We can’t deny that video games have become an important part of our new culture. With an industry that is growing up every year, and recognitions that have even reach awards like the BAFTA’S, is not longer strange to use video games as a reference as we have been always using books, movies or TV. Considering the nature of our project, I think there is no video game more related to our work than Deus Ex.
Deus Ex is a futuristic-based game created by Ion Storm and after developed by EIDOS Montreal from the 3rd generation onwards. The main plot is based on a future when humans have developed augmentations in order to heal diseases or cure disabilities. Society is divided in between pro-augmentation groups and people who is against, creating two antagonic philosophy movements that are affecting politics, economy and basic aspects of society.
The main character, Adam Jensen, works for the most important augmentation design company of USA, having a moral duality between how good this implants can be for someone who actually needs them, and how ethic is that the main investors of the company are paramilitar groups and governments looking to create a new breed of super-soldiers completely augmented.
The game let the player to take choices over every single moral decision. This means that during the gameplay, more often than none, the player would have to take moral choices that will affect the endgame. Some of them are strong related with modern topics of our society like euthanasia, capitalism, militar investment and technology development over morals.
Nowadays is a common thing to find people with a catastrophic vision of future. Recently, news about nanorobots in the blood that can cure diseases, or implants that can make a disability disappear forever, can be find easily in every main newspaper. If we have a closer look, we can realise that technology, even when is not implanted on our body, is “augmenting” us in a way. I might not have a robotic arm that give more strength, but I have an object not bigger than an oyster card that let me know what has happened in Melbourne few minutes earlier.
To predict how society would be in 2050 is not an easy task, but we can’t deny that technology is getting over humanity in a pace that has never been seen before. If we are able to develop “digital humans”, must be inside an ethic field, using this progress for the goodness of mankind and not for militar or economic benefits of the few who hold the power. Deus Ex gives an, obviously, exaggerated vision of the world that has to fit with the plot of a videogame action, but at the same time is throwing to the player a serie of moral questions that one can apply to our world and time. We might not have implants in the body, but, are all these Google glasses, Apple watches and nano-computers the beginning of this distopia?
Transcendence 