Deus Ex marks one of the first times I realised videogames could be about things, man. That conversation between the two NSF troopers on Liberty Island—where they discuss the reduction of people to version numbers and functionality—was a real eye-opener for a young Josh who had previously only played Rayman and Quake 2.
But as I’ve aged, I’ve come to realise that, while Deus Ex is indisputably still one of the greatest games of all time, its politics are more than a little incoherent. Your main allies in the game are the NSF, a ragtag assortment of right-wing militia types right out of the Idaho panhandle. Their comrades in arms? Silhouette, a faction that’s pretty much the Situationist International—a French intellectual Marxist group—with the serial numbers filed off.
Uneasy bedfellows, and behind and above it all? Various billionaires who function basically like Sith Lords, allied or at one another’s throats depending on what they think they can get away with. Well, I guess that part is pretty realistic, at least.
But maybe it’s not so surprising that Deus Ex is a bit politically muddled: when PCG dispatched Robert Zak to chat with the original devs to mark the game’s 25th anniversary, they said politics wasn’t really on their minds. “I was in my mid-20s, so I definitely wasn’t thinking on that level,” said Deus Ex designer (and later Dishonored lead technical designer) Ricardo Bare. Instead, he was just excited to be working on Deus Ex: “It was more like ‘I really like shooters, I really like RPGs, Oh my God, somebody’s combining these and I get to work on one!'”
Project director Warren Spector, at least, was thinking about politics, but specifically he was thinking about how he didn’t want to inject his own into the game. “I’m a big believer that if you want to make a statement, you should make a movie or write a book,” Spector told PCG. “What I thought about things didn’t matter in Deus Ex. What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It’s all about what each player thinks.”
Spector says he didn’t want “to tell them the state of the world, I wanted them to act and see the state of the world that resulted from their choices,” which I suppose manifests in all the choices Deus Ex can respond to, right up to its choose-from-three ending, where you can either hand the world over to super-AI Helios, plunge it into a new Dark Age, or just return the reins of power to the Illuminati (Invisible War, the sequel, decided to settle on an amalgam of all three as the canon ending, by the by).
I suppose I see where Spector’s coming from, but I’m not sure it’s really a desirable or even feasible goal to extricate a dev’s worldview from the art they make. The politics of a devteam will invariably end up reflected in the kind of world they depict, the kind of choices they allow you to make. Deus Ex, I’d argue, is fundamentally a pretty liberal game at its core in spite of the radicalism of its characters and factions. Its central politics are contained in the immortal JC Denton line “When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror.” But if that’s the case, I guess it wasn’t Spector’s intention.
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