Deus Ex: A world of augmented humans
5 September 2011
Richard Fisher, technology features editor
By enhancing ourselves with technology, do we throw away a part of our humanity? That's the question at the heart of a new video game, Deus Ex: Human revolution.
Set in 2027, in the game you play Adam Jensen, a moody, gravelly-voiced security agent for a fictional company that makes technological augmentations for the mind and body - for those who can afford them. Injured at the start, Jensen is augmented with all sorts of mean hardware: it's the only way to save his life, but it's against his will. Set in a vast world where the moral choices you make influence the next steps in the story, the game is part role-play, part shooter.
To root the game in reality, designers recruited scientific advisers such as Will Rossellini from the Dallas, Texas-based company Microtransponder, which makes wireless electronics that can be implanted in the body to treat pain and other medical conditions.
One thing these advisers helped to do is build a "timeline" of the game's technologies and key events, stretching from the 1960s to the beginning of the game's story in 2027. It merges the reality of a robotic hand built at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 40 years ago with the future of the fictional company Jensen works for, Sarif Industries.
These efforts mean that many of the ideas in the game are extrapolations of today's technologies. The body prosthetics, for instance, echo those under development by the US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Researchers there are building artificial limbs that wire up directly to nerves, controlled by the mind and with the same sense of touch as a normal limb.
The game also features brain enhancements, which, again, are not so far from tools today that use light, ultrasound or magnetic fields to boost cognitive powers.
Jensen can also upgrade his social skills when interacting with other characters. Technology that enhances your social interactions in real time - by feeding you information about a conversation partner's emotions - is currently being developed at MIT.
The debate at the heart of Deus Ex is whether all is augmentation is a good thing. The future imagined in the game is hardly pleasant. In order to stop the body rejecting implants, inhabitants of this 2027 world must take an expensive drug called neuropozyne for the rest of their lives (naturally, big pharma makes huge profits as a result). Many people can't afford the drug or the implants in the first place. In fact, some citizens in the game's world are resisting this unwanted pressure to upgrade their bodies - often violently, as your character Jensen soon discovers.
If you visit the website for Sarif Industries you can get a flavour of this tone: it's an apparently real corporate site, promoting the virtues of Sarif technologies with director profiles and press releases - but it appears to have been hacked by anti-augmentation activists. "This is a business driven by fear," one scientist complains in a video. "If you feel your brainpower or body's abilities are lacking compared with the next person, you feel pressure to upgrade".
Debate over the ethics and impact of augmentation is nothing new. The idea of "transhumanism" - that we can use technology to transcend Homo sapiens - dates back to at least the 1950s. The term "cyborg" dates back to the 1960s, proposed by two NASA scientists to describe the improvements that would be required to prepare astronauts for long-distance space travel.
Plenty of people in the real world are already well along the road to integrating their bodies with machines. In 1998, researcher Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading, UK, implanted an RFID chip under his own skin, and is widely known as "the first cyborg". But the truth is, we began enhancing our abilities with technology much earlier than that. Many of us could be considered cyborgs today: pacemakers, mind-boosting drugs, and Google at our fingertips are all ways we already augment our minds and bodies.
More recently, neuroscientists have debated whether "designer brains" and other enhancements could divide humanity into haves and have-nots, with idealised body forms and intelligence that are available only to the rich. There's a fear that technology upgrades will lead to a less fair society - where people get into top universities and careers, for instance, thanks to their implants, not their raw abilities.
Deus Ex tackles these issues in an inventive and entertaining way, and the art direction of the game is fabulous. The accuracy of the technology and the accompanying ethical dilemmas give the game's story additional impact.
As for gameplay, I suspect Deus Ex will be divisive. Many hard-core gamers and role-playing game fans will love the ambition and scale of the world the designers have created, and the freedom to explore it and make choices that influence the overall story. But more casual gamers may be less taken with it all.
One theory of game design is that a good game needs to be intrinsically entertaining. It also can't just be about scoring points or getting to the end - you need to enjoy the ride. Yet Deus Ex can be infuriating to play at times. You spend long sections just waiting: hiding behind boxes, for instance, only to stick your head out and be killed instantly (at least if you're unskilled, like me). Then there's more waiting, because the game takes up to 30 seconds for the section to reload after you die. Good games offer steep challenge, but not when the test you face is coping with sections of boredom followed by flashes of intense difficulty.
The story and vision behind Deus Ex are interesting, and the issues it raises about the future of humanity are complex. If only the game was more fun, you might spend more time exploring its ideas.
Deus Ex is currently on sale in North America and the UK.
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