Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Video Game as Design Fiction
Design fiction is a powerful tool for helping us think about the future. Often times, the goal in creating a design fiction is to explore what a future technology looks like, how it feels, and how we might interact with it. Noah Radford recently wrote two blog posts about design fiction. On Glass and Mud criticizes corporate design fictions being short-sighted and for disregarding the human element. The other post, Three Examples of Good Design Fiction, looks at what it takes for design fictions to have "meaning and breadth beyond their topic." I agree with Noah that many corporate design fictions focus on a shiny utopian future while forgetting the bigger challenges (or opportunities, depending on how you see them) that humanity faces. The three design fictions that Noah shares are particularly well crafted, focusing on a richly textured and human-focused world. Each of the three "good" design fictions come from different backgrounds; the world of entertainment, research-focused academia and corporate foresight, yet all three examples use only video. This would have been fine 20 years ago when we had a more consumer-focused culture, but according to Clay Shirky, new generations are growing to expect an interactive component. I would like to build on Noah's choice of three good design fictions by sharing one of my favorites. It is a video game called "Deus Ex: Human Evolution."
"Deus Ex" is a game about cyborgs, and the political, social and economic implications of what could happen if human augmentation is widely adopted. The idea of cyborgs walking around your neighborhood is a bit of a stretch, so the creators of "Deus Ex" made a short documentary about modern day cyborgs. This documentary views the world through the electronic eye of a real-life cyborg named Rob Spence. Rob travels around the world to see cutting edge limb and eye augmentations, and he speaks with the real people who are using this technology. Today, cyborgs are benefitting from their technology with the ability to walk again or see for the first time, but the documentary references to the darker side of augmentation through weaponized limbs and moral predicaments. Rob Spence also compares modern day augmentation technology with the speculative technology used in "Deus Ex", and seriously blurs the boundary between fiction and reality.
Before you watch the following videos, I would like to warn the viewer that they contain graphic violence and disturbing images. Viewer discretion is advised.
The game "Deus Ex: Human Evolution" starts out in Detroit in the year 2027 and things are not much better than they are in 2012. Crime, unemployment and inequality are still rampant. What is left of automobile manufacturing has been retooled for the construction of human augmentation technology. A company called Sarif Industries is the leader in the field thanks to generous government contracts. Your role in the game is to play Adam Gensen, head of security for Sarif Industries. After an incident, you are brought back to life and find that most of your body is now a machine. You are a cyborg, and the technology used to augment you has saved your life. You might say that Adam owes Sarif one, but its more complicated than that. There are multiple forces in play and this is the future of humanity that we are talking about.
From the beginning of the game there is an apparent conflict between Sarif Industries and political activists who are protesting against human augmentation. Activist groups claim that Sarif Industries is playing god, which according to them is fundamentally wrong. But they are also upset about the degree of control this technology enables. In order for an augmentation to function properly, a person must take an anti-rejection drug known as Neuropozyne. This drug helps the body accept the augmentation, and if the drug is not administered, the hardware will be rejected. While there is a practical need for this drug, it provides Sarif Industries (or rather VersaLife) with a certain degree of control, and arguably ownership, over an individuals body. On the positive side, human augmentation can vastly improve peoples lives and it has the power to drive humanity to a whole new level of evolution.
The argument for and against human augmentation is brought up repeatedly throughout the game. You, as the player, can choose to side with Sarif or anti-Sarif activists, or you can forge your own path. And this isn't just about long-term evolutionary rhetoric. There is a strong human element in this world. You have the chance to meet people whose lives have been affected by augmentation, and who are asking for your help. One individual in the game might ask you to collect a debt, and when you try to retrieve that debt, you learn that it is for augmentations which imprisoned the debtor in what is essentially indentured servitude with no way out. They would rather die than continue to live like this and pay the debt. You have the power to choose your path and there often isn't an easy answer. Throughout the game you are put in morally ambiguous situations where in order to progress, decisions will have to be made.
"Deus Ex" is a provocative design fiction, grounded in reality. It is a fully immersive experience that brings to life one possible reality that is just full of dilemmas. Anyone that plays through the game must actively make choices about how they feel in relation to human augmentation. This helps lay a foundation of understanding, not just for the potential of human augmentation, but also the social, political and economic issues around augmentation and how it might effect every day life.