Well, it’s really just an extremely competent game. I wouldn’t call the gameplay revolutionary in the same way I would the original Deus Ex, but it’s certainly an improvement on many aspects of it, particularly the writing and characters. Human Revolution has a fine line to walk between the somewhat cheeseball bombasticism of the original game and the things people have come to expect of serious games in the meantime, and with the exceptions that I’ve already mentioned, it does it quite well. Bob Page is still awesomely evil, but his world is toned down somewhat, and his henchmen–the power players of Human Revolution–have their own satisfying goals.

And then there are the support characters, who fill a role in this game that they were never quite able to in Deus Ex. As much as I loved Paul Denton and Alex Jacobson, Malik and Pritchard are fantastic bit players, so much so that when Malik was in danger, I broke my oath of nonviolence and went on a madman’s rampage to make sure she flew off safely. The dialog between them is crisp and clever, and I genuinely enjoyed it whenever one of them broke in on my radio frequency. With some exceptions, the secondary characters feel more like people with opinions than walking tropes or ideological set pieces, even when they’re going over their spiels on augmentation for you.

I would have loved some more closure–especially because, depending on your ending, you may never see any of them again–but as it is, there’s still an evolution in their relationship with you that’s really pretty rare. Malik, who comes off initially as somewhat hesitant and blandly friendly, places her trust in Adam implicitly by the end. Pritchard and Adam develop a snarky form of friendship, going from chilly enemies to a mutual support system. Not that that will stop me from stealing his credit chips when he leaves them around. Even if I don’t think Adam necessarily deserves all the good reactions he gets from people, and more of the change is on Pritchard’s part, it’s nice bit of development.

And then there’s Megan, who is about fifty layers of tightly-packed cipher. Without appearing or acting in any way the femme fatale, she comes off as a far more successful schemer than Zhao or Darrow, managing to always somehow place herself exactly where she needs to be. It’s a common enough hardboiled and cyberpunk trope–the minor character who nonetheless manages to always get what s/he wants–but here it’s done almost invisibly: It would be entirely possible to miss all of Megan’s agency, or to see it as coincidence, if one doesn’t delve into Adam’s backstory or find the stinger at the end of the game.

To be fair, this sometimes gets into weird territory that’s never explained, as I’ve gone over earlier. But it’s impossible to make sense of Megan’s backstory without something fascinating coming up. If she made Adam fall in love with her to get his DNA samples, she’s a master manipulator. If she was working with his DNA and then fell in love, it’s a tragic getting-too-close-to-the-research. If she’s set up with Adam by Sarif, she’s a fantastic opportunist who pursues her research at all costs. And regardless of which you pick, the fact that she goes to work for Bob Page at the end, designing the Gray Death, just adds another layer to the puzzle.

And yet for all the strange goings-on surrounding Megan, her first scene with Adam comes off as surprisingly genuine. It’s a convincing portrayal of former lovers and close friends at a moment of great importance to one of them, right down to the necklace-twirling and the dialog surrounding the various items in her room. I think I’ve written before about the difficulty of creating established relationships between characters at the start of a video game, and Human Revolution is one of the best examples of it that I’ve seen.

Outside the major characters, I’ve complained about the odd focus on augmentation in dialog. What’s funny is that this is completely absent from the emails and pocket secretaries, which largely seem like, well, the devices of ordinary people. They range from the petty (minor office romances in Sarif Industries and the police station) to the referential (Detective Alex Murphy, aka Robocop, has a computer at the Detroit police station) to the heartbreaking (the capsule hotel contains a number of these in both conversation and pocket secretary form, as people with no money and little hopes of getting jobs sign petitions, pick up lovers, and finally commit suicide). The text and dialog in Hengsha, in particular, shines in this respect, and I’d like to put it forward as my favorite level of this game or any other this year.

One of the biggest changes in the writing of Deus Ex and Human Revolution is the latter’s decision to remove the intertextuality that so pervaded the former. This came up in at least one review, and I’d like to talk about it briefly as well.

I’m not going to lie and say that I wasn’t absurdly thrilled by DX’s references when they came up. Deus Ex was masterful at developing weird concepts that stood alone pretty well, mainly the snippets of conspiracy classic The Man Who Was Thursday and the fact that Silhouette, the French freedom fighters, were based on Guy Debord’s Situationists.

But I don’t think I miss them too much now that they’re gone. They added an interesting depth to the game, but it was one that was rarely explored, more of a straightforward reference than a commentary on those things. From what I can tell, Silhouette never really did much Situationalism, and the conspiracy of Deus Ex was entirely unlike Chesterton’s work.

(Ironically, you could probably see Human Revolution as a sort of dark mirror of The Man Who Was Thursday, with a cabal of Illuminati who don’t really consider themselves Illuminati, each looking out for themselves in this version instead of, as in the book, trying to end the conspiracy by joining it. Bob Page is, of course, Sunday.)

Finally, I just have to say: There are women in this game. That shouldn’t be as big a deal as it is, but I still feel compelled to point it out when it happens. There are women in this game, and they talk to each other about their jobs, their political sympathies, and their lives. They are reasonably practically-dressed, play very different roles, and aren’t all shoehorned into prostitutes/girlfriends/dominatrixes/plucky sidekicks, although many of them, including the oft-lampshaded Dragon Lady, are. In a fairly common video game move, there are no female goons, which is slightly but not incredibly strange.

If I wanted to be picky, I would probably say that it would be nicer if the whole plot weren’t based on Women in Refrigerators, or specifically fridging Megan Reed to catalyze the plot (even if she does get defrosted later when she turns up at the lab). My coblogger jokes that Adam and Isaac Clarke should start a support group for men with PTSD and missing girlfriends. Being halfway through the tie-in novel, though, I’m starting to think that it’s not so much your standard-issue “kill the girlfriend/plucky female sidekick to catalyze the hero” as that the entire world of Human Revolution resistance works on the idea of vengeance. There are two protagonists in the tie-in novel, and both are seeking closure for their fallen comrades. It’s perhaps a bit much, but it’s not so much problematic as it is either an odd storytelling choice or a deliberate decision that I haven’t quite parsed yet.

(Also, why does the only female Tyrant walk en pointe all the time? Even for somebody with robot legs, doesn’t that get uncomfortable and Rob Liefeldy?)

So there we are. It’s not so much that the game has flaws (although it does) as that it has puzzles, things that aren’t really explained or are left unfinished in a way that frustrates deeply. But when it goes right, it really goes right.

While I know the broad strokes of the incredibly complicated plot already, what’s really interesting to me about the game is the balancing act it manages between a purely abstract environment and a quasi-realistic story. Obviously, most early first-person shooters weren’t exactly photorealistic. But Marathon is unique in that while the player knows a great deal, textually, about the world and characters, very little can be gleaned from the environments themselves, nor do they seem to exist for any in-world purpose.

The sense of space in Marathon is downright unsettling. While game levels are almost always disconnected in some way, there’s little sense of spatial progression at all here–you’re teleported from one place to another, completely at the whim of whatever AI you happen to be working for at the moment. Certain levels will have teleportation inside them, creating Mobius-strip areas that loop back on themselves. Doors appear in seemingly random places, sometimes as unworkable facades that should lead logically into places with no doors on the other side. There’s a full map in the game, but it contains so many layers that it’s difficult at best to tell where one is at a given time.

What’s more, the areas in the game don’t seem to correspond to anything that would logically be inside a spaceship, although I suppose the Marathon is supposed to be planetoid-sized and made out of a moon. You’re occasionally told you’re being sent to turn on a communications array or fix the engineering sector, but almost nothing ever indicates these items or areas; the most specific rendering I’ve found so far is a few barrels and the aforementioned satellite dish, which is placed inside a massive octohedron inside a dirt-colored arena that appears to have no ceiling, giving you a full view of the stars outside. The occasional texture suggests circuitry or foot lockers, but the walls are equally likely to be made of wood paneling or turquoise tile interspersed with the more obvious gunship metal. The spaceship has huge areas that are filled with lava.

The spaces seem almost designed to make no sense, with huge, high-ceilinged halls that go on forever followed by tiny passages that all lead the same place, magnificent stairways to nowhere, and transportation device puzzles fiendish in their deadliness and curious specificity. The UESC Marathon goes beyond standard FPS level design tropes into dreamlike surreality, as if the entire thing were the playground of some mad god in which people were never meant to live or work. Which, I’m increasingly thinking after being kidnapped by Durandal, it really is.

It’s possible, I suppose, to chalk this up to the designers’ puzzle-making instinct, or to the constraints of the time, but I don’t think that’s all that’s happening. For a pair of obvious counterexamples, take contemporary shooters Doom and System Shock, both released within a year or two of Marathon. All three are set in extraterrestrial environments, and all contain some form of jumping or navigational puzzles, but all except Marathon also try to incorporate elements of place and theme into their levels. For Doom, the simpler example, this means demonic patterns, skulls, and architectural set pieces as showcased here; for the surprisingly-detailed System Shock, it’s an almost realistically-designed space station with a variety of themed levels, most convincingly a science lab, a group of garden pods (with level-specific killer mutant plants!) and a carpeted executive shuttle bay. Clearly the technology at the time was there, making Marathon’s landscapes, from what I can tell, an aesthetic decision.

Being still only about halfway through the first game, I’m not sure if this will ever play into the plot, or if the environments change at some point in the future. Based on what I know so far, it feels like the game is using its spaces to explore the artificiality of the Marathon and its AI crew, the grandiose but meaningless architecture alluding to the AIs’ and the Security Officer’s search for purpose in a meaningless universe. Or that it’s a space that gains meaning only in conflict, a kind of empathic architecture that was designed for, and invites, chaos. I really don’t know yet, but thinking about it makes the game so much more fun to puzzle through.

While Deus Ex took this on to some degree, it was also surprisingly straightforward: You’ve got a war between a couple of different secret societies, which ultimately leads to the creation of something greater than either of them. Your protagonist starts on one side and ends up on the other, and eventually must choose his loyalty to a faction. But Human Revolution has the GiMP in spades.

Like so many things in Human Revolution, this has fantastic potential. The warring societies are still around, but instead of all-out battles it’s quiet double-crosses, utterly subverting the notion of a single, omnipotent syndicate. There are threads that connect to the original game, a subplot about your protagonist’s identity, and surprisingly complicated villains. And yet it never seems to really add up to anything.

Need I say spoilers below?

Here’s how I understand it. The bulk of the plotting in the game takes place between a group of four Illuminati: Darrow, Taggart, Sarif, and Zhao. They appear to be under the direction of Bob Page, who at this point seems to be still with the Illuminati, having not yet split off to form MJ12. Insofar as they manage to work together, they’re trying to build two things: A killswitch for augmented humans and Hyron, an AI that may be the precursor to Page’s Icarus. The one thing they seem to have been successful at creating so far is Picus, a propaganda news network fronted by Eliza Cassan, the semi-sentient computer.

Sarif is, as far as I can tell in the game, only associated with the Illuminati as far as he must be as a captain of industry. He also is either unaware of the Illuminati’s full power or recognizes the dissent within their ranks, as he says at one point that it’s “just a name to get investors to throw more money at it.” He’s the catalyst of the game’s actions: Megan Reed’s research in his labs is going to possibly solve the problem of dependence on Neuropozyne by using the case study of an anonymous patient whose immune system seems unusually accepting of augmentation. This, apparently, forces the Illuminati’s hand, as Megan’s research is also the key to creating an aug killswitch. There’s also a Congressional hearing that might decide the regulatory future of augmentations, at which Megan is going to speak. So they invade the Sarif facility, kidnap the scientists, and leave destroyed bodies to fake their deaths. Oh, and they kill(ish) Adam.

Over the course of the game, virtually everyone in the Illuminati will betray each other, trying to use Hyron and the killswitch for their own ends and, to some extent, succeeding. It’s a reasonable, fairly clever plot, as long as you accept that both Hyron and the killswitch are things that it would make sense to develop in the first place.

But then we find out about Megan’s research. I…think it hinges on getting the body to bond with augmentations better, thus removing the need for Neuropozyne. At least, it’s based on DNA samples from Adam, and that’s what Adam’s body can do. Why can he do this? Because, according to a private investigator, his scientist parents used him in a VersaLife (Bob Page’s evil corporation) study to discover “the next step in human evolution” by dosing babies with a ton of chemicals and seeing which ones survived, and Adam was the only one who did. They were going to use him to inoculate the next batch of babies, but his parents, disillusioned with the experiment, snuck Adam out to be adopted, burned down the facility, and died in the fire. When Adam finds the woman who snuck him out, she claims that he is far too old, and should be “twelve or thirteen” by now.

David Sarif, apparently, knows this, because when he hired Adam, he created a massive security hole so that he could surreptitiously contact the PI for a background check.

This is a pretty fun V For Vendetta-style twist, so it’s a bit too bad that it raises an absurd amount of questions. The moment I found out about Adam’s past, the whole thing became a massive plot-derailment bomb from which the story never really recovered. Here’s what I’m wondering:

• Why would parents be allowed to perform an experiment on their own son?
• What, exactly, would VersaLife be testing that results in a fix for a problem that doesn’t even exist yet (Neuropozyne treatments)?
• Does this mean that Adam ages really quickly, or that some of his memories are actually faked?
• Does Adam also have some other kind of special powers?
• How did Megan, apparently accidentally, find the one person VersaLife had been testing between thirteen and thirty years ago?

I’m pretty sure the plot never explains any of this, preferring to focus on the impending killswitch and the Hyron AI. So let’s go through it.

I’m going to skip the first point, because I can just chalk that up to the story needing to get his real parents out of the way or something. Plus it allows me to imagine GLaDOS telling Jensen “You are adopted. And that’s terrible.” At which point Jensen presumably tries to strangle her and then rolls behind a desk.

Question 1: What is VersaLife doing?

There’s a temptation here to imagine that Bob Page or whoever was running VersaLife at that point just decided to run an experiment called “dose babies with chemicals” because they’re evil. I’m not…entirely sure that’s not what we’re supposed to think. But the Illuminati are supposed to be the masters of the long con, so there has to be some way to explain this.

The easiest explanation is that they were trying for the results they got–freedom from Neuropozyne–and that they’d already done early tests with augmentation and determined that rejection, while it could be managed with the drug, would be better-managed by a permanent solution.

Actually, more problematic is that this seems to indicate that the Illuminati are being weirdly nice. Remember, last time we checked (in Deus Ex), VersaLife was manufacturing a nanovirus that was threatening to kill off half the eastern seaboard. They have no reason whatsoever to try to get people off Neuropozyne: It’s both bad business logic and bad evil-conspiracy logic. As long as they keep control of the Neuropozyne supply, they don’t even need a killswitch, as all they have to do is cut off an aug’s supply if s/he starts asking questions.

There’s only one reason I can think of for them to do this, and that’s if they’re planning on augmenting themselves. This makes the experiment the Ambrosia to their Gray Death, a way to keep themselves safe from their own machinations. Granted, it still seems a little unnecessary, since they presumably have access to all the Neuropozyne they want, but it’s at least a rational explanation.

This also explains the rush to develop a killswitch once Sarif threatens to go public with Megan’s research. They’ve accidentally handed him the means to take away their power, and now he’s going to use it. Thus, they need a new means of control.

I’m still a little unclear of how Sarif is connected to the Illuminati, but the general feeling I get is that he’s at least subtly resisting it, and this bolsters these claims. It also explains why Sarif would be doing something that presumably cuts into his profits significantly, if he’s making any money at all from Neuropozyne sales: He’s trying to stop his competition and their evil conspiracy by starving their profit margins as well.

I actually like this, because it significantly undercuts the “all corporations are generically evil” assumption that’s so much a part of Deus Ex. Sarif’s not a particularly altruistic guy–he’s willing to let his own employees die to save a defense contract–but you also get the feeling that he’s genuinely trying to run a meaningful business, not just an exploitative trust.

Question 2: Why did Sarif open the security backdoor?

One of the early missions in the game is to shut down a satellite that’s been serving as Sarif’s massive security backdoor, which, as I’ve mentioned, was meant to be a way for Sarif to contact his private investigator.

This can’t be real.

First of all, why would he even need to conceal doing a background check on Adam? He’s the head of the company; it’s not like somebody can tell him not to. Moreover, isn’t this standard practice for heads of security, especially those who have just quit SWAT under mysterious circumstances? If he has to hide the fact that he’s checking up on Adam, why wouldn’t he set up an encrypted channel to do so, instead of creating a security gap? If there’s some handwavey reason he can’t do that–encryption is inadequate or the amount of information is too great–then hasn’t RoboJobs ever heard of sneakernet?

There is just no way that Sarif is telling Adam the truth. And yet we never hear it contradicted, and it never comes up again.

So what is Sarif hiding? Well, one explanation is that he’s hiding his incompetence: He doesn’t know a lot about computers, and he hadn’t realized what a massive security flaw this was until Pritchard found it. But although Sarif seems kind of naive, I find it unlikely that he’s capable of setting up a hole that Pritchard couldn’t find without knowing what it does.

So that brings us to a different explanation: That he’s not actually the one who set it up, at least not of his own accord. The security backdoor is a kind of protection racket for the Illuminati.

If the Illuminati is supposed to be some kind of uber-trust, it makes sense that people from the individual businesses, regardless of their centrality to the group, would be forced to submit to oversight of their activities. For Sarif (and possibly Zhao and Darrow), that means a backdoor that can only be used by Page & Co in exceptional circumstances. It’s meant as a failsafe, and when Sarif starts going off on his own, the Illuminati uses it to take control. Sarif can’t tell Pritchard about it, because the Illuminati will make him disappear. And Sarif certainly can’t tell Adam about it.

So he lies, and makes up something that sets angsty, self-centered Adam off on a chase for his own identity, giving Sarif plausible deniability the next time the Illuminati come calling while still ensuring that Adam ends up at VersaLife, aka the Illuminati.

However, this still doesn’t explain why Sarif hired him in the first place, which brings us to our next issue:

Question 3: How did Megan think to test Adam?

What are the odds that a scientist specifically working on human augmentation is going to stumble across an artificially-created perfect test subject? That might just barely squeak by as a coincidence in real life, but it’s way too perfect for fiction. Megan had to have known about Adam. But how?

Similar to this question is why Sarif hired him in the first place. If Sarif had been doing market research and stumbled on the VersaLife experiment, he could have learned about Adam that way, tracked him down, and arranged the Mexicantown Massacre as a way to get him fired and rehired at Sarif, keeping him close while not naming him as an official test subject. Sarif explicitly has some measure of control over their police–he can threaten to pull money “out of their retirement funds” at the very least–so this isn’t a huge stretch.

But instead, we’re told he hired him because of nepotism, because Megan convinced him to hire her boyfriend. This doesn’t really add up either…unless we consider the alternatives.

Pritchard says early on in the game that he wanted to hire Belltower, a group that appears to have Illuminati connections. I’m guessing almost every other company has them too, meaning that no matter which contractor Sarif hired, he’d be bringing in a Trojan horse. Hence why he wanted somebody in-house.

So he kills two birds with one stone and brings in Adam. But he can’t just hire him out of the blue–that would look suspicious, and he wants the Illuminati to still believe Adam was killed in the fire. So well before he hires anybody–I’m not sure what the timeline is here–he sets up Megan with Adam, then gets Adam disgraced over Mexicantown and brings him in. What might have looked suspicious before now seems like a simple case of nepotism, lulling his opponents into seeing Sarif as a man easily influenced by his subordinates’ love lives.

And how does he make them fall in love?

Pheromones.

Okay, I’m completely making this part up. But the pheromone brain control is such a huge thing that it does it almost a disservice to not use it. And as amusing it is to imagine Megan obsessively saving DNA samples for all her boyfriends, it’s far more likely that Sarif set them up, then slipped her a suggestion to use him as a test subject.

(One possible other explanation is that Megan was in on it all along, or that she was the one who found the VersaLife experiment and Adam, then drew him into a relationship as a way of getting samples. Given her apparent duplicitousness at the end of the game, this is also not unreasonable, but to actually get Mexicantown to happen, she’d probably need Sarif’s help.)

Question 4: Is Adam really thirteen?

I have no idea. I can’t see any reason for it other than moving up the timeline, which isn’t really necessary anyways. The easiest thing to do would be to just say that the woman he talks to is confused about the timeline, and she does have dementia, so anything’s possible. But this is DX-world, where every random street preacher is 100% right. Seriously, a bum in Human Revolution predicts the Gray Death. So how is it possible for the Jensens to have adopted a baby and not noticed that he aged at about three times the normal rate?

Well, the only reasonable explanation is that they did. Like JC Denton, Adam Jensen’s growth was accelerated by the VersaLife experiment, optimizing his body for augmentations and aging him to maturity within a few years. Grateful to have any kind of child, the Jensens were instructed not to mention his aging and to keep him out of school, giving him as much education as they could in the five or so years they had between baby and apparent eighteen-year-old. Then either he was implanted with false memories or the poor guy simply doesn’t know what a normal childhood is supposed to be like. This could even explain his apparent emotional immaturity, although it does make it super-creepy that he’s been in a relationship with Megan.

Thus, the rest of it–the SWAT team, Mexicantown, Sarif–all actually could have happened, plus it cements Adam’s status as an Illuminati ubermensch never designed for mass-production, but as a prototype for the ultra-powerful.

It also changes the central conflict of the story, making Sarif a combination of free market crusader and anti-Illuminati power player, a man who probably could give the group a run for their money if he wanted but who really just wants to run a business by giving people the best product he can.

There’s more I wouldn’t mind discussing about the plot of Human Revolution. But the major issues are all above, and while none of them are guaranteed by the text, they all make more sense than the current lacuna. Barring any new information I come across in a second playthrough of the game, or a canonical explanation from Eidos, this is probably the best I’m going to do.

Previously: Fixing the World and Fixing Adam Jensen

So. There’s a concept on TVTropes known as the Anti Sue.

Unfortunately, simply inverting the Common Mary Sue Traits does not prevent a character from being a Mary Sue. When other characters still worship her and the plot still bends over backwards to facilitate her, she’s still a Mary Sue, despite now being described as an unspeakably ugly and incredibly pathetic loser. This can actually be even more annoying than a vanilla Mary Sue — at least it makes some sort of sense for characters to worship a beautiful, friendly, hypercompetent Mary Sue, but when they’re physically ugly with an unpleasant personality and can barely tie their own shoes (much less solve other people’s problems) and everyone still treats them like the greatest thing since sliced bread, Willing Suspension of Disbelief gets smashed into tiny little pieces.

It would be far too harsh to label Adam Jensen, our intrepid cyborg, an Anti Sue. To do so would be to tar almost every FPS hero, with their penchant for bending the universe around them for no apparent reason, with the same brush. Nonetheless…keep the above in mind as we proceed.

Pretty major spoilers below.

Here are the various things we know about Jensen. He appears to be in his late twenties or early thirties. He was previously on SWAT and in a relationship with Dr. Megan Reed. He was involved in an altercation with an augmented fifteen-year-old, who he refused to shoot; the kid was shot anyways and Jensen resigned from the force. He seems to have done this in some disgrace, but is still well-liked by rank-and-file police.

At this point, still in a relationship with Megan, he was given a position as head of security for Megan’s company, Sarif Industries, the Apple Inc. of the augmentation world. Some time after this, he and Megan separated, he was beaten and near-fatally shot in a lab attack that took the lives of what appears to be the core team of scientists for Sarif, and David Sarif had him rebuilt as a mechaug.

I’m fairly sure that the image we’re supposed to be getting of Adam Jensen is that of the long-suffering, slightly variable FPS hero. He’s supposed to be gruff but ultimately kind and get the job done with varying amounts of carnage, smooth-talking, and exploration. He has awesome powers and responsibility but is conflicted about them, is bright but not book-smart or by-the-book, and is admired by all as pretty much the best around at what he does. In other words, he’s supposed to be terribly generic.

Fortunately, this is not what we get. Unfortunately, I don’t think the devs quite recognize this.

Adam Jensen is basically an incompetent jerk. For every augmented kitten he saves from a tree and returns to its rightful owner, there’s another person he sells out, needlessly bullies, or just plain fails. And, well, I’m kind of cool with that. But let’s go through a few vignettes.

First, there’s his initial response to the first attack on Sarif Industries. David Sarif sees an alert and tells Adam to go investigate. Further information suggests that there has been a laboratory accident, to which Jensen promptly pulls out a gun. For a lab accident. I understand that there may be some paranoia at work here, and of course it turns out he’s right, but even so, Adam must be such fun at fire drills. More egregiously, however, he firmly and resolutely fails to ever apprise anyone of the situation or alert the rest of his team, despite numerous opportunities to do so. Yes,  it’s cool to stealth around shooting goons, but you know what else is cool? Telling your boss the very important thing that he sent you down there to find out.

Later, you’re given a mission to retrieve stolen data for one of the game’s Powers-That-Be, Hugh Darrow. If you succeed, you have the option of wheedling some information out of the Power’s secretary, who will tell you about the existence of a top secret project. The Power gets on the phone. Adam’s next lines, roughly paraphrased?

“So, I guess you’re glad that top-secret project is safe now, huh?”

“Did my secretary tell you about my top-secret project!?”

“Yep.”

So, for the sake of needling his employer, Adam compromises the livelihood of a woman who has just broken protocol to be nice to him, plus he alerts the guy that someone is onto his secret plan. All I can figure is he sees her as a Just Following Orders employee of the Death Star (which would be strange, considering that at this point we’re supposed to consider Darrow to be a benevolent figure), but even so, that’s kind of cold. And this isn’t even a result of trying to play Jensen a particular way–there are no dialog options here. He just says it.

And then there’s his reaction when he meets Megan in the Singapore facility. At this point, he’s already met several other kidnapped scientists, who make no bones about the fact that they’re going to be killed if they don’t comply with their kidnappers’ demands. In fact, one of them already has been. They might find the research compelling, but he should be pretty clear about the general lack of consent. So what does he do when he finally finds Megan behind a door guarded by the same man who tried to kill him? He yells at her.

“How could you do this?”

Wait, do we have to explain the concept of kidnapping to you? I can understand somebody thinking they’d rather die than work on an ambiguously evil project for the world’s most obvious Dragon Lady, but once again, fully expecting someone to kill themselves and berating them when they don’t falls into some pretty shady territory.

More generally, I don’t think anyone in this game quite understands what “head of security” means. I’m willing to overlook the fact that Adam gets sent around the world on wild leads while he probably should be doing paperwork, because rule of cool. But don’t people in managerial positions usually have some kind of people skills? Every time we see Adam at the Sarif offices, he’s lashing out at some hapless employee about how I might be an aug now but my memory’s still intact, I wasn’t fired from SWAT, I quit because of a little thing called integrity that you should look up some time. If anyone at his initial job interview asked him how to handle conflict in the workplace, I fully expect him to have answered “Confront the perpetrator angrily and then threaten violence.”

The thing is, I’d see this as a perfectly legitimate character interpretation, if that’s what I thought the game was actually going for. In fact, I’d think it was kind of neat: Adam Jensen, after being forced to resign from SWAT, sleeps his way into a job for which he is patently unqualified, then suffers the consequences when the facility is actually attacked. Coming back to the job, he maintains a demeanor of bristly resentment towards everyone involved, but slowly moves on a path towards competence and even heroism, using his augmentations to protect the powerless and uncover a global conspiracy. I’d be especially sympathetic towards his easy anger, given that he’s gone through major physical and mental trauma and getting back in the field is probably the last thing he needs right now. If he didn’t have PTSD after the incident that made him quit the force (which it’s mentioned he might), he certainly should now.

But, instead of presenting these elements as essentially unfavorable character traits, they’re downright vindicated. Whenever he jumps to a conclusion, it’s the right conclusion, as if they handed him a copy of the game’s script before he started (and once again, none of the things I’ve described above are optional actions. Unless there’s some kind of very sophisticated behavior-determining algorithm at play, he will always do this.) When he pulls out his gun for a lab emergency, he’s right. When he tells Darrow he’s onto him, it has no negative consequences. When he berates Megan, we find out later that she’s perfectly willing to work for the Evil Conglomerate. The nepotism in hiring him is only ever questioned by Pritchard, the guy who nobody else likes who questions literally everything that Adam does regardless of reason. I don’t even think his temper is supposed to be particularly out-of-character; it’s just expected of him as the Designated Anti-Hero.

I love characters with weaknesses, and I have a soft spot for Jensen, silly Christian Bale bat-voice and all. But if you’re going to be gruff and angry and constantly forget about your boss to go off on random side missions, people in a reasonable universe are going to react to that, and it’s not with constant admiration and love. Part of a character having weaknesses is him or her having to actually deal with their consequences, and I feel like that’s something that the game could have addressed, but never did.

Next: Fixing the Conspiracy

None of which can be said for its sequel, Human Revolution. It’s a big game, for certain, but it’s got a certain feeling of self-containedness to it, and despite the engine and texture quirks, it’s got an absolute beauty that I think is going to age well. The plot, while it lacks some of the intertextuality of the original DX, looks for a relative sense of realism and achieves it reasonably well for a series that is probably contractually required to throw in everything and the conspiracy kitchen sink. And yet, for a number of reasons, I find HR so very, very frustrating. Sure, there are the gameplay issues–the boss battles, the regenerating health but non-regenerating energy–but for me the important screen-yelling moments came when the game, time after time, presented a bit of worldbuilding and utterly failed to deliver on it.

As others have noted, the issue of augmentation is, well, oddly central to Human Revolution. It’s not only apparently the sole hot political issue, it’s virtually the only thing people will talk about, period. If you chat with a bystander, they’ll give you the equivalent of “How ’bout those Mets augs?” If you listen to the news, it’s all augs, all the time. I’m willing to accept a certain amount of this, especially since your protagonist would be a natural lightning rod for criticisms of augmentation (he’s probably a literal lightning rod as well, just saying) and the news, in HR world, comes with an agenda. But when you listen in on conversations surreptitiously, it’s the same thing all over again. This is just not how people work.

Even assuming that augmentation is a virtual necessity for the haves and a constant source of envy for the have-nots, there have to be other issues in this world. Like, how about the global warming that Hugh Darrow is apparently trying so hard to fix? Or the apparent endemic crime in Hengsha? Or just little personal stories and events? Even in Hengsha, the section of the game with perhaps the most diverse conversation (an excellent snippet where one character says that private military contractor Belltower makes him feel “that little bit safer”; a foreigner who perpetually wanders the streets looking for help), an overwhelming number of conversations are about augmentation.

I can defend this to a certain extent. In a game based on an overarching theme, this is the equivalent of a book cutting out the scenes that don’t advance the plot or detail the characters. But you could make an equally good argument that the world is a character in this book, and that by not detailing things that aren’t readily assumed, the picture that emerges is one of a world obsessed with augmentations to a bizarrely unlikely extent. It’s the difference between Batman’s parents’ death pervading his worldview and Batman prefacing every sentence with “Well, since my parents died…”

In terms of games that have done this better, I think Bioshock is a great example to pull from. For a game that’s equally built upon a single theme, the incidental character dialog still managed to convey a richness of life that, while centering the selfishness of the characters and their dependence on splicing, doesn’t have them constantly debating the merits of egoism or ADAM. Characters in Bioshock, as minimal as they were, had their own obsessions, to which augmentation was only an end: Andrew Ryan said he would make me a star! The cry of a fading actress, her face disfigured by splicing, says more about the desire for superhuman perfection and about human weakness than a hundred variations of “Augmentations suck.” “No they don’t.”

Which brings us to the second reason for the screen-yelling: For a world so utterly dependent on augmentation, nobody really seems to actually think about it that much. There are several distinct groups in HR, each with their own agenda: Sarif is a brilliantly convincing corporate technoutopian, Taggart an apparent self-help guru slash Nader-esque watchdog, Megan Reed a research-above-all scientist. But when they actually get down to arguing, it’s all distressingly abstract. Here, for example, is Sarif on human augmentation:

“All those purists out there, accusing us of tampering with the natural order, when all we’ve done is unlock the potential that exists within our own DNA!”

Okay, you say, that’s Sarif. He’s supposed to be kind of abstract; he’s a CEO. But the problem is that this is how the entire augmentation debate is aligned. The purists tell the augmenters that they’re “playing God” or “widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.” The enhancers tell everyone else that “This is evolution.” Repeat ad nauseum. That’s not exhaustive, of course, but here are the various concrete reasons that people in the game give for or against augmentation:

• Megan Reed: “It can make us think faster, react quicker…it can really improve a life.”
• Random bums, a few times: “I’m injured, but do you think I got these augmentations? How would I pay for the Neuropozyne?”
• Random bums and prostitutes, a million times, in unison: “Eew, a coghead!”
• Various civilians, after a few reveals, paraphrased: “It’s probably bad that they’re creating an army of supersoldiers.”
• Civilian inside a Taggart speech: “It’s my choice to get augmented, and you have no right to restrict it.”
• A side quest informs you that without augmentations, it’s virtually impossible to get into some businesses.

These are all pretty good answers, but they’re not taken nearly far enough. Only one of these–the Neuropozyne–will ever feel like an organic part of the world, and it’s only the most obvious manifestation of the utter dependence that augmentation can saddle you with. Overall, characters seem to far prefer to focus on augmentation making you less or more abstractly human, or being more or less like “evolution”, a statement so nonsensical that I can only suspect everyone in the HRverse of being a closet Lamarckian who believes that amputees’ children are born with prosthetic limbs.

For fairness’ sake, though, let’s look at the best augmentation bits from Human Revolution, and then see how they could have been even better.

Augmentation makes you better at your job.

This is something that, when it’s done right, is extremely convincing. There’s a side quest, mentioned above, that involves a woman who has bought black market augmentations as the only way to be a profitable trader/forecaster. Although the quest’s a bit more complicated than this, it really drives home the fact that the augmentations aren’t just a gift, they’re an arms race, and a way for people who already have an advantage to capitalize on it.

What I’d like to have seen more of, however, is what these augmentations actually do. The only civilian aug we see much of in action is the hacking one, but we’re told (by Megan, who admittedly isn’t the best source of information) that teachers and other legitimate employees use them regularly. Here are some things I can think of off the top of my head:

• Memory enhancements (teachers, lawyers, journalists, any other knowledge worker)
• Wakefulness stimulators (truck drivers, anyone who has to work long hours)
• Pheromones (lobbyists, pick-up artists)

Honestly, the pheromone thing raises enough questions on its own. Are they actually dosing people with chemicals, or just giving augs the equivalent of heightened social sensitivity? If the former, then it’s truly creepy and coercive, and people should be raising that as an anti-augmentation talking point. If the latter, they’d be really digging into the inequality issue: Are rich children hacking their college admissions interviews by analyzing the interviewers?

One final thing that gets mentioned is that it sounds like (according to a conversation in Hengsha) you actually have to be augmented to work for some companies, like TYM. This is something that I actually find far creepier than the simple fact of augmentations: It’s the idea of work made so important, and employees having so little power, that you’re literally required to lock yourself into a career path and get majorly-invasive surgery to get any kind of job. Adam can complain about his augmentations all he wants, but in the end, is he really all that different from the poor guy who had to get leg surgery (which, remember, requires immunosuppressants for the rest of your life) so he could lift warehouse boxes at PageCo?

Although I don’t think this was completely intentional on their part, the Recycle Military bill is also wonderfully creepy this way, and raises the specter of how the government itself would be promoting augs as a fix for unemployment. If you’re required to take career classes from an outsourced business now in order to get various welfare programs, what’s to stop you from having to get augs in this world? It’s entirely possible that instead of a “more than human/less than human” argument, we could have had sides who saw unaugmented humans as simply lazy. Don’t you want to work? Don’t you know you have to make sacrifices? What are you, some kind of human-only welfare queen?

All of which brings us to something that should have been in the game, but wasn’t, which is:

Augmentations kind of suck.

Yes, yes, you can jump nine feet into the air and turn invisible, at least if you get lucky and are put in the supercop program rather than the checkout-cashier one. But even beyond the downside presented in the game (Neuropozyne forever), there are a number of things that should be getting mentioned.

The computer you’re reading this on? How long do you think you’re going to be using it for? I’ve had my current computer for about a year and a half. I had the one before it for four years. Phones are designed to be replaced every two years.

Now imagine your phone is grafted into your skeleton.

Technology, especially emerging technology, moves fast. Firmware, okay, that’s not that hard, but how long do you think that hardware is going to stay top-of-the-line? How much longer is Adam going to be fighting other augs before they start showing up with faster implants and more power? How long before the hacking hardware he has stops being able to interface with current computers and he has to get another surgery?

Some of it probably isn’t going to be an issue, just like prosthetic limbs or hip replacements aren’t constantly becoming outdated. And if it wanted to, the game could easily handwave a solution to this. But I think it’s actually more interesting this way, with augmentation as a very, very fragile form of superhumanity. It also makes Adam’s objections (and those of the private investigator you’ll meet later in the game) to augmentation that much more concrete, as not only are you buying into being “half a machine” or whatever, you’re buying into a lifetime of constantly chasing the cutting edge. It would at least be enough to make you think twice before cutting off your perfectly-functioning hand and turning it into a metal one, as people in this game seem so wont to do.

But one of the biggest disadvantages to augmentations is one that’s never even brought up: While they’re great industrially, it’s highly unlikely that they will provide anything like the sense of touch that comes with current human senses.

There’s a character in Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol who’s the equivalent of a brain in a robot body, and is constantly frustrated by the fact that he feels disconnected from the world–his body gives him only the most rudimentary sense of touch, smell, or taste, and while he’s very powerful, he’s cut off from a whole array of experiences. In the HRverse, I can imagine that the high-end augmentations, maybe Sarif’s, would have the best sense of touch they could muster (which might be varying levels of good), but the PageCo lackey mentioned above probably isn’t going to get that. He’s going to be making the ultimate workplace sacrifice. Sure, I can punch through walls. But will I ever really feel it when I touch my girlfriend’s face?

This isn’t necessarily true in this world–maybe augmentations have better-than-human senses. But as far as I can tell it’s never mentioned one way or the other, when it’s actually an issue that’s quite pertinent. At it’s simplest, it’s the corporate and governmental coercion that comes up fairly often in DX; at a different level, it’s a literalization of the internal conflict between skill or success and enjoyable living. In order to gain something, you give up something else. And it, too, would go a long way towards explaining why Adam is so upset about his augmentations.

Augmentation is my choice.

The abortion arguments have a certain logic to them, particularly the “I regret my abortion augmentation” signs scattered around Detroit. They probably could have run with the patronizing “people don’t know their own mind about augmentations” thing a little more, but overall I approve. But you know what the aug movement really seems more like? The gun debate.

I mean, think about it. Half the augs you see in the game turn you into a black-hat hacking death machine. Every random streetfight and stickup now includes the possibility of somebody getting electrocuted or turned into mush by a hand-gatling. Your home is no longer safe because criminals can literally punch through your walls. Considering that this is America, wouldn’t people be trying to get their own augmentations to retaliate? Why no “When augmentations are outlawed, only outlaws will have augmentations?”

This wouldn’t just be another way of making a hot-button political comparison–it’s also just far more fertile (as it were) than the abortion question, where the comparisons largely end at the most basic question of bodily autonomy. Unlike abortion, augmentation and guns both are political issues because one person having them automatically gives them the ability to harm or, at the very least, affect someone else.

But perhaps the greatest oversight in Human Revolution is that it needed this:

An open source movement.

Seriously, there is no way that this does not exist. You’ve got a fascinating bunch of gadgets seemingly designed to appeal to precisely the kind of technoutopian crew that runs Linux, and nobody’s trying to think of an alternative to your augmentations being DRMed by a trust of obviously sinister corporations? Windmill should have an Augmented Frontier Foundation sticker on his terminal. The techier folks should be busy trying to develop open drivers to control mechanical hands. Pritchard should be taking heat from his friends about working for a company that doesn’t make its vision augmentation firmware open to the public, because come on, it’ll just help us squash any bugs quicker, man! Even if augmentations are tightly controlled, anything that’s available to the public in such vast quantity is going to get reverse-engineered. And hell, even Apple (upon which I believe Sarif Industries was based) has Google, a nominally open-source competitor, breathing down its neck.

Not only would this have added an excellent subplot to the game, it would have highlighted one of the glaring false trichotomies of the ending: That the only choice is between no augmentations, tightly government-restricted ones, and corporate-controlled ones. I’ve thought about this a lot, and decided it’s possible it’s intentional–the DX theory, after all, is that the world is inevitably going to end up controlled by somebody. But not even mentioning the possibility of other choices just makes everyone involved sound like they’re either being deliberately disingenous or painfully short-sighted. One of the things that this DX was supposed to bring us was a less bombastic take on politics and morality, one more grounded in human behavior. If this is the case, why not at least include something that points to  individual agency?

Next: Fixing Adam Jensen and Fixing the Conspiracy

The final part, now. In terms of commentary, I feel like this ends a little suddenly, but then, that’s also rather the point, as the story never gives away the real end. Parallel universes and all that.

***
You Ask Me, I Ask Who?

Hu released the switch. The girl slid from the machine, sobbing hysterically. You can’t help her. Nobody can help her. She shouldn’t have had those thoughts; the bricks should make more bricks obediently.

The door to C opened, and out stormed a squad of soldiers!

They grabbed their guns, some homemade and ugly like everything C produced, others the special-issue revolvers from Borough B.

Hu raised his hands quickly. Mai Ya was still vacantly standing by the test machine, his hands holding a mop, preparing to go clean the machine. Hu called for him to raise his hands as well. Across from them, a full-bearded young man laughed wholeheartedly: “Don’t worry! Listen, we’re not going to kill you if you just listen! Now open the A door!”

Looking at their clothes, Hu vaguely recognized them as the bandits from the sewers, although they were all dressed roughly the same. “We don’t have that power. This door hasn’t got a key—it’s controlled by the machine.”

“Then you’re pointless…Come up here! You two, help him take the test. If he doesn’t passes, I’ll kill you both!” They pushed forward an old man, his eyes piercing and colorless. He wasn’t like the B people; in fact, he simply didn’t seem living at all, his movements robotic. Could he really be a visitor from Borough A?

They switched on the machine quickly. The old man’s inner power was obviously profound, and after ten minutes, the red light flashed, and the door to A opened.

The Thorny Path to the Great Tower

The bandits, their training obvious, proceeded to the gates of Borough A.
Were there only these few of them, or had this been staged at every test center? Hu didn’t know, nor did he know the intent of these interlopers.

Mai Ya headed for the A door. “Me too…”

A bandit turned and unloaded a clip, and Mai Ya had no time to finish before the bullets shredded him.

“Oh my god…I’m too nervous.” The bandit could obviously see that Mai Ya had not come forward to resist or question.

He looked at the girl sitting in the corner, and Hu realized he had forgotten to look after her. Her wide eyes looked at the approaching bandit the way one would look at friendly reinforcements on a battlefield, filled to the brim with concern and envy.
“Do you want to come with us?” the bandit asked her.

She nodded forcefully.

“Can you shoot a gun? Come on, I’ll teach you.” The bandit led her to the door.

“Hey–” Hu didn’t know why he cried out to the girl, didn’t know what he wanted to say.
The girl turned her head and gave him a look.

History stops at that point.

The universe splits…

In one world, the C mob is put down by Borough A, and more advanced testing machines installed in every center…

In another parallel universe, the C uprising destroys Borough A, and from this point on, Y City returns to an unscientific, irrational, but person-centered primitive society…

Only one thing remained the same:

Hu remembered that one look his entire life.

In case it’s not already obvious, “The Test Machine” is a commentary on the Chinese gaokao system, a massive, detail-oriented test that decides one’s admission into college. Here’s a recent story about it.

A note: The word failed at the end of this section is 淘汰, a term that more literally means something like “left behind” or “die out”.  It has a sort of Social Darwinist implication that’s incredibly useful when you’re trying to convey the idea of life as a competition. My Chinese coursebooks, of course, tended to talk more about old-fashioned ideas that were 被淘汰的, but this story uses it quite often to describe people being systemically left out of society as a result of their own supposed inadequacies.

More notes: There’s a bit here about Planck and black body radiation. All these words are right, but I’m probably parsing them wrong, since I know very little about scientific theory, and have forgotten what little I once knew.

There’s also a reference to “mao” and “kuai”. The kuai is one Chinese “dollar”, officially known as a renminbi (also known as a “yuan”, about six RMB to a USD), and there are ten mao (officially called “jiao”) in a kuai. A third unit, called “fen” (a hundredth of a kuai) exists, but is almost never seen in the wild.

***

Rats in the Sewers

When Hu arrived at the testing facility, the door had already acquired a small cadre of followers. And his new partner, Mai Ya, was not an endearing supervisor.

“You’re late…in 1900 Planck developed the quantum radiation hypothesis…” Mai Ya was forever studying the encyclopedia, and hoped feverishly to someday ascend to Borough A.

“Someone died on the street this morning. Right in front of me.” Old Hu thought suddenly that he was as weary of all this as the test-takers.

“The Planck constant is therefore equal to the black body radiation capacity distribution formula…”

Hu glanced at Mai Ya, and remembered the science fiction storybook that Zhao had left. Everyone thinks a little differently, he supposed.

From beyond the entrance of the test hall came a sound of surprise, and Old Hu ran to the fence to look. On the ground twenty feet below, people were scrambling, running, and then he saw that the covers to the sewer had been flipped open, and out they were crawling, threadbare denizens of Borough C, pawing at the things of the citizens of Borough B.

The police bots gave chase immediately, and the band from C retreated underground. The sound of the cheers afterward bored down, down as if in pursuit…
“Let’s get started,” said Hu to Mai Ya, who was still whispering a recitation.

“We’ve started, we’ve started…everyone pay attention! When your number comes up, don’t even try any kind of interference machine or cheating—all it’ll do is lose you your citizenship, and you’ll be exiled to the farms in the western mountains to become fodder for their animals. All right…when your number is called, come up with me…”

The Thinking of Bricks

The testers went in one by one, and entered the machine. Those who passed from Borough B to Borough B returned.

Generally speaking, the bulk of the citizens from B were able to pass, and to be demoted to C because of poor study habits was, in the end, a rare occurrence; to ascend to A was again rarer. But all it took was a demotion, and to worm your way back up again was hard indeed, when one no longer had the time to look at books.
Hu enjoyed games, and would often seek out the Forty-Sixth Street chess masters for a game of go, then proceed to play the Nineteenth Street go masters at chess, or something of that sort. Last week he had won a ping-pong match against a bridge champion who, quite displeased, shouted: “You cheater! The ball obeys you but not me—there must be something wrong with it. The board isn’t fair—let’s play a game of cards, and see who wins that.”

“You’re a champion, what kind of talk is that? If we play cards and you win, can’t I say that the cards listen to you and not me, that the cards aren’t fair? Is it not like that?” Hu countered.

“Yes, what you say makes sense…but then again, I just don’t believe that after ninety years of honing my bridge technique, I can’t win a game of ping-pong!” The old man was quite earnest. The people of Y City were all earnest, and besides the knowledge of an immense number of books, their bricklike minds were empty.
They even did their calculations mindlessly.

It was like a computer. If you ran the CPU at full capacity executing some garbage code, even the most powerful processor crawled at a snail’s pace.
The Y City citizens were snails, carrying a full set of encyclopedias on their backs.

Besides The Test, What Way Out Do People Have?

The wisdom of the machine was endless, and not only did it decide in which city you belonged, it told you what you would do.

Hu had never wanted to be a test machine operator, but he had not chosen it, just as the bakery proprietress sold her water at two mao a bottle and the water bureau sold theirs at five kuai. You couldn’t say that the bureau’s was expensive, because this was what Borough A had decreed. A decided everything, and if you wanted a say it it you had better get to A, and to get to A you had to pass the test machine, and the test machine, well that was A’s design.

It was an endless cycle: The tests turned the people into bricks, and the bricks drew up plans to manufacture themselves again.

The door opened, and today’s seventh tester entered the hall. It was a girl—this was probably her first test, her eighteenth year. Her face was panic-stricken, in comparison with the older test-takers’ mechanical and insensate looks, but there was also, on it, a little anger. Perhaps she would ascend to the gates of Borough A, and Hu was not sure why he felt a rise of passion: “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be sick. It will all be over in a minute. Come on, take off your shoes and stand in front, right, put your hands in place, okay, close your eyes…”

Hu flipped the master switch. The test machine gently extended its electromagnetic feelers, firmly fixing the girl in place, sliding a helmet over her head. After struggling slightly, the girl obediently allowed it to slide in place…

“Aah–”

Her bowels loosened. The stupid girl hadn’t outfitted herself with any sanitary pads—maybe her whole family had gone to Borough C, and there had been no one to give her the basic instructions…The first test was really a nightmare. The test machine’s feelers went into your body, and drew out your thoughts, squeezed out your ways of thinking. If your brain offered up any dissatisfied opinion towards Borough A, you were done for sure.

She didn’t need to stay the full ten minutes. The red light flashed, and the machine spat out her report: Failed.

On my trip to China, I picked up a few copies of 科幻世界, or Science Fiction World. I’ve been told it’s not a particularly well-regarded magazine–it apparently goes for a somewhat younger audience than it used to–but it’s the best place for me to find short pieces to translate, and since short is about all I can manage, that’s what I do. There’s not much Chinese SF translated into English, with the exception of Lao She’s Cat City and apparently the recently-published The Fat Years, which I haven’t read yet, so I don’t have much of a background in it. But anyways.

Here’s a piece called 考试机, or “The Test Machine”, by an author named Xuan Yuanjian. The great thing about Chinese is that it’s beautiful for neologisms like that. The character system gives you an almost infinite number of building blocks that you can put together without sounding like an idiot with your “vidcalls” and your “cyberrats” and what have you, although the equivalent of “robocop” in this story is the somewhat less-catchy “robot police.”

The Test Machine

by Xuan Yuanjian

“There’s only one difference between a toaster and a tester: The things you put in the toaster aren’t as easy to burn.” Old Hu, the test machine operator, swallowed his dry bread. “Hey…bring some water.”

“You’ve already got milk. And this bread is richer than you.” The bakery proprietress brought a bottle of house-produced “black market” water. “What, don’t you want it? Even here it’s not all the same. Old Seven over there, he got checked, and the water wasn’t recovered—they still fined him three thousand. I wouldn’t be giving it to you if you weren’t a regular.”

“Ehh, it’s not the same. There aren’t dying men at your door every day.” Old Hu took the water at a gulp. “Bring another.”

“This stuff could get me arrested. One point four.”

“What do you take me for? Am I going to tell anyone it was Fifty-Fourth Street’s prettiest shopkeeper? I’ll say it was Old Seven’s bakery.”

“Hu, you joker. Hey—be careful. I heard there were bandits in District 2 the other day.” The shopkeeper called as she swept past him.

“I fear no bandit! See you later!” Hu looked back and laughed, tripped over the rubbish under his feet, which crackled and rolled…

Test, Test, Test: The Teacher’s Silver Bullet

The year is 3010, in Y City, Z Country. Those who follow the works of writers know that among them are many Y Cities, many Z Countries, and all are set in 3010, but the settings could not be more different, and even those in which the background are the same tell very different stories.

It is said that the universe is a self-extending system, and the theory of parallel universes is a fascinating one. It is possible, for instance, that any conceivable situation could exist—or could not. In this way, the universe contains both every possibility and its negation, and countless parallel universes take shape, destined never to intersect. It follows, therefore, that in some universes this story was written, and in some not, and in some it was written one way, and in some another…and in this way the year 3010 contains a multitude of possibilities.

Old Hu, the man named Pan Hu, sadly never exceeded a hundred pounds. He is the protagonist of this particular story; however, that is not to say that the author dares readily subscribe to his views. Once, he said to his S13 Testing Facility colleague Little Zhao: Quit reading that science fiction, and study your Borough B Citizen’s Reference. If you don’t pass next time, they’ll send you down to Borough C, and then you’ll be finished.

Zhao put down his science fiction novel and gestured at the dense thicket of people outside the facility. “Look.”

The varied group lined outside bore stupefied expressions and a look of unspeakable exhaustion, like bricks cast from the same mold. Even their nervous eyes were all the same, their bowed heads, their rigid looks from right to left. Every day there were a few who, at the sounding of the horn, climbed the fence and jumped, free-falling the few dozen meters to forever conclude their annual testing.

“And why? Are there still old men who take it so seriously? Or unweaned children?” Hu was already used to the cleaning crews at the foot of the building taking the corpses out for fertilizer.

Zhao handed Hu his book. “Happy birthday.” And he left, parting the crowd, climbing the fence and jumping down…

Division, Division: The Student’s Lifeblood

What Hu tripped over as he left the bakery was not rubbish that someone had discarded, but a cadaver: Still fresh, one that had jumped when he had turned his back. It was an old woman, around whom were scattered small things, things that she had probably loved in life. Like all other suicides, she had test booklets on her when she died..

In Y City, everyone planned from birth to test, and on their eighteenth birthday began the annual exam.

The city had an upper, lower, and middle class. On the ground was Borough B, responsible for providing he city’s natural resources. Below it lay Borough C, provider of energy, and above Borough B, supported by a massive set of pillars, was the hanging garden that was Borough A, the city’s administration, whose main work consisted of laying out the test machine’s examinations.

Every day in Y City, two thousand or more people in ninety test halls took the exam, with content ranged from quantum mechanics to gene sequencing to a thousand kinds of global dialects—no topic was neglected. Examinees had only to visit the testing facility, and the machine would stretch and fix upon them, pricking them with countless needles linking the test-taker’s nervous system and the machine. In a split second, the machine had asked a full set of random questions. Within ten minutes, it could compile a synthesis of the test-taker’s knowledge, and would provide them with a score. The outstanding passed through A Gate to create more test questions in Borough A. Those who passed remained in Borough B, meeting the needs of Borough A. And those who failed descended through the C Gate, destined to become the mouse in the dragon’s belly. Wasting their bodies to provide the power for Y City.

The system was scientific and rational, so cultured that not a chink could be found in its armor.

But for one thing…

Hu eased shut the old woman’s eyes.

Unless one studied the Y City Citizen’s Encyclopedia for at least four hours a day, there was no chance of passing, and it was off to Borough C to tread the power machines. This was no ordinary test, and no ordinary transformation.

Gamification seems, by and large, to have identified a real problem with alienation and modern life. Part of the reason we play games is indeed that they offer us a purpose and a chance to feel great, a chance to see the effects of our actions. I have plenty of aesthetic reasons for playing games, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say they have had, at times, a purely anesthetic value. I’ve played games because they let me feel successful, because they let me feel as though I was tackling problems or gaining skills in a way I could never do in real life.

In a sense, reality is broken in a way that can never be fixed, and probably shouldn’t be–I’m obviously never going to be able to master all the skills I’ve mastered in video games, because games present a simplified version of those skills. But in other ways, I think we’ve really become completely alienated from any kind of meaningful work or skill–our lives are based on finding a “career” that works entirely on an extremely scarce prestige or currency system, and then defining ourselves by it completely. We’ve taken something that sounds good–make your work something you love–and turned it into a game that very few people can win. Likewise, even as all of us benefit in a capitalistic system, inequality rises, giving most of us an ultimate goal that is completely unreachable. So, in this sense, reality is broken: We’re reaching for an unattainable final goal, and, along the way, making nothing of consequence.

McGonigal’s solution is fairly simple. She defines these external factors–money, grades–as “extrinsic” factors, and positions gamification as a way to focus on non-scarce, “intrinsic” resources like flow, fiero (the joy of accomplishment, roughly speaking), and positive reinforcement. Hence replacing grades with “leveling up,” airline waits with games that can unlock virtual prizes, and doctor’s orders with slaying concussion vampires.

I don’t have a real problem with most of this. Making games out of unavoidably terrible circumstances is far older than the idea of gamification. I don’t think it’s necessarily infantilizing, either–there’s no reason not to escape unavoidable situations with a fantasy world of your own making. The major issues I have, however, come down to two things: impact and coercion.

One of the less settled aspects of game studies are whether or not a game proper must be purely voluntary and have limited real-life impact. I tend to subscribe to the idea that it must, and that something with identical rules can be either a game or not a game depending on the circumstances. The characters in Cube, for example, are not playing a game, but a purely voluntary and non-lethal version of the titular giant square would certainly be. McGonigal acknowledges this during a discussion on Chore Wars, in which she agrees that voluntary participation is a vital part of the system. Being forced to play Chore Wars would not be much more fun than just doing chores.

But how, then, is this implemented in schools and work, two of the areas with the greatest impact on our lives? At this point, gamification seems less helpful and more coercive: Being forced to do your work in terms of games would violate the inherent voluntariness of the system. You can talk about voluntary “leveling up” in school all you want, but when it comes time to apply to college, you can bet that everyone’s going to be trying to get to Level 60 whether they’re enjoying the game or not.

And when it comes to work, the “intrinsic” rewards of gaming, no matter how altruistic, end up seeming far more pernicious. I’m all for making work more fulfilling, but adding a veneer of enjoyability to it does nothing except emphasize the utter meaninglessness of what we’re doing: It’s so useless, you can make it a game with no consequences whatsoever!

My last point will end up probably seeming the most cynical, but here it is anyways: It’s very convenient that with real wages stagnating and inequality growing, we see a movement towards nonmonetary rewards for the people who already are getting paid the least. The principles of gamification, as innocuous as they seem, come out feeling almost like propaganda when applied to work–they’re a way of making people feel better without ever examining or changing the status quo. Instead of examining the real reasons why our work feels useless and unrewarded, we’re covering it up with a thin coat of fun and pretending that the problem has been fixed.

Which is why gamification, really, seems oddly hopeless for a movement that’s supposedly all about joy. In a final analysis, it’s a way of admitting that our lives have no meaning save what we give them, that there’s no difference between pretending to slay orcs and pretending that the report you write will have any impact. By making games real, we admit that real life is not only broken, but that it is irrevocably so–a ship that should be abandoned altogether. Play, level, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

Here’s the problem, you see. Combat is done (partially) through a turn-based system called V.A.T.S., in which you click on parts of an enemy, accept your actions, and then attack and wait for a counterattack. This is fine. When you accept the attack, however, you do so in slow motion and the third person. You do so slowly, with a full view of yourself swinging the bat or shooting the gun, and then a view of the enemy staggering back or, in the case of a critical  hit, falling.

It’s a curious sense–one of complete immersion combined with voyeurism, where you are simultaneously yourself and watching yourself. This is something we all do (witness how many people will look in a passing mirror), but seeing it played out in a game makes reality feel somehow…diminished.

Then there are the RPG elements, the quests to be completed or “karma” to be gained or lost. Despite the fact that I find RPG character interactions as stressful as blind dates, they’re not nearly as difficult, and they’re far more rewarding. The me in reality is forced into messy choices with no clear-cut results. Contrary to what I often think about RPGs, the issue is not that my real-life choices have consequences. The problem is that they don’t.

RPGs have been criticized–perhaps rightly–for enabling a sort of operational cause-and-consequence thinking, the entitled nerd fantasy that people are like computers that can be manipulated to give out certain results with the right input. “If I buy her flowers, she’ll go out with me.” I get the feeling there’s some truth in this, but I would phrase it differently: It’s not that RPGs fulfill a fantasy of people as predictable systems, it’s that they fulfill the desire for a person’s actions to convincingly matter at all.

Because it’s very difficult to see that in real life. It’s possible to work for years and see no positive outcome, and not even much of a negative one. We have agency, obviously, and life isn’t purely based on luck, but a good deal of it is, and it takes forever to really see the difference between our own actions and those of uncaring fate, so to speak. This was reinforced for me by listening to Alain de Botton’s On Pessimism, which postulates that two of the cruelest theories of modernity are the twin ideas that one will marry the one they love and that one will enjoy their work.

In narrative terms, people in video games, or first-person shooters and FPSRPGs at least, often don’t enjoy what they do, and rarely do we find one with a significant and meaningful romantic subplot (of course, there are exceptions to this–see Mass Effect or Dragon Age.) But rarely, as well, are the game’s events optional for the character, and it’s uncommon indeed for them not to be enjoyable and fulfilling for us, the players.

All of this is really just a very long way of saying that Fallout 3 is escapist, as is much post-apocalyptic stuff. But it’s escapist in very specific ways, and in a way that is instructive about what it is in life that I’m escaping from.