Readers reflect on humanity, redemption, and masculinity in Deus Ex
A Complicated Man
Our Special Topics In Gameology miniseries continued this week with an essay about Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Anthony John Agnello argued that Adam Jensen’s pervasive and powerful bionic augmentations allow him to be more human than he was capable of without them. PaganPoet contrasted Jensen with a more famous pop culture cyborg:
In a way, Adam Jensen represents the anti-Robocop. Robocop’s cyborg upgrades make him all the more efficient at killing criminals and generic ’80s bad guys. Jensen’s cyborg upgrades make him all the more efficient at dealing satisfying justice.
Fluka pointed to a blog post on The Border House about Human Revolution’s dabbling in the conflict between transhumanism and traditional masculinity and explained why this makes Adam Jensen at least slighty more interesting than your typical “rugged white dude” main character:
For me, DE:HR has been one of the games about a white dude that actually grapples with masculinity, rather than just having a white dude as a default. (Though I’d love to see a female protagonist in the series someday, and whiteness isn’t a concept it deals with well at all.) What does it mean for Jensen to be a man when cyborg augmentations can take the place of “natural” male strength, the usual marker of masculinity, in either gender? As for the game’s women, Malik has augmentations as well, but she’s still considered unquestionably human, while Yelena is augmented beyond belief and is silent and “damaged.” Long story short, I think Jensen’s interesting for many reasons, and for once, I’m actually happy to see a gravelly-voiced straight white dude come back as the protagonist for the game’s recently announced sequel.
Didactautolonomotopoeia talked about how Adam’s fractured life was encouragement to play nonviolently:
The first time I played this game, I wanted to be the whirlwind of death and destruction in the trailers: Spray a guy down with the assault rifle, pirouette between two others with the arm swords, and then finish off with a Typhoon blast in a mob. But during the first mission, I couldn’t bring myself to hurt a couple gang-bangers who were just in over their heads. I figured I’d go full lethal on the PMC assholes who were obviously total evil, but after touring Adam’s apartment and seeing the detritus of a shattered life and signs of a man trying to put himself back together, I got the feeling that’s not how “Adam” would handle himself. I ended up playing exactly opposite to how I’d planned on approaching the game, and I feel like it was a better choice.
Elsewhere, stepped pyramids reached back to the original Deus Ex and discussed the unusual way players were able to sway the mindset of its main character, JC Denton:
For some reason, my favorite thing about Deus Ex is how you keep running into hobos and bartenders and the like who will just start talking about Olaf Stapledon [*] or Voltaire or whatever. In Hong Kong, you can get JC in this extended debate with a bartender about the value of participatory democracy versus laissez-faire economics.
The interesting thing is that JC’s opinions are almost always set in stone—there aren’t many Fallout/Black Isle/Obsidian-style conversation trees where you get to pick responses. He just argues in favor of American-style democratic institutions with a kind of robotic vehemence. Throughout most of the game, the only influence you have on JC’s dialogue is through the actions you make him perform. If he goes along with Anna and shoots a bunch of NSF, he gloats about it later. If he finds a way to sneak in and accomplish the objective without violence, he expresses concern about Anna’s violent tactics.