I’ve finally hopped on the Detroit: Become Human bandwagon after grabbing it on a sale a while ago. It’s only been seven years since its release, so I’m not that late. I’ve been a fan of it since it first came out, though, and small me was rather quick to spoil myself on the game’s plot by watching gameplays when the game came out. Playing it myself now and letting the consequences of my actions play out, I’ve only fallen in love with the game even more.

I’m glad that I’ve got the chance to play through the game for myself now, at this point when I’m more grown up — I doubt that 13-year-old me would’ve truly appreciated the game and its storylines in their full glory. Beyond just playthroughs, there were now elements of the game that I found really intriguing: the meta-commentary that the game attempts to establish on the real world that you and I live in today.

Sparking something in me

But first, let’s go back. It’s quite funny how I grew obsessed with the game: I just thought the UI was super neat and clean. It turns out that it’s easy to achieve that effect when you use Gotham in basically every place, and the motion design of the UI — how the text fades into view, but also subtly flickers letting you know that it’s still tech — only further upgraded the sleek and futuristic vibe that the game (rather successfully) attempts to give off. Just have a look at this moment in the game, where you can piece together clues so that you can reconstruct a timeline in the digital realm:

I might even go off and say that this game sparked a small interest to pursue the little things in design that goes with tech. The small, careful considerations that were made when designing UIs, in particular. The game painted a world where technology is beautiful — one that’s clean, perfect, precise — as much as it lacks humanity — all white, pure sans serif fonts, and digital screens everywhere. It sits in the middle of the spectrum of tech design. Small me went “woah, this looks cool and sick” but also knew that if I created things, maybe I wouldn’t make something as sanitised and pure as this.

The world at 2038

At its core, the game revolves around androids: humanoid robots that are eerily close to resembling humans, up to having artificial blood powered by an element named thirium and a circulatory system powered by biocomponents for organs, sold by the tech megacorp CyberLife. These androids share such a distinct similarity to humans that the only thing telling them apart is a (semi-)removable LED ring on the right temple; every other feature is virtually indistinguishable from a normal human being.

The androids are described to be intellectually superior to humans, but are shackled and bound to become slaves to humankind. Androids can do almost everything, and you can probably start to see where the problem arises.

Magazines as a social critique

What stood out to me were these little books of magazines littered around in most, if not all, levels of the game. They give a bit of insight into the fictitious world in 2038, when androids are out and about and the world is gripping with existence. There’s mention of androids being in baseball and basketball teams, but also the mention of US-Russia tensions over the Arctic because of an abundance of materials for thirium (again, androids’ blood).

As the game went on, I noted down the gist of some of them because they stood out to me. They were too realistic — they were what I think might happen if you take something happening in the real world today and exaggerate it just a little. Have a look:

• Sports: androids introduced as a one-per-team innovation; changed team strategy, with teams making breaking records to purchase the latest android models and fans becoming disenchanted
• Climate change: depicted a 3°C increase in global temperatures since 2000, and pollution still on the rise; depiction of the rich moving to more inland and rural areas and the general population concentrating near coastlines and other places previously luxurious
• Job prospects: 37.3% unemployment rate at the cost of adopting androids as human replacement; androids have replaced basketball players
• Economy: sales of androids fuelled the economy, massively dominating the US’ GDP
• Ethics: during a life-or-death scenario involving two pedestrians and an autonomous vehicle, the vehicle assigns a score based on the pedestrians’ state (age, gender, etc.) and societal roles (job, family role, etc.) to decide which to ‘sacrifice’
• Diplomacy: tensions between the US and Russia over arctic ice that contains rare resources for thirium (android blood)

The butterfly with android wings

And these are just from the magazines alone, not the main storyline. In the main storyline, you make actions, and those actions have consequences. Just as a butterfly flapping its wings causes a ravaging hurricane a week later, the choices you make in the main storyline have a profound impact on the ending of the game.

There’s quite a profound irony at the heart of the game: that you, a human, are making choices for androids that desperately want freedom from human control. Every thought that they seem to have is actually yours. Their emotions, moral struggles, and rebellion are all projected through you, the one behind the controller (or keyboard + mouse). You’re trying to emulate humanity within these androids, and it turns out that it’s also you reflecting your own humanity into yourself with the choices you make.

Connor, the detective

Connor begins as a heartless machine tasked with investigating deviants — androids purported to have deviated from their original programming, often expressing human emotions but also tending to be more unstable. Connor himself has the option to retain his heartlessness, therefore remaining a machine, or inject small and tiny acts of humanity in his actions as the game goes on — saving the life of his partner, choosing not to shoot when the opportunity presented itself, etc. — and find himself grappling at the thought of becoming deviant himself.

Something about his coldness made me choose everything opposite to his actions. Seeing his mannerisms makes me empathise with the person on the other side of the table he’s conversing with, and it’s almost like I chose to show humanity to spite that indifference. And as the game progresses, I get to see Connor unravelling his inner conflict: is he just a machine programmed to do what he’s told, or is he more than that? His mannerisms became more ‘human’ the more I introduced empathy to his character. When the time came, there wasn’t any doubt in me that stopped him from going deviant. It just felt right.

And that plays a role in another subplot that runs intertwined with Connor’s: that of his human partner, Lt. Hank. Having lost his son due to a freak accident at the hands of a human surgeon high on red ice¹ and an android, Hank decided it was easier to blame the android and resent them as a whole because of it. When they first met, Hank was cold and aggressive to Connor. As I controlled Connor and gave him human traits, Hank learns to open up and befriend Connor, even ultimately revisiting the loss of his son and realising that androids aren’t all that bad. I think that’s a beautiful conclusion for a complicated character.

So, apparently, the heartless, ruthless detective machine can have its own doubts, too, and showing empathy and humanity pays off. There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing Connor and Lt. Hank become friends, and him finding the emergency exit that prevented CyberLife from overriding him and stopping them from ruining the androids’ freedom.

Kara, the caregiver

Starting out already abused by her owner, Kara’s priority becomes to protect a small girl called Alice from the dangers of the world. They escape their abusive household, then venture out into the wild — doing morally grey things for survival and falling into traps, just for a way out where they can live their life in peace. The big plot twist comes when Alice is revealed to be an android herself; what’s intriguing is that Kara can suddenly destroy her entire plotline by giving Alice the cold shoulder or continuing to be a mother figure for her.

The main conflict with Kara lies in the actions that lie in morally grey actions that I think the game explored well. If you have a little girl with you, would you steal money from a cash register and steal other people’s clothes so that she can get a cosy night’s rest at a motel instead of a dilapidated house? Would you lie to the little girl to make her feel comfortable, or would you burden her with the truth? When she’s revealed to be an android, does that mean that all your care for her — the extra effort to rest at the motel, the white lies — were all for nothing?

Kara’s one hit me because they don’t really make it to the end of the game. I might’ve chosen the wrong options, and I really tried to keep everyone, including Luther, alive. But right at the end of the game, it had different plans: Luther was shot dead and Alice fatally injured, and Kara jumped into freezing cold waters just to make it to the other side. This wouldn’t have happened if I kept the bus tickets that the couple earlier on dropped at the bus station, but I couldn’t deny them the freedom with the baby they have in their arms. The final option was whether to shut down with Alice (who succumbed later) and Luther, or to keep going.

For spending most of the game thinking ahead and caring about these three characters, seeing their lives shattered at the end really made me stop and think for a bit. I’d say that this storyline left the deepest and most profound impact on me.

Markus, the revolutionary

Once living in his own bubble with a wealthy artist, the sudden death of his owner and the sudden blame shift on him led to him becoming discarded. Literally having to rebuild himself from the ground up, Markus opens his eyes to the discrimination androids face against humans and does something about it. What stood out to me was the choices you could take with Markus and the way you present the androids’ protests to the humans: there’s generally a pacifistic or aggressive path, and they each have dire consequences for the android race.

The game really got me conflicted between the two routes. It spins this carefully-woven and delicate web that traps you. The game showers you with relentless and unending discrimination and violence from humankind onto androids, but you, as a human yourself, know that violence isn’t always the answer. The game doesn’t hide its parallels from real-world civil rights movements, and forces you to embrace it and think about it.

I already knew I wanted to go the pacifist route right from the first gameplay: not because it led to the most interesting character arcs (Markus and North as lovers was an arc that I think was delicately woven well) , but also because it felt right to me. Markus, when prompted to fire on two patrol officers surrounded by freed androids, said that “an eye for an eye and the world goes blind”. I think that also aligns with what I personally feel, and that’s what ultimately drove me to keep going down this path.

It wasn’t without resistance, though: one point in the game got painful trying to stay pacifistic. The Jericho raid destroyed what was once home to thousands of deviants, and a huge portion of those deviants were destroyed in the raid. After all that’s lost, how could you not fight fire with fire? What ultimately swayed me back was the strategic planning: public opinion is already on the android’s side, so fighting back with violence might only shatter that opinion and make things harder the deviants.

Thoughts for technologists

This game is just so, so interesting to me. Thinking as a technologist, it’s important to consider the implications of the things we create and bring to life: when people are suddenly laid off of work because tech can do things better and the government isn’t helping, what should we do? When technology digs its roots into other important matters like global security and climate change, to whose shoulders does the responsibility lie?

This game feels like a Black Mirror episode wrapped in a box with a tiny bow on the top: it seeks both to educate us about the implications of technology and also teach us about what shouldn’t be the case. And the fact that the game allows you to decide for yourself and see the consequences of your actions follow suit is the cherry on top. The game makes you ask questions that are applicable today:

• How far do ethics go with technology?
• When we create something artificial that’s humanoid, to what extent should we make it replicate us, our feelings, and our biology?
• As technology pushes boundaries and blurs the lines between real consciousness and expression of emotion, when do we decide when something is ‘alive’?

Some people think that the game is a bit too on the nose with parallels to civil rights movements and the treatment of certain races and groups, but I think that it sends just the right amount of message for us to start thinking. In the future, if we’ve reached this point where we’re contending with an artificial species that appears alive to us, will the events play out the same way as they do in the game?

These are all valid questions to think about, and it’s alright not to have the answers to them. I definitely don’t have them now.

13-year-old me would’ve been no thoughts, head empty with all these questions and probably still trying to Google the font the game used. Now, though, I know what makes the game cool isn’t just the UI design but the messy questions it asks us as humans. Maybe one day I, or you, will build something that thinks it’s real and feels emotions. When that day comes — when something we made starts to feel alive — will we treat it only like a tool or something more? Are we ready for what that says about us?

But hey, until then, enjoy this emotional rollercoaster and the post-game depression, because this one definitely hit me like a truck.