To what extent might a semi-autonomous robot maid be able to intervene in domestic abuse cases of the future? The question underpins Detroit: Become Human, a forthcoming PlayStation game directed by the French game maker David Cage.
Last week, during a press event held in Paris, Cage showed footage of the game, due for release next spring, in which Kara, an android housekeeper, bears witness to an American father’s psychological and physical abuse of his daughter. “What are you looking at?” the man demands over a fraught dinner, as the girl, Alice, winces.
Players, it seems, are able to make intermittent choices to direct the drama, nudging Kara to stand up for Alice or, alternatively, maintain an impartial, subservient distance. In the three-minute trailer the stakes are bluntly ratcheted: her abusive father, it seems, will murder Alice, unless you choose to take her place.
Cage, in an interview with Eurogamer after the trailer’s reveal, was defensive of the game’s subject matter. When challenged about the trailer’s grim brutality he asked: “Would you ask this question to a film director, or to a writer? Would you?” Cage’s retort is rooted in the longstanding insecurity of game makers and players alike, that video games are a lesser medium for creative expression, one that lacks the gravity to address taboos. (Cage’s response is related, too, to his obvious cinematic aspirations: his previous game, Beyond: Two Souls, centred on a digitised performance by the Hollywood actor Ellen Page.)
But any independent interviewer would question an author or film director on their handling of sensitive material, especially if, as in Cage’s case, there had been a yawning gap between their previous work’s ambition and achievement. (Cage’s early game Fahrenheit features a sex scene involving a woman and her zombified boyfriend, and ends in a showdown with the personification of the internet.) The implication that Cage, as a video game creator, is being held to a higher standard than his cinematic or literary counterparts would seem somewhat disingenuous.
And yet there is something distinct about games that makes this subject matter potentially more perilous for the medium’s writers and designers. Video games typically offer players agency – the opportunity to make choices that redirect the story or at least nudge the plot into alternative parabolas. The trailer makes it clear that Detroit: Become Human is a game steered by player choices, a kind of hyper-evolved version of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books from the 1980s, where readers would, at the end of each plot beat, make a dramatic choice and turn to the indicated page to see how the choice played out. When these game mechanics are married with the theme of domestic abuse and, in particular, child abuse, the obvious implication is that, to escape the violence a victim, or those around them, need only make the “correct” choices to resolve the situation. It’s a deeply troubling misrepresentation of the reality for anyone who has suffered from, or who knows a survivor of, domestic abuse.
Cage’s success or failure in overcoming these problems will only be revealed next year.
“I think people should see the scene, play the game and see it in context to really understand it,” said Cage to those who objected to the trailer. Complaining that critics have taken the scene out of context, when a trailer by definition removes a scene from its context, is a flimsy defence indeed.
