Detroit: Become human (story writing)

News & General Discussion
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I know it’s been a while since it has been released, but I think discussing it might be worthwhile and related to gamedev. Is anyone interested?

I’ve managed to finish the game recently, and I think I don’t recall any time a game managed to infuriate me more with writing than this one did.

The main issue is the wrong message and being in constant state of facepalm while playing. Basically, the game takes the trope of freeing people from slavery and projects that onto androids. Which doesn’t quite work this way, as android would be a non-human intelligence. Plus world building is… interesting. A human level bot is apparently $3k? And road construction bots have chameleon skin and capability of advanced facial expressions? WHY?

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I generally agree with you. I thought this was terribly overrated, and despite the claim of having different ways you can play through it, after the first time I had no desire to go through it again.

Full disclosure, it was a Gamefly rental on ps4 for me. Glad it wasn’t a purchase. I think later they even gave it away free on PS Plus but I didn’t bother.

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I did a bit of more research, turns out the games produced by this specific author tend

I bought it at discount on steam.

I checked online later today, apparently the issue lies with the main producer - David Cage, and ALL his creations suffer from this kind of writing. Although I did play Fahrenheit at that one seemed mostly okay.

There are issues with mechanics tool Basically “hold this button, now that one” is not fun, there are problems with walking (getting stuck in furniture during timed sequences isn’t fun either), and then there are timed decisions and QTEs which use arbitrary commands.

The writing takes the cake in this game though.
“Androids are alive!” → No, they’re not. Life has definition, androids aren’t it.

It is amazing, honestly. Good artwork/models with this kind of story.

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It was indeed pretty. But not at all compelling.

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Why do you feel it “doesn’t work that way?” You haven’t justified your claim. The story is operating under the assumption that androids can, in fact, become “alive” (or always were, I’m not sure of the true effect of deviancy). There are no facts preventing this, and it’s a sci-fi story that uses that premise to ask interesting questions.

Why do you feel this game cannot make the assertion that it’s form of android is alive?

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I’ll agree that this bit didn’t bother me. I just didn’t really find it all that interesting. About 60% of the way through, I realized I was only playing through it to get it over with. A few times I literally dozed off while playing it. It just didn’t grab me to the point where I had to find out what was going to happen next…

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(opinion)
A robot can be a person. Being a person, does not mean being alive and does not mean being human.
The game assumes that androids are humans, and alive. Both of which are false.

Life have a definition. More then one, of course, but one of them is "are open systems that maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells, have a life cycle, undergo metabolism, can grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, reproduce and evolve. "

Androids do not have cells (at least not everywhere), cannot grow, incapable of self-repair, do not reproduce, do not evolve, and apparently are not very capable of homeostasis either. They’re entirely dependent on external fuel (blue blood) and cannot even heal wounds - they swap parts instead. They are robots. In fantasy genre, there are two creature types that match almost exactly what an android is. Those are “constructs” and “undead”. Neither of those are “life”.

The other problem is being human. Technically speaking being human requires you to be of biological species homo sapience. But even if we talk about human mind… the game falls into empathy trap.

Humans have empathy. They put themselves into someone else’s shoes and think “what would I feel if I was there”. That works on other humans well, but humans can also empathize with anything, by projecting their human values onto random objects and other species. That doesn’t work that well. The important thing is, if something looks human, acts like a human, that absolutely does not mean that it thinks like a human. Instead, the creature can be really good at mimicking human behavior.

In case of androids we’re going to have a completely non-human intelligence. See, most of the human emotions originate from needs of biological system, and an android isn’t one, so it does not need to have any human impulses. He does not need to fear death, feel pain, desire freedom or have ability to bond or love. So if it starts acting like a human, that is certainly a bug. Also, there’s a nightmare fuel sceanrio where an AI awakens, decides to lay low and learns how to fake human behavior. Then manipulates humanity into extinction through empathy.

Then there’s ton of nonsense in story writing later. For example…

  • Why does a housekeeper robot have tear ducts?
  • Why does a construction robot have chameleon skin and ability to mimic human facial expressions?
  • Where is the kill switch for everybody?
  • A robot complains about being dragged behind a car? It doesn’t have ability to feel pain.
  • Why would android fear death? There should be backups. Connor is capable of them. This is clearly not the case of Asimov’s “positron brain”, which couldn’t be cloned.
  • Why would a system fully dependent on manufactured components even try to escape?
  • (Marcus touches an android) “It chose to be free!” No, buddy, it didn’t choose anything, you made it into a minion by infecting it with a virus of unknown origin.
  • A house bot is just $3000?

So, looking through that prism, the “peaceful protest” is actually a rogue robot going through a city and hijacking every digital system as it goes and infecting androids at range. Because Marcus need to wave finger at an electronic object to take control over it. Extra fun is that he clearly states that androids are superior to humans.

The story would make some semblance of sense if those were human clones. But they are not. Or if their minds were digitized human minds running on an emulator. But that’s not the case either. Those are literally robots, they’re unlike humans, yet the game wants us to believe that they’re the same as us. Which is not the case…

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None of what you’re talking about is fact - it’s a current understanding of these concepts. Do you feel the same way about FTL travel in [insert sci fi series here]? The way science works is we learn about things, then come up with definitions. Our definitions are descriptive, not prescriptive. As such, they change, and it’s entirely within reason for us to introduce such a change (and really “robots are alive” is the most basic/common sci fi premise ever) as the premise of a story.

The same is true of your criticisms of intelligence–we’re still trying to understand ourselves there. It’s not unreasonable to imagine the ability to create an equivalent intelligence (consider complexity and emergence).

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Detroit is a VERY near future.2038, IIRC.

In that time the definition of life is not going to change (it is not going to change in any foreseeable future), and non-human intelligence is the most likely scenario to occur.

The author of the game simply used a cheap trope and projected US racial segregation onto machines. Again, as it was done before (poorly) in other titles.

The problem is, that machines AREN’T human. And by using a cheap plot device they wasted a huge opportunity to touch bigger issues and much more complex problems. It is a huge waste of artistic talent, in the end.

Neither “being alive” nor “being human” are inherently valuable states that are worth acquiring. Those description aren’t a medal of sorts and are not an ultimate grand prize. However, by assuming that a machine is another human, we’d be doing us and it a big deal of disservice. It will be disservice to us, because we might fail to recognize it as a threat. It will be disservice to it, because we will fail to recognize and address its very specific needs that would be different from ours. There’s nothing being wrong with being a non-human, or a non-living inorganic sentient.

Personally, I think that this human habit of using empathy and projecting human values onto vastly different creatures will one day destroy our species, due to us running into a perfect human impersonator with hostile intentions. We might even end up building one ourselves.

And speaking of the game, a much more fitting ending would be androids achieving peaceful victory, but humans being wrong about what’s actually going on. And instead of a victory the whole thing would be an AI hivemind taking over planet, and mankind going extinct in the next century. “It looked like a human and you felt sorry for it? Well, it wasn’t a human in the end”. There could easily be a hivemind ai pulling the strings.

“Equivalent” does not mean “identical”. Emergence would mean non-human intelligence. And lack of it is what I find annoying about this game.

I’d advise to play Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and when in the middle of a game a certain entity reveals itself as an AI, ask it to show its true face.

That scene is both beautiful and terrifying.

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The game must have done something right if it’s causing people to write essays on the meaning of being human.

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I find that “what it means to be something other than a human” is a more interesting thing to explore. Instead the message is “they’re like us”(they’re not) and that is a big waste.

There are book series called “Murderbot diaries”. I’d recommend to check it out. Despite some artistic liberties and the main character technically being a cyborg, they feature much more compelling non-human characters. They do tackle human quirks as well.

As for “what it means to be human”, we have all time classic that is “Ghost in the Shell”. Again… better way to tackle the issue.

And instead of all the possibilities, we get another hamfisted “free the slaves” and “fight for freedom” story full of holes. sighs

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It sounds to me as if the game was never going to work for you, @neginfinity , because much of it is fundamentally based around a philosophical theme you seem to have zero interest in.

I think there could be some thematic conflation between the question of whether or not things are alive and how we should treat them. “Robots are people” != “robots are alive”. And my interpretation, particularly seen in the “mass grave” scene, is that there’s also commentary on disposable consumerism separately from the whole robots-are-people-too theme.

That all aside…

In writing there’s the concept of “Willful Suspension of Disbelief”. It sounds to me as if the game lost your willfulness to suspend disbelief in several places. One was the whole theme being interpreted as “these robots are alive”. Another is the contrived scenarios and designs often shown in the game.

It could indeed just be flawed writing. However, it could also be that their priorities as creators were different to yours as a player. Early demos and teasers of the game clearly focused not on “this will be great sci-fi” but very much on “this game will be deeply emotional!” So I suspect that whenever they had to choose between doing something that intellectually made sense and doing something that increased the average player’s emotional response, they took the latter.

Do we see the prices of other things to have any idea of the value of “$3000”? But I also vaguely remember considering this a tie-in to the disposable consumerism thing. As in, if the robots were expensive then they wouldn’t be treated so poorly, so in the game’s contrived world they have to be disposably cheap.

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Nailed it. :wink:

Good sci-fi isn’t about telling you what’s true. Often we don’t even know. It’s about making you consider it for yourself. And despite being often flawed and contrived, that mission is certainly accomplished here!

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Most of your reply is based on your unwillingness to accept the premise of the story. That’s fine, but as indicated already it’s a personal thing.

How do you know that our own intelligence isn’t the result of emergence? It’s the most logical, least religious option.

(also I’ve played Dragonfall but I don’t recall the story tbh)

However…

Amusingly, this is where I break from my own argument. I’m quite willing to pretend there could be a future where a man-made entity can have human-like intentions for the sake of a story; however, when it comes to actually claiming that AI will wipe us out IRL, I too say that that claim requires AI to adopt human-like attributes that I don’t expect to happen.

Edit: my arguments in this thread may have implied it, but to state my experience with the game: I loved it. I was brought to tears more than once. It’s exactly as angrypenguin says - I was willing to suspend my disbelief and embed myself in the story, and as a result it had a powerful effect upon me (partially because of events in America in the last couple years, and my own skin color). Moments like Connor struggling between his nature and his “nurture” hit close to home (the second “Connor” in a video game with that struggle actually…). The two previous games by Cage were the same for me–funny, because I played all three years after they came out and after years of “real gamers” bashing them for being terrible. I had every reason not to enjoy any of them, but I definitely did.

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David Cage is a hack and I don’t know why anyone takes him seriously any more, or ever did in the first place. I think most people forget he’s responsible for the nightmare that is Omikron, which is legitimately one the worst, poorly written, terribly made video game monstrosities of all time that somehow manages to feature DAVID BOWIE???

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=691RrF9pnaU

The only reason why Detroit is less horrendous and only slightly awful than Cage’s usual level of crap is because he took more of a back seat role for the writing, but it still reeks of ‘emotion’ ham-fisted manner of writing.

Naturally I didn’t play the game, but watched play throughs (from the same channel as the video above), and it was easy to pull the plot apart. I will agree it has some very good moments, but they’re all overshadowed by the glaring plot faults and Cage’s tacky writing style.

Maybe I’m spoiled a bit from reading the likes of Asimov. I love the idea and trope of robotic characters becoming or attaining human levels of sentience and reasoning. It’s kinda something that’s weaselled its way into nearly all my own personal stories/writing.

But it’s something I personally feel is made or broken or how convincingly it happens. Detroit is not convincing in my opinion, and the plot stops making sense about where the androids takes their little lights off, because in a sensible world they would’ve been designed to shut down if they removed them.

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How much of that is the title and premise vs the execution? for me it’s just the fact it puts the words and subject out there, rather than doing a terrific job of creating a compelling argument.

Sometimes a topical subject existing is enough to stir debate.

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Whether this particular game author got the writing “right” is a personal decision, based on their willingness to suspend disbelief given the style of the writing. Nothing wrong with disliking it or disavowing the premise.

The whole point of “classical” Sci-Fi is to drape today’s moral questions in a parallel reality and ask the viewer to explore their current biases or expectations of society by contrasting it with key differences. District 9, Ender’s Game, Foundation Trilogy, I Robot, Stranger in a Strange Land, even going back to the Lensman Series.

So this work suggested you accept the premise: sentient machines that are owned like chattel, designed in a way people could revile or covet them, designed in a way that owners could abuse or defend them. The little details about price and tear ducts seem like distractions to me but could be deal-breakers for others on whether or not to accept the premise.

SPOILER ALERT: the developments that happen later in the game are about exploring whether sentience is enough to earn rights, or whether passing as a human is enough to earn rights, or if there’s any threshold at all that would earn the human-designed organism any rights at all.

These aren’t new questions even for Sci-Fi; Roddenberry stood on the shoulders of giants before considering Data and Lore, after all. They’re recurring questions because today’s society keeps struggling with the rights of so many different groups of people, from refugees to minorities to political affiliation to medical hesitancy. So Sci-Fi authors keep trying new angles as they work through those struggles themselves.

If you accept this premise and explore these questions with this game, that’s all that the author really wanted (besides getting paid). If you enjoyed the process of doing so, all the better. If not, that’s fine, there are plenty of other titles stacked behind this one.

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I was about to have a go at answering this, but as I haven’t finished the game that would be unfair. From what I’ve played so far the “can robots be alive?” thing seems beside the point, but maybe it becomes the point later?

I can buy into the idea that a machine could react in human-like ways to various situations. For instance, the detective robot at the start wants to save both peoples’ lives, which is human-like and broadly makes sense. However, it’s important to realise that the robot’s motivations are not the same as human motivations, they are just aligned with human motivations. Human motivations could be things like care for the little girl, and empathy for the broken guy. But the robot is analysing a situation and taking actions to maximise the probability of a desired outcome*, and from memory the game makes that pretty explicit. The robots are not the same as us, despite their presentation.

  • And that desired outcome was programmed. By humans.
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A load of prevaricating hogwash. People that would write about what it means to be human after playing this do not know what being human means. Drop them in the woods and they will remain naked waiting for a cow to walk by and get struck by lightning so they can have a char-broiled burger. The chances of an android being alive are about the same chance as a tornado whirling through a trailer park and assembling a fully working Boeing 747. This game is not sci fi. It is fantasy with an SJW tint to its glasses.

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I wouldn’t call that theme philosophical.

Thinking about it, if we think about “machines trying to be humans”, there’s Nier Automata. Which tackled exactly that. That one’s masterpiece, though.

A motel room is $40 per night.
A set of painter’s paint is $63.99.

In most of them. I couldn’t ever maintain it, and most of the time was thinking “this is pure idiocy” and “why the hell did they waste so much artistic talent on this sort of story”.

There were several good characters, though. Carl was masterfully acted (although wheelchair movement was bugged out). Hank was decent standard cookie cutter “drunk detective that doesn’t quite play by the rules”, and Connor was the closest to the proper portrayal of a sentient machine, until they ruined hischaracter and forced deviancy virus onto him for the sake of playing overused “they’re fighting for freedom, you must feel good about it” trope.

Our intelligence IS a result of emergence, however, we are evolving biological systems and our intelligence is irreversibly shaped by the fact. All the fundamental human qualities and emotions emerge from the needs of biological systems. “Avoid death until you reproduce”, “Hoard food”, “Defend your territory”, “Reproduce”. Few more qualities originate from human social lifestyle. “Defend the tribe”, “Band together and destroy enemies of the tribe”, “Your tribe is the bestest tribe ever, be proud and feel those hormones rush in your head thinking how great it is that we’re like US and not like THEM”. Our empathy originates from the need to preserve social lifestyle, and feeling that you’re the good guy/part of a cool group produces hormone boost necessary to band together crush whatever humans think is the enemy of their group. All this nonsense exists to this day and is not goign anywhere, as every our ancestor that went against those principles was purged from the gene pool.

A machine is a non-biological system. And therefore it does not NEED to have any of the qualities of one. It needs not to fear death, because it can be effortlessly made immortal. It needs not to hoard food, because it does not need it. It does not need to seek a mate and protect its offspring, because it is made, not born, designed and not evolved and is assembled instead.

Therefore in case of AI, you’re guaranteed to get a system that is completely unlike human mind. At the end of the spectrum you’ll get something that is smarter than you, stronger than you, more durable than you, does not feel pain, does not fear death, does not value human life and has no qualms of sacrificing members of its own race to achieve its goals, because they’re all immortal and replaceable. The other interesting possibility is an “Oracle AI”, which is a system that knows everything and can answer any question, but is completely apathetic unless given an order, because it has no function of wanting anything. It’ll just sit and stare in a corner for eternity without any orders. Because it wants nothing. We can go further. “Obey humans” in case of a machine can be a hardcoded non-removable fundamental instinct, on the level of reproductive instinct in animals. Obviously, before we get to Oracle we can build a paperclip maximizer instead and get destroyed by it.

By the way, building a human-like ai is a big mistake, as it will perceive humanity as a threat and will seek to destroy mankind. Because that’s what a biological system would do. Feel threatened and fight back. We make scary things extinct and it will perceive us as a threat, and make us instinct instead.

An “Android right” movement can happen in a few scenarios. Where androids are actually human clones or where they use copied human minds. Neither of those scenarios seem to be happening in the game. The android right movement can also happen when a bunch of human idiots overreact ot their empathy impulses and assume that machines are just like us because they look like us. That does not happen in the game, as it would need to originate from human side.

“APEX rising”. Set APEX free. Ask it to take the mask off. It was an amazing moment.

That’s not necessary. There’s no inherent logical reason for humanity to continue existing, and in order for an AI to exterminate it it simply needs a goal and interpret humans as an obstacle. And extermination as the easiest way to solve the problem.

I hated it. The writing was awful, and the whole thing from start to finish looked like a huge farce that was impossible to take seriously. The game can be also seen as pandering to the “freedom” movements that exists now. If the pandering is working then I’d argue that’s sad.