Video games are often painted as toys for children, lacking any artistry or relevance to the real world. However, any time a video game attempts to comment on a serious issue through its themes or game mechanics, there are ideologues who condemn it for not falling in line with their politics.
Colin Campbell, a Polygon writer already infamous for declaring “All video games are stupid, of course” recently penned an article to condemn the upcoming sci-fi game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided for its use of the term “mechanical apartheid,” which he labels problematic.
Apartheid is a perfectly serviceable term that simply means “the state of being apart.” There’s no doubt that it carries cultural baggage, and it is for that reason that the game’s writers chose to use it. In the setting, mechanically augmented humans are forced to live in segregation from the rest of mankind (hence the game’s title, Mankind Divided) after an event that saw many of them temporarily losing control of their bodies and causing massive bloodshed at the end of the previous game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
One of the game’s two lead writers, Gilles Matouba, a black and French game developer explained how he and co-writer Andre Vu came up with it. Posting on reddit last year, Matouba wrote that the story was both close and very personal to them, drawing from their personal experiences.
He explained that their goal was to deliver the experience of playing Adam Jensen, who is himself augmented. He’s forced to serve the same government that is aggressively segregating his own kind.
Matouba described it best when he called it an “experience of being torn between 2 worlds and 2 identities. Augs calling you the ‘uncle Tom’ of the non-augs, non-augs always insecure when you’re around, always deeply being scared or appalled by your mechanical body.”
“Somehow, it was our own individual stories… We wanted to share a little part of our own life experience (on a super dramatized degree, of course) as visible minorities in a world of prejudices sometimes not well tailored for us,” he wrote, further explaining that he drew from historical instances of apartheid like South Africa, Israel, and the ghettoes of Brazil, France and the US.
“This was important to us to not half-ass these analogies. Because this is Deus Ex,” he wrote.
Offering commentary on social and cultural issues has always been a staple of good science fiction, which is more than just spaceships, lightsabers and funny looking aliens. Much like Ken Levine’s BioShock, the Deus Ex series doesn’t shy away from engaging with serious real-world issues like inequality.
To condemn Deus Ex for its use of a term that perfectly describes its themes would, by itself, come off as nothing more than manufacturing outrage—but the Polygon piece attacks the game from a place of ignorance and even attempts to justify apartheid.
In the previous game, which begins in Detroit—appropriately enough—the player explores the reality of human augmentation. Contrary to the claims Campbell makes in his article about how the augmented are “a privileged and wealthy elite,” the working poor are forced to spend their life savings on mechanical augmentations in order to keep their increasingly demanding jobs that are phasing out non-augmented humans. But it doesn’t stop there: once augmented, these individuals are condemned to a lifetime of dependence on anti-rejection drugs or suffer as their bodies reject their mechanical implements. It’s economic oppression with a physical component.
Some of the people you meet are women who engage in prostitution in order to pay for their meds. Hardly a “privileged and wealthy elite” as the author claims.
Arguing from ignorance, Campbell opts to lecture the reader about privilege and racism, all the while misconstruing the setting. He then doubles down by arguing how “it is not unreasonable” for governments to force the augmented humans into segregation. The rhetoric isn’t too far from what South African legislators came up with in the 1950s. It’s all perfectly disturbing.
Further compounding his ignorance, Campbell mocks Matouba’s explanations as “protestations” and insists that the story isn’t about inequality, but “the consequences of connected technology and consumer choice,” as if the working poor who are forced to modify their bodies had any choice in the matter.
“I never asked for this,” says Adam Jensen. It is Deus Ex’s most famous line. And like Jensen, many of these augmented humans never had a choice.
