The beauty of science fiction is that it provides unique insight into parts of our lives, past, present, and future, that we otherwise wouldn’t normally think about. It takes a simple idea—what if we could predict crimes before they happen? What if our society waged war on books? What if we could travel through time?—and carries it to its extreme conclusion. In that sense, good science fiction is more than just spaceships, lasers and robots. It's a way to answer questions about ourselves, individually or as a whole, we may not otherwise be comfortable addressing. On paper, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided has the potential to be good science fiction. Its central question—what if we could cybernetically enhance our bodies?—is rife with implications for issues ranging from class to race to the metaphysics of what it means to be “human” at all. But instead of using these issues as a lens through which to engage with the game’s story, themes, and mechanics, it wears them like an ill-fitting suit, running nose-first into a wall of social problematica with the grace and aplomb of an undergrad showing up to a Halloween party as Sexy Hitler. In all fairness, it’s not entirely Mankind Divided’s fault. As a sequel to Human Revolution, a game which shattered any notion of subtlety with its trichotomous ending, the new Deus Ex was going to have a lot of momentum to contend with out of the gate. It admits this directly with the agonizingly long recap video that precedes the game’s campaign. Its predecessor was a game that began with ruminations on the philosophical ideas of personhood (where is the line between man and machine?) and the ethical implications of using science for arguably unnatural ends, and ended with street riots and a literal evil genius orchestrating a global terrorist attack. But even the title of this installment—Mankind Divided—implies that this game is, at least narratively speaking, more inward looking than its blockbuster roots signify. Another common trait of science fiction is that its creators look to their own world for inspiration. The reason sci-fi resonates with us is that we see our own values and ideals reflected in its stories. Mankind Divided meets this criterion, too. The game begins with a prologue set in Dubai and then immediately follows it up with a public terrorist attack in Prague: Every inch of this game is positively dripping with slogans, bywords, #brands, and ideas omnipresent in media, news, and life today. The most egregious examples of this social coattail riding came out of the game’s marketing. The months leading up to the game’s release saw such ill-advised marketing efforts as the infamous “Digital Apartheid” campaign. More notoriously, the promotional art featured a protester holding a sign reading “Augs Lives Matter.” These aren't just window dressing or a #2edgy marketing campaign. The game's central conflict revolves around the assumption that players will buy into its fictional Aug oppression as being on the same level as real-world racial discrimination. Mankind Divided's creators want to invoke the gravity and sincerity of a tense social climate defined by hostile race relations. But the main problem with this strategy is they want to do this without being accountable for saying anything substantial about these issues one way or the other. Apartheid isn’t just a word that means, vaguely, “racism and segregation.” It represents an entire history of violence, oppression, and hate. Just like it’s hard to read “Augs Lives Matter” as little more than a limp-wristed attempt to cash in on a popular concept in our current sociopolitical consciousness. The fact that the poorly chosen phrase bears more than a passing phonetic similarity to the reviled #AllLivesMatter retort can’t be overlooked either. To be clear, the problem isn’t that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is attempting to address real-world social and political issues—to do such a thing is one of media’s greatest assets, and there have been many games to successfully pull it off. The problem is that Mankind Divided's developer is pulling from the social cachet of very real, very impactful moments only to superimpose them over top of a fictional framework that lacks any grounding in reality, much less any of the historical and social context framing these major problems. The obvious connection we’re supposed to make is between the augmented humans of the Deus Ex world and marginalized racial minorities in our own. On the surface it seems like a simple enough comparison—and this game is far from the first piece of sci-fi media to draw such a parallel. It’s the same premise that the X-Men comics have been running with for 50 years now. But just like X-Men, Deus Ex fails to realize that this isn’t a simple 1:1 relation. The biggest sin committed by Mankind Divided is that it assumes oppression is universal and transferable, that police turning dogs and fire hoses on a band of peaceful protesters in the American South is interchangeable with the registration of and government intervention in the lives of augmented citizens. But it’s impossible to speak effectively of oppression while ignoring the issue of power and power dynamics, on both an individual and systemic level. This is by far the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to Deus Ex’s stance on social commentary. In some ways the developers painted themselves into a corner from the get-go. How do you reconcile a narrative of social oppression, which by definition hinges on gross power disparities, with the idea of an omnipotent Big Budget Videogame Protagonist custom-built to make the player controlling him feel invincible? At the start of the game, Jensen, who has made the jump from the private sector to working as a special agent for INTERPOL, is ridiculed by his squadmates as the only Augmented member of their team. The men he serves with are career soldiers who are understandably worried given the events of the previous game—a globe-spanning cataclysm that caused all augmented humans to turn homicidal. And yet Jensen addresses their concerns by menacingly flashing his cyberknives. The message is clear: Jensen is not a victim in this world, he is infinitely more capable than everyone in the helicopter with him, and he knows it. Even worse, in a move that crystallizes the developers’ commitment to straddling the fence, we are told right from the outset of the social tension between Augs and non-augmented humans. The conflict is introduced with that most infamous of milquetoast centrist platitudes: “There are aggressors on both sides,” we are told in the game’s intro cinematic, as the camera cuts to a shot of Augmented “terrorists” of an unknown affiliation gunning down non-augmented humans in the street. The punctuation mark comes when the Prague subway bombing that kicks off the game’s main story is believed to be perpetrated by a group called ARC, the Augmented Rights Collective—essentially a radical Aug terrorist group. This isn’t a way to establish balance and subtlety in your primary conflict. Quite the opposite, it justifies all the fear, backlash, and hatred that defines the game’s social underpinning. By introducing the world dynamic in such an explosive way (literally), we start off with the stakes already about as high as they can get. We’ve already seen what the Augmented are capable of, and therefore any action, no matter how severe or extreme, is justified. Contrast this with the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, where the primary frontlines comprised everyday citizens, most of whom had next to no legal rights due solely to their race, let alone any form of power (personal, political, or otherwise) that they could exert over their opponents. Men like Gandhi (and later, Martin Luther King Jr., a devotee of Gandhi’s) preached resistance strategies based on nonviolence because there were no other options available. The Black Power movement of the ‘70s, not to mention the ongoing efforts of freedom fighters in Palestine, arose as a response to ongoing oppression that pushed an entire segment to its breaking point. Unlike the Black Panthers or the Palestinian rebels fighting for their lives and rights in Gaza, Mankind Divided’s Augmented population isn’t itself an affiliation or an organized collective. When the major event of Human Revolution occurs, it isn’t the result of carefully organized planning among a revolutionary contingent. Quite the opposite—it’s the caprice of a rich white capitalist using a significant fraction of the global population as literal pawns to acquire more political and economic clout. Comparing the Aug Incident with #BlackLivesMatter protests or even Palestinian suicide bombings erases hundreds of years of political context—not to mention the lives of countless real humans—in an attempt to lend gravitas to a videogame otherwise concerned with guns and killing. Black Lives Matter isn’t a brand or a slogan or even a political party. It’s not a secret handshake that you can use to score Points. It is a culmination of the pressure cooker of American social, political, and racial circumstances that has driven a population to a breaking point. Jumping on board that train to try and sell a videogame is, at best, painfully ignorant, and at worst, nefarious. It’s strictly the province of the very privileged to be able to preach a message of universal peace and equality. Those “coexist” bumper stickers are infuriating because, to say “let's all just get along” turns a blind eye to whole generations of complex social context and interactions. Mankind Divided lacks even this basic attempt at having some form of directive. Under the very popular tactic of “players can make up their own minds,” the developers are mistakenly trying to convince us that conflict can be extracted from the context that created it. It can’t. And implying otherwise means that, far from a powerful tool for social introspection, a game like this—one whose story, intentionally or otherwise, preaches the “shut up and get along” message—is just another form of oppression.

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Patrick Lindsey is a Boston-based game critic who likes to focus on narrative and thematic design. In addition to cohosting the Bullet Points podcast, he also co-edited SHOOTER, an ebook anthology of critical essays on shooting games. Follow him on Twitter @HanFreakinSolo.