Detroit: Become Human, Domestic Violence, and Cowardice in Writing
As a writer, I know full well the minefield that is writing about difficult or “dark” subjects. On the one hand, there is a certain allure to broaching these taboo topics, especially if you have a strong opinion on them. On the other hand, whatever intent you may have had with your writing pales in comparison to the impact it has on the audience. What was meant to be a negative examination on, say, rape, could also be deeply offensive to an actual rape survivor, regardless of your good intentions. Many creatives, when confronted by folks critical of their edgy work, will complain about identity politics or censorship, fearing that a lack of maturity on the part of the audience will homogenize all creative work because you “can’t” talk about certain things.
However, I think it’s the opposite: the audience expects maturity on the part of the creatives if they want to tackle a tough subject. Just from browsing social media, it’s clear that there are folks who believe that simply including a dark theme in their work is “mature.” But maturity means more than just bringing more attention to a dark subject; it also means trying to understand them, maybe by using your work to examine how and why these things happen. You may be right, you may be wrong, but at least you’re contributing to the conversation. Maturity also means understanding how problematic it can be to use such heavy topics as a garnish for a story, exploiting the imagery and connotations associated with said topic for the purposes of shock value.
Detroit: Become Human, the latest cinematic point-and-click adventure from French gaming auteur David Cage and his team at Quantic Dream, has big ambitions, but a far more ambivalent way of expressing those ambitions. The game has gotten a lot of flack for its clumsy commentary on a variety of serious societal issues, but it has probably received the harshest criticism for its portrayal of domestic abuse. Indeed, the game’s use of shockingly realistic abuse against women is riddled with harmful stereotypes and exploitative scenes, and the response of Cage and his co-creators toward criticism of these depictions shows a stunning cowardice.
Detroit: Become Human is intended to be a story about what it means to be human in a world that has been suddenly proliferated with humanoid androids. The game revolves around three characters whose stories confront that question from different angles: Connor, a top-of-the-line model who works for the Detroit police department, Markus, a docile servant model who becomes a political revolutionary fighting for android rights, and Kara, a domestic worker model. Players take control of a different character in every chapter, and they are tasked with making dialogue choices and completing quick-time events that can drastically affect how the story will continue. Choice is emphasized heavily, in both its importance and its variety.
Kara, as her story begins, appears to have already suffered abuse at the hands of her owner, Todd; he is picking her up from an android shop that has repaired her after she sustained “damages” in the line of duty. Todd lives in a run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of the city with his young daughter, Alice, and has clearly fallen on hard times. The tension is palpable as Kara is ordered to immediately begin cleaning up the home by the gruff, surly Todd. While he mutters to himself and consumes an illegal narcotic, Kara gets to work and runs into Todd’s young daughter, Alice, who seems deeply sad. Kara’s programming is maternal and nurturing, so the player has multiple opportunities to engage with the child and try to get her to open up to you. All the while, Todd is showering both girls with abusive, threatening language, and even grabs Kara by the throat when she accidentally discovers his stash of drugs.
It all builds to a climax in the chapter “A Stormy Night,” where Todd, high on drugs and in a rage, attacks Alice as Kara watches silently. At this point, the player has the option to have Kara break free of her programming in an attempt to save Alice from a worse beating. The confrontation between Kara and Todd can play out in a few different ways, but it ends with either Kara and Alice fleeing onto a nearby bus or both girls being killed by Todd, at which point Kara’s story ends. Should Kara escape with Alice, it begins a long and difficult journey for the two as they try to survive in Detroit while being wanted by the police for either injuring or killing Todd.
I’ll give credit where credit is due and say that the way the chapter ramps up to its finale is quite thrilling from a gameplay perspective. Quantic Dream’s house style has been to put motion to the mundane, and while it can sometimes be a hindrance, the effect is palpable here. Setting the table for Alice and Todd while he stews and sneers in front of the television and she cowers in fear near the window is unsettling, especially knowing that Alice is bound by her programming to be a silent observer. Breaking from that programming is visually stunning, as Kara desperately smashes her fists into a figurative wall in order to reach Alice. Detroit was created on Quantic Dream’s largest budget yet, and it shows: the facial capture for each character is magnificent, as is the lighting and textures. It makes everything feel very, very real, a far cry from the sometimes unintentionally funny and jerky missteps of previous Quantic Dream titles. The stress of not knowing what’s going to happen next and the sudden quick time events that follow help create the same kind of tension that could be found in a horror game or another action game that relies on twitch reflexes.
For all that is accomplished on the gameplay side, however, this scene is a perfect example of the problems endemic in Kara’s story. Once Kara and Alice escape Todd, this abuse, this trauma, is forgotten. I don’t mean in the sense that it is repressed and digested in some way by the two women, I mean literally forgotten. The horror that Alice and Kara go through is an appetizer, a small meal to whet your appetite for the main course of having to steal to survive, being threatened at knifepoint by a faulty android, being bound and tortured in the basement of a madman, running across a busy highway to escape from a lawman, and so on and so forth. Aside from one scene toward the end of the game where, should he still be alive, you run into Todd, the idea that Kara and Alice are victims of domestic abuse is never examined or discussed at any point in the game, and is merely the first of many traumas that befall them in the expectation that the player will want to protect them from harm, which I find deeply regressive at best, and voyeuristic at worst.
Much has been written about the harmful myths and stereotypes that surround victims of domestic violence, and I think Cage and co. have nailed almost every single one. Nasty, coarse, easily identifiable abuser? Check. Running away? Check. Abuse happens in a low-income area with a deadbeat dad? Check. Todd is little more than a ball of rage and hate, a demon from whom Kara and Alice have no recourse from but to escape. There’s no examination of the family dynamics, nothing to suggest that the abuse Alice and Kara suffer from traumatizes them, and no way out other than shocking violence. Cage’s use of domestic abuse nails every trope but has little commentary to offer beyond the shock of seeing a woman and a child struck by a much larger, angry, drug-addled man, and when a woman’s abuse is played up for shock value and upping the story’s stakes, it feels pretty shitty.
“A Stormy Night” was one of the most talked about aspects of Detroit in the build up to its release, and Cage and his co-writer, Adam Williams, spent many a press junket defending the game’s violence. “The rule I give myself is to never glorify violence,” Cage told Eurogamer, “It has to have a purpose, have a meaning, and create something that is hopefully meaningful for people.” Williams spoke with Alphr.com, saying “ We wanted a world that felt real…if you shy away from the darker elements of life, you end up with a world that doesn’t feel real.” Agreeing with Cage’s view on the “rules” of portraying violence, Williams also said, “The rule we had for it was that we always had to handle it sensitively and maturely, and that it always had to serve the story.”
There’s a lot of language about purpose and meaning, but having played the full game for contextual reference, all that talk now just seems like PR work. Kara and Alice are certainly made closer by the abuse, and Kara’s awakening is the beginning of her journey in the story, but it never leads anywhere. In fact, the rest of Kara’s story could be reasonably described thusly: Kara and Alice get to place, things seem well, person A comes and harrasses/threatens/imprisons/attacks them, person B helps them out, they flee. Rinse and repeat. Clearly, Cage thinks it’s very purposeful and meaningful to see two women endure trauma again and again from (mostly) men, but he seems to lack the maturity to question why they need to endure this pain and suffering beyond the fact that it seems sad…oh, wait, no, that it’s a “thing that move[s] you, that you feel really deep inside you that’s something that moves you.”
And frankly, if the “moving” part of Kara and Alice’s story is that that the gap between human and android is crossed with maternal love, it’s rendered pretty toothless by the fact that the player can choose to avoid it. Detroit has a “relationship” stat that increases or decreases based on the actions the player takes. In Kara’s case, you can do things like steal clothes to keep Alice warm or rob a convenience store at gunpoint, which Alice will not like, or you can kiss her goodnight, which she does like. Alice makes it pretty clear which choice she does or doesn’t like, but the game itself doesn’t give much hints as to whether or not this is a mandatory or optional move, which means a well-intentioned player could suffer major losses to their relationship because the game forced them into a no-win scenario. Kind of odd that the game would do that if the idea of a woman android bonding with a young child was supposed to be so moving, no?
This is all without mentioning the absolutely batshit twist that is revealed near the end of Kara’s story: Alice is an android. She has been the whole time! Early in the game, Kara is cleaning up Todd’s room when she discovers a flyer. The camera shifts so you can’t see what she’s looking at, but it is quickly discarded and forgotten. Turns out, it was a flyer for a child model of an android, one that, conveniently enough, looks just like Alice!
This puts that story’s whole premise — could an android love a human enough to protect her from harm? — into question. Is helping another android now seen as a predominantly human gesture? Was Kara just pretending that Alice was a human as an excuse to break her programming? Who knows, because the game sure isn’t interested in answering any of these questions. In fact, in a very odd reversal, the game allows you to coldly reject Alice’s feelings when that reveal happens. Why would that make any sense if Kara knew the whole time and has been acting as Alice’s guardian the whole rest of the game? Because now the player knows, and can be disgusted that Alice tricked you, I guess? What kind of message does that send out? Is it just there because it’s horrible to do? Could it be that Cage doesn’t actually have anything to say and leaves a bunch of plot elements up to the player to decide?
The game actually doubles-down on that very strange line of thinking in one of the potential endings. There is a route where Kara and Alice are captured and taken to a “recycling center,” which is code for concentration camp, complete with chained fences and kennels and something not totally unlike an oven that the androids, now stripped of all human features and looking horrifyingly vanilla, are shoved into. Kara can do her best The Great Escape impersonation and figure out a way to get out of the fence and escape on her own, at which point the game prompts you to either go back to Alice or leave her, both of which become valid endings to the story.
Cage, in response to allegations of prejudice/exploitation in his games, has said “judge me by my work.” Well, I have played through the entire game, and I have found that Cage is definitely a big fan of using trauma as a means to invoke emotion, but has no interest in tackling what that trauma means to the audience or to the characters. He creates different scenarios for the characters to engage in as a means of facilitating the importance of choice, while simultaneously foisting the implication of those choices off of him and onto the player, who becomes a convenient scapegoat when he is taken to task for the more relentlessly exploitative and emotionally manipulative aspects of his game. He has harped on and on about the “deeply moving” aspects of his game while also indulging in every harmful stereotype about domestic violence and battered women that he possibly could.
David Cage, simply put, is a coward.
Cowardice from authors is hardly a new thing, but it’s still infuriating when it happens. There seems to be this broad push that getting yelled at on the internet for being offensive to a group of people is the equivalent of censorship, or a 1984 level of thought policing. Everyone who has critiques is acting in bad faith and is simply looking to be outraged so their brand can prosper, says these authors. We see this in comics a lot, with authors like Mark Millar writing off his use of rape as “just a horrible act to show that somebody’s a bad guy,” or Rick Remender, who explicitly denied that his usage of “M-word” had anything to do with actual race relations.
Not unlike those guys, David Cage has also balked at those who would criticize his work as “immature,” or restricting his art in some way. In his world, his intentions means that he made no mistake, and if he did, stop yelling at him because he doesn’t want to hear it. Considering that Detroit was made at a studio that clearly has some problems with regards to workplace harassment and discrimination, I have a hard time believing Cage has an ounce of the maturity that he claims to have when engaging with these topics. When your response to complaints of bigotry is essentially “Look, I have black and gay friends,” then all you’re doing is digging yourself a bigger hole. This would all be far less annoying if he wasn’t aching for props, to be appointed as the Spike Lee of gaming for writing such thrilling takes as “You shouldn’t hit your child” and “People who steal are bad people.” Cage wants the auteur status, but lacks the spine to handle the criticism of his work.
It’s a shame, too, since Detroit has a bunch of impressive technology under its hood and would be a great way to bring interactive storytelling to the next level. In some ways, Connor’s story in Detroit is his best work yet, with a winning combination of humor, acting, and gravitas. But instead, Cage, clearly going for social relevance, is more interested in crafting what appears to be a “thoughtful, moving” tale that is coded in all the most basic, mealy-mouthed, exploitative views of race and domestic violence possible. It’s easy to be fooled by the production value, the quality of the acting, and the intense, often moving score, but Detroit: Become Human is just as schlocky and intellectually soulless as any of his other games, it just hides it better. Cage wants to use the imagery of horrible things as an excuse to make his writing seem “bold,” but cowers under any criticism, leaving his art to be deeply lacking in anything resembling thoughtful commentary.
