this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
110 points (100.0% liked)

games

20970 readers
245 users here now

Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.

Rules

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Nakoichi@hexbear.net
MiraculousMM@hexbear.net
ZoomeristLeninist@hexbear.net
jack@hexbear.net
gaystyleJoker@hexbear.net
Sulvy@hexbear.net
110
Deus Ex devs say they weren't trying to make a statement when they made one of the most political games of all time (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 day ago by Tychoxii@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
39 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

You kids don't remember, but back then there was no politics in vidja gams.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Tervell@hexbear.net 9 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I, uh... what even is this article? "Deus ex devs" in this case is... two - a level designer, and Spector, who's the producer and director, but, you know...

Nothing from the design lead, Harvey Smith (who in Spector's own words, "functioned more as a co-director", and would later work on the Dishonored games, which pretty obviously have plenty of politics going on), or the writer, Sheldon Pacotti? https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/deus-ex-at-20-the-oral-history-of-a-pivotal-pc-game

spoiler

Smith: Sheldon came in halfway through the project and rewrote it in this voice that I’m not sure anyone else would have been capable of.

Pacotti: I’ve always been a very political writer. I’m attracted to social change and revolutions. If you see allusions to Foucault in there, that probably came from me.

Smith: We would say things like, ‘In order for one person to be a billionaire, millions of people have to live in poverty’. And then Sheldon could come in and back it all up with deep historical examples.

Todd: It wasn’t this thesis statement from the outset. Sheldon was really into the conspiracy and socialist angle, I enjoyed a lot of cyberpunk at the time, and Austin was very much into politics.

Smith: Warren would contribute ideas here and there that I will always remember, like ‘You can’t fight ideas with bullets’.

Pacotti: I was certainly pilfering from Warren’s library - a lot of books about the NSA and the US government, different conspiracy theories. It was something he’d been into for a long time.

Smith: My dad was a welder, my mom was 15 when I was born, I graduated high school without knowing the difference between the left and the right politically. I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone say ‘The people you call terrorists are freedom fighters to someone else’ before. That period of time from ‘97 on was a political awakening for me, partly because of all the arguments we had and the research we did.

...

Romero: Warren thought of the marketing campaign with a UNATCO website. People thought it was a real government organisation. It was an ARG kind of situation.

Smith: The deeper you read into that website the more we started using questionable coded phrases that were adjacent to fascism.

Powers: It had a fake sign-up process if you wanted to be recruited as a UNATCO agent. And people applied. People wanted to be in it. We got applications from military veterans, and we would look at these resumes that came to the office.

Todd: Something that was commented on multiple times in the reviews was that if you were being stealthy, you could overhear the guards discussing communist philosophy. That was the first time I’d worked on a game where that kind of philosophical attitude was exposed to the player.

...

Smith: Every time the US shifts a little towards fascism or centralised control, somebody will send me a link to something from Deus Ex. It’s not that we were prescient - the sad part is that it’s on repeat through history.

Powers: We gave birth to UNATCO, a multinational secret police force that worked clandestinely and did these black ops around the world. There was this seed that hinted at our real world future that I didn’t take too seriously at the time.

Smith: You can really feel the change in 20 years as the internet has had its way with cultures around the world. You can look back and vaguely remember when conspiracy theories were just amusing, and not terrifying examples of people engaging in delusional magic reality thinking and doing hurtful things, or families losing people.

Grossman: I take it a lot more seriously now than I did then. Edward Snowden is a Deus Ex character. I have to say, I was a little more naive.

Smith: Deus Ex and Dishonored both involve a plague, and they both involve powerful, corrupt elites turning the disenfranchised against each other. When some states discouraged the wearing of masks or sheltering in place, somebody inevitably linked me the opening cinematic. ‘Why contain it? Let the bodies pile up in the streets’.

Even Warren in this article I feel is being misinterpreted

"I'm a big believer that if you want to make a statement, you should make a movie or write a book," Spector told PCG. "What I thought about things didn't matter in Deus Ex. What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It's all about what each player thinks."

"what I thought doesn't matter" doesn't mean "I didn't put any of my views in the work" - it means "you, as the player, are free to ignore my views and come to your own conclusions". Have we sunk so deep into media literacy discourse now that "a work can have multiple interpretations" is something we're supposed to be mad about? The sentiment "if you want to make a statement, you should make a movie or write a book" isn't "games can't be political" - it's "games, as an interactive medium, are less suited to communicating a clear message". Which is, you know, true - the ability of players to interact with the world obviously throws a wrench in your ability to deliver a story. The "solution" to this in the AAA space has historically been to just... give up on actually looking into new methods to write narratives that take into account interactivity, and start making movies with gameplay segments interspersed between the scenes. Which I guess has worked out pretty well given all the TV adaptions, if what you're looking for in your artistic work is prestige and not, you know, actual art.

Spector says he didn't want "to tell them the state of the world, I wanted them to act and see the state of the world that resulted from their choices,"

This isn't in any way incompatible with the game being political - if anything, an effective political message is exactly one which shows you the consequences of a political action. Like, the end of the game is literally you making an ideological decision about the future of the world, with the final level constantly having characters calling in to exposit their personal ideology and try to convince you of it! It's clunky, sure, but it's obviously political.

Deus Ex, I'd argue, is fundamentally a pretty liberal game at its core in spite of the radicalism of its characters and factions. Its central politics are contained in the immortal JC Denton line "When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror."

Okay, now this is just straight up making me feel like I'm being gaslit. JC Denton the character is a naive liberal - the game, on numerous occasions, offers counterpoints to him. Him standing in front of a godlike AI, with full knowledge of the global conspiracy running everything, and saying "we just have to :vote: the Illuminati out" isn't supposed to be him being correct. The due process line is literally at the start of the game, and is a response to another UNATCO agent arguing that the agency should just shoot people on sight - the whole plot of the 1st section of the game is JC coming in as, again, a naive lib, one who genuinely believes law enforcement is doing good, and being repeatedly shown that most of his fellow law enforcers are bloodthirsty murderers, culminating in him betraying the organization. There's one character who expresses a reformist view and that "the only way to save the agency is for the good people to stay" - he is promptly kicked out of the agency and joins the resistance.

I guess we're doing "if a protagonist says it, it must mean the author endorses the viewpoint" again.

This is also an area where Deus Ex is pretty interesting, with regards to the whole player choice thing - you mostly don't get to choose JC's ideology in dialogue. You can choose it to some extent via your in-game actions, but JC mostly remains set - as, indeed, a lib. It is through dialogue with other characters that opposing viewpoints are presented - JC will try to argue, usually not very successfully. There is no "naive lib" ending - the closest is the Illuminati ending, described as "essentially 20th-century capitalism: a corporate elite protected by laws and tax-codes", and which ends with nefarious music over the main Illuminati guy saying "this time we will do it right", promptly followed by