Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Tries, and Fails, to Be a Political Game

The tentpole videogame is having a crisis of character, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided might be its herald.

This massive RPG, shipping Tuesday for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, seems divided on its purpose. Its developers clearly wanted to craft a grim, politically relevant tale while fulfilling their financial mandate to create a fun, open-ended videogame equivalent of a summer popcorn superhero movie that will sell millions of copies and not rock the boat too much.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is a political tragedy, a paranoiac thriller, a ruthless shooter, and a thrilling stealth simulator. It tries to do what the original Deus Ex did so splendidly by offering a vision of freedom to the player, letting them shape the game into whatever they most want to play. But despite many of the individual parts succeeding, I don't know if it gets the balancing act right. Ultimately, like big-budget videogaming itself, I'm not sure Deus Ex knows what it is anymore.

Over the past decade, through global recession and the increasing cost of creating videogames that make use of the most advanced hardware, mass market games have become the purview of increasingly fewer and fewer publishers and developers. These are the parties with the most money and the most employees---Activision, Electronic Arts, or Deus Ex maker Square Enix---and the products they make are becoming increasingly homogenous. They're violent, they're straightforward, and they try to appeal to the broadest demographics possible, which is often a convenient code for catering to young, white men. They also strive to be apolitical, without any "deeper meaning," the sort of games about which executives and PR managers can shrug away any controversy.

It's not clear how much longer those attitudes are going to remain tenable. The availability and sheer volume of online discourse has made discussions around the political meanings of game stories and mechanics more visible and more heated, while the rise of independent games has illustrated what many of us have been saying all along: that games are and always have been a potent, but largely untapped, medium for nuanced expression. The sentiment that games are, and should be allowed to be, political is one that is burrowing its way deeper and deeper into the industry. And as some independent creators move to working with those major corporations, and as their beliefs and attitudes infect the waters, it's a sentiment that is only going to move upward through the echelons of the industry as time goes forward.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an unambiguously political game. Look at the marketing materials: Set in a future where mechanical augmentations like bionic limbs and brain interfaces have stratified humanity, the marketing for the new Deus Ex has taken the form of mockumentary footage and fake news reports that detail protests, oppression, and the slogans of a fictional grassroots movement. The slogans pull from modern political rhetoric in a way so blatant it's impossible to imagine that it's unintentional: "Mechanical apartheid." "Aug Lives Matter."