For the first time since starting Bullet Points, I'd like to reference another of our articles: when Patrick wrote that BT's sacrifice, at the end of Titanfall 2, is undercut by the fact it is a robot and its actions are not the result of true altruism but “programmatic inevitability,” he was absolutely right. Videogames continue to struggle with human characters. What we have at the moment is a canon of games whereby humanity, to spare writers the nuance of creating plausible people, is transplanted into non-human beings or, even worse, inanimate objects. In BioShock, Gone Home, Alien: Isolation, and a litany of others, our relationship to the people within the game is explored via written notes, carefully constructed sets (think of Adam's apartment in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided) and graffiti. In Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, Papo & Yo, and The Talos Principle, games ostensibly about specific human experiences, ghosts, monsters, and robots are stand ins for people—layering metaphor upon metaphor, games don't provide artificial characters, but artificial versions of artificial characters. Patrick was also correct when he described how Titanfall 2, despite its dramatic climax centring on an unfeeling machine, makes various attempt to humanise its protagonist and the soldiers around him. I don't like to lead articles with my personal, emotional response—good criticism, I think, should find objective and universal truths about a work, rather than focus on the experience of one individual. But without exaggeration, I felt uneasy about killing the enemies in Titanfall 2. More than, say, Zakhaev in the original Modern Warfare, which the directors of Titanfall's developer, Respawn, also created, the team of mercenaries one encounters in Titanfall 2 are given faces and voices. It's perhaps a cheap trick, but assigning to each of them a different international accent and specific Titan robot makes them each instantly recognisable—the heavy weapons guy who speaks German, the Londoner who can turn invisible. By the same token, Titanfall 2's regular enemies are noticeably verbose. Their interactions might not amount to much more than shouting “he's over here!” or “my squad is down!” but the dialogue is well enough worded and performed to be convincing. If the game does a poor job of selling exactly why the two sides in its fictional war are fighting one another, it imbues the individual battles with a detectable sense of loss of life. You aren't just shooting avatars, you're silencing voices. But still Titanfall 2 hangs on the implied, but ultimately truncated humanity of BT. Even its most personable moment, when it gives the human protagonist Jack Cooper a friendly thumbs up, is clarified to be a robotic behaviour when, in a cutscene which follows shortly afterwards, one of the lesser, “janitor” robots is seen doing the exact same thing. And if Titanfall 2 humanises its lesser characters by juxtaposing their being alive and then dead—by filling your ears with their voices when you enter a room, and noticing an oppositional silence when you leave, your killing complete—it also de-humanises BT by “killing” the robot twice. Human characters, like those accented mercenaries, are defined by their individuality: voices, faces, respective Titans. The first time BT dies, its memory core is simply transplanted into another robotic chassis. The defining qualities of personhood, which Titanfall 2 establishes elsewhere, patently do not apply to BT. One may argue Titanfall 2 is merely a story about a person and his relationship to a robot, rather than about a person and his relationship to a distinctly or sentimentally humane robot, but again the game undermines that defence. As the story progresses, BT graduates from calling Cooper “pilot,” to “Cooper” and eventually “Jack”—evidently, we are supposed to be convinced that BT has cognition. But since it doesn't die like the people around it, and makes repeatedly clear that all of its apparent kindnesses are the result of computer protocol which dictates every Titan should safeguard its operator, feeling for BT like we would a human character—even a human character in the shallowly written Titanfall 2—feels charitable. And yet, we are reassured by BT's presence. When held hostage by the mercenary group, the robot sends to us, via our heads-up display, a written message: “trust me.” And we do. On battlefields full of shouting, scrapping soldiers, the sight of the hulking BT, its big guns and impervious armour, combined with the knowledge it is not only our side but connected to us specifically, is comforting. If there is a difference between the ghosts in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture or the written memos in BioShock and Titanfall 2's BT, it's that BT talks and responds to us directly. It is not an element of a person, incidentally found or experienced, which cannot be interacted with or defined either way by our presence. With BT, we hold conversations. We make plans. We pick and win fights. Of course, it isn't impossible for a sense of humanity and person to be felt via non-human characters, but to have their thoughts and feelings simply read or written out for us—to imbibe them passively or through alienating vectors, like computer screens, hallucinations and androids—is surely contradictory to the uniquely interactive nature of games. If game writers are so rarely capable of penning nuanced human characters, it would at least make sense to shore up that absence of credibility by allowing players to connect to the characters via interactions. That is what Titanfall 2, above so many of its contemporaries, understands. Simply by talking to BT, and it talking back, the robot, though it belies so many of the implicit elements of what it means to be a person, feels marginally human.

***

Ed Smith contributes to Vice, The Observer, Edge, Play Magazine, and Kill Screen. Find him on Twitter @mostsincerelyed.