a stand to voice their opinions. Unjust treatment by itself does not mean oppression.

Unjust treatment on a state-wide level is oppression though. It's where one group has greater political and social influence than another and deliberately uses that power to keep them down. I'd actually consider something as mild as the non-legalisation of gay marriage to be oppressive as one group has used their power and influence to lower the status of another group. In Mankind Divided the augs are considered outcasts and attempts are made to pass legislation that would legally class augs as inferior citizens.

If oppression means that nobody can stand against it, how do you explain movements that have successfully been able to grant rights to groups that unfairly didn't have them before?

 

[stroopwafel]

If oppression means that nobody can stand against it, how do you explain movements that have successfully been able to grant rights to groups that unfairly didn't have them before?

Just because a group doesn't have certain rights don't necessarily mean they are oppressed. To take your example: non-legalisation of gay marriage don't mean homosexuality is illegal, just that they can't get married. If gays were genuinely oppressed, you would have the situation of say islamic countries. With a constitution it's pretty much impossible for people to be genuinely 'oppressed' simply b/c the legal incentives to do so are lacking. The U.S. is still fairly conservative so society might sway in one way(ie rather no gay marriage), but minority rights are still respected(ie free to poke other men up the bum). However society might sway the other way again later and have gay marriage legalized. But still, as long as basic rights of people aren't violated I don't think you can speak of 'oppression'. I think it devalues the meaning of the word if not used only in it's most literal context.