The Opening of Detroit: Become Human

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From i09:

The concerns at the heart of Detroit: Become Human are readily apparent almost from the very start: the existential crisis faced by androids that look and behave like people but are treated like things. But its lofty ambitions get hamstrung at the very start by some incredibly heavy-handed moments of shlock.

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The studio tends to put the player in control of small, everyday interactions, the idea being that you more fully inhabit a character and invest in the drama as a result.

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Detroit starts out with a series of vignettes that cycle through three main android characters, opening with high-stakes drama first. Players first meet Connor (Bryan Dechart), a special police operative tasked with tracking down deviants, androids who go off protocol and pose a danger to humans. The first sequence is a hostage negotiation where a distraught android threatens to kill a little girl he once took care of. It’s a good primer for the gameplay that follows because it’s heavy-handed to a fault and borrows heavily from familiar tropes in cop-drama movies and TV shows.

From there, we meet Markus (Jesse Williams), who starts off as the assistant to an ailing artist but then becomes a leader in the android resistance movement. Finally, there’s Kara (Valorie Curry), who works as a housekeeper/babysitter but breaks her programming to go on the run with her young charge.

We’re supposed to care for these almost-humans but we meet them as overly familiar symbols first. Connor is the android hunting down his own kind, with an initial hostage crisis that leave another android dead. What’s supposed to feel like moral ambiguity instead comes across as cold and unfeeling pragmatism.

Markus gets yelled at by a preacher, only to be then beaten by a crowd of anti-android protestors. If that wasn’t enough, when he gets on public transit to go back home, he has to sit on the back of the bus, in a segregated android compartment.

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Real-world tech-ethics controversies get copy-pasted into Detroit’s fiction in eye-rollingly facile ways, like sponsored content that says hetero men prefer sex with androids, news reports on exodus from flooding coastal cities, and articles that report androids may be listening into owners’ conversations and harvesting data for advertisers. For the most part, it doesn’t seem like most people in the world of Detroit actually cares about these matters. They’re just there for the player to find so the game’s creators can check off a box on a ‘Deep Commentary’ checklist.

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Detroit mostly stumbles through an odd dance of performative philosophizing and none of the characters feel lived in enough for you to care about what happens to them next. They’re cypher vessels made to hold trite observations about human nature.

Link to the rest at i09