Can I Become Human in Detroit? — Self-Assessment in Gaming

Set in a futuristic city where the population is divided among those who can enjoy a financially stable life, those trying to survive unemployment, and the androids who serve humans, Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream, 2018) presents players with a morally driven experience. To be more precise, it addresses the question of what defines humanity, by reflecting on what defines humanity and how this definition relates to interpersonal relationships. In this essay, I discuss how the game is played, as it poses moral dilemmas to players, and how choices are encouraged or not. I use my own experience playing the game as a means to exemplify my arguments, since these are based on the idea of analyzing oneself, besides the fact it would take a bigger structure in order to monitor the experience of different people. This discussion draws on Michel Foucault’s idea of technologies of the self. Playing the game requires continuous engagement from players and offers them the opportunity to self-assess their ethics, thereby providing the potential for self-transformation outside of the game.

As Cameron Kunzelman (2014) points out, Foucauldian theory is productive if one intends to reflect on the disciplinary functions of video games, in other words, the potential games have to enforce behaviors in players in order to format them as a specific type of subject. As an example, Dark Souls changes how the player sees the world and interacts with it: after dying countless times, most players will choose to be more cautious than usual in regular areas of the game. Therefore, games constitute a subject, as the procedural rhetoric present in them disciplines the player’s body. More specifically, I am interested in exploring how players constitute themselves through the experience of playing, understanding play as an exploration of possibilities and choices inside the context formed by the game’s formal and symbolic dimensions (Sicart, 2011). Considering all the work already done in the area of ethics and games, addressed later in this text, Foucault’s take on ethics complements the discussion and provides critical tools to analyze how players are constituting themselves as ethical subjects. In this piece, specifically, I present, through in-game examples and personal experience, how gaming can work as a ritualized set of procedurally structured practices in which the player is morally confronted with and encouraged to analyze their own beliefs and, as a result, presented with the opportunity to either reinforce or rethink their own sense of ethics and morality.

What does it mean to know myself in Detroit: Become Human?

In Detroit: Become Human (hereafter DBH), the main characters, Markus, Kara, and Connor, are androids who, while dealing with personal matters, end up involved in a revolution fighting for android freedom and rights. The story of DBH also tackles questions such as poverty, unemployment, and unchecked corporate power. However, these themes, when treated merely as secondary, miss the opportunity to develop a critical assessment of the social, economic, and political aspects of the story (Waszkiewicz, 2018). DBH utilizes a branching narrative structure, present in other Quantic Dream titles, such as Heavy Rain (2010) and Beyond: Two Souls (2013), to provide gameplay with a “wide variety of moral decisions” (Holl, 2019) to choose from. The whole setting is, according to Craig et al. (2020), an opportunity to simulate human-robot interactions and potentially evoke emotions in players.

DBH is structured in a way that requires players to think about which choice is best to attain what their moral code dictates as “correct.” In some ways, this is similar to what Foucault studied in the history of Pagan and Christian practices: the exercise of analyzing oneself in order to transform and achieve a certain desirable mode of existence (Foucault, 2012), also known as the practice of caring for oneself. The ancient Greeks would meditate about their routine or write a journal to analyze the ethics of their choices and behaviors. Throughout history, different techniques have been developed to attain this sort of self-knowledge, but they all share the basic form of “ritualized procedures” (Foucault, 2005, p. 46). As players, we follow certain steps in and out of games. Specifically, in DBH, we go through the same structure during the whole game such as interacting with specific elements, choosing an answer/action, and then go to the next scene.

The care of the self relates to what Foucault (1988, 2005) called “Technologies of the Self.” These are practices that, according to Foucault, are adopted by a person as a way to conduct a self-analysis that uncovers truths about themselves. Such technologies, then, constitute tools meant to help the subject examine the ethics of their acts and thoughts. For Foucault (1990), ethics are related to the attitude of a person when acting according to what is approved by the moral code taught to them. In his work, the philosopher differentiated between moral conduct (i.e., following the moral code of institutions) and ethical conduct (i.e., acting in certain ways in order to achieve a certain mode of existence). Choosing between killing a human to support the android revolution or letting them live, as you do in DBH, is a situation that may lead the player to act according to their own sense of ethics, thereby performing a truth that reveals something about them and constitutes them as ethical subjects.

It is important to emphasize that I am not proposing a discussion of how successful DBH is at creating morally challenging gameplay. I am interested, instead, in addressing how game developers try to access players’ moral values and how this dynamic might turn into an instrument for self-assessment. Miguel Sicart (2013) argues that designers often fail to present real moral problems since these are thought of more as puzzles that players are supposed to solve. Moreover, if too much information is given to players regarding what will happen depending on which choices they make in the game, players might engage in a strategic style of gameplay, instead of “ethical gameplay,” or rather “a pause in the fluidity of play, a caesura that forces players to evaluate their behaviors in light of ethical thinking rather than ludic strategic thinking” (Sicart, 2013, p. 31). Following Sicart’s idea of ethical gameplay, in addition to the medium’s inherent affordance to produce the illusion of agency (Stang, 2019), it is clear that games such as DBH can offer legitimate ethical experiences where players evaluate their choices through questioning their assumptions of themselves instead of the social-economical context represented.

At the same time, in keeping with Foucault (1990), while one follows the socially accepted moral code in situations of ethical gameplay, as defined by Sicart, there is also a movement of self-assessment on the player’s part. So, while playing DBH, players are not only experiencing moral dilemmas, they are also potentially transforming themselves. While playing the game, players might reevaluate what they thought of as the best moral option, configuring DBH as a tool, part of the technology of the self which, as articulated by Foucault (1988):

Permit[s] individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (p. 18)

According to Foucault (1988), the technologies of the self have penetrated Western culture and taken different forms. And, since games are an influential medium capable of affecting player subjectivity in multiple ways (see Chess, 2017), individuals can also take them as a means to constitute themselves.

Choices I have made about a revolution and about myself

To begin with, I would like to discuss the initial segment of Kara’s route, an android who works as a housekeeper/nanny. She lives with Todd, her owner, and Alice, his daughter. The first decision that I felt morally intrigued by took place right after an argument between these two. Todd accuses Alice of being the reason why his wife abandoned him. Then, hurt and afraid, the girl runs to the second floor of the house. Kara is ordered by Todd to stay put and to not follow them.

Such a situation illustrates Sicart’s idea of ethical gameplay. As a player, I had no idea if refusing to obey Todd’s order would bring me any future benefit. Any decision made was supposed to be based solely on my moral principles. Preparing myself to face him and his anger, I went to his bedroom, against his orders, and grabbed a gun I had found earlier. Then, I went to the next room in order to face the man who was about to hurt a little girl. When the time came to protect Kara and Alice from Todd’s fury, I chose to pull the trigger. I decided of going after them, since a threatened human life, in a circumstance of injustice, should be protected — a belief I hold that follows contemporary humanistic morality (Braidotti, 2013). However, since this was not the only choice available to me, to kill Todd was the means I adopted to perform that moral code, that is, killing him was my way of being ethical as articulated by Foucault. Once this whole situation came to a conclusion, Kara and Alice left the house.

Right after the end of each chapter, the game presents a flowchart showing the path the player chose, the points where the story splits, and where the forks in the road could have led. Moreover, it also shows the percentage of players connected to the PlayStation Plus system who have made the same choices (Holl, 2019). In addition to acting based on socially-accepted morality, now I was confronted by other people’s choices. As Foucault (2012) points out, the practice of caring for oneself is always based on a truth given by another person or institution (the flowchart) and a truth produced by the subject (that killing Todd was ethical to me). During my experience, the flowchart showed most people had chosen to kill Todd, which could indicate that the humanistic principle of solidarity and social justice was followed (Braidotti, 2013). In my case, more specifically, I ended up recognizing how the choices I made, in other words, my ethics help constitute me as a moral subject.

To illustrate another situation in which I was led to reflect on my choices and figure out what I considered the “correct” way to act, was during a segment of Markus’s route, a former caregiver android whose life changes after trying to protect his owner, later in the narrative. He leads a group of android fugitives that, after invading the tv station, must face an unexpected complication in their escape plan due to some of my prior choices. An android in Markus’s group called Simon is shot by a guard. Since he was injured, Simon could not run by himself, putting the group in a difficult spot. As the one making the choices, I needed to decide if the group should take the risk and try to save Simon or if he should be left behind.

In contrast to what happened to Kara in my first example, this time I tried to act pragmatically. The team should escape so the revolution could happen. Thus, I chose to sacrifice Simon, preventing important information (like their hideout location) from ending up in the wrong hands. I was certain it was the only logical option, but as Simon states, staring down the barrel of Markus’s gun, “there is always a choice” (Quantic Dream, 2018). Embarrassed, I backed down and left the gun with Simon since, from that moment on, the most ethical action I could take was to give him the freedom to decide whether or not to take his own life.

As a result of Simon’s statement, I analyzed my choice, confronted my prior decision with the moral code I was taught (as transmitted in contemporary society), and then changed my mind. In the end, when the flowchart was shown, I saw that a higher percentage of people chose to let Simon live right from the beginning. Based on this information, I had a confirmation of my action as morally correct, and therefore I could perceive myself as a moral subject. If seen as a tool of technology of the self, the game leads the player to “take oneself as an object of knowledge and a field of action, so as to transform, correct and purify oneself” (Foucault, 1986, p. 42). By posing complicated moral questions that avoid giving too much information (there is no indication if one choice is better than the other regarding a players’ interests) as well as comparing the player’s choices with those of moral agents, the game provides ethical feedback. Of course, since DBH is still a piece of entertainment, a player might want to just have fun playing it and will not necessarily transform themselves while doing so. However, games like DBH can do much more than just provide an ethical gameplay experience: they can change the way players experience life, and how they find themselves constituted by a moral truth. In order to demonstrate this, I highlighted my own experience of how reflecting on my choices in the game helped me constitute myself as a moral subject. It was important to narrate my experience in specific situations, because it gave clear and direct insight into how they unfolded in a movement of self-analysis, such as the one about Simon, in which I felt a strong internal conflict upon deciding about his future. Even though choosing to describe my time with the game works in this essay and addresses directly the theory used, it would take a more complex analysis to capture other people’s experiences. I might never see a machine revolution in my real life, but following those androids and reflecting upon my choices affected me as a person, leading me toward an understanding of what it could mean to be human.

References

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