How Do Rich Liberals View “Revolution”: David Cage and "Detroit: Become Human"

Revolution. The romantic, idealized, dramatized, and sanitized idea of an in-some-way-oppressed people rising up against the city, nation, corporation, or socio-economic structure that oppresses them. This revolution often is framed in two extreme ways: one, as a violent, bloody, visceral, terrible war; or two, as a romantic, pacifist, do-no-harm-and-no-harm-will-come-to-us civil resistance akin to Dr. King or Ghandi; to change from within those people and structures who do us harm by singing about love. American attitudes about revolution have long been disproportionately described as “peaceful good, violent bad”, and this is the prefered social narrative of rich liberals in the United States.

This is of course completely ignoring an entire history of people the world over who have risen up with violence to overthrow oppressors, and won. Historical examples of violent revolutions that brought about major social, political, and economic change include the American Revolution of 1776, the French Revolution of 1789, the Haitian Revolution of 1791, and the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, to name just a few. These are revolutions which were extremely violent, bloody, and led to thousands of casualties on both sides. American labor riots were violent. Suffrage was violent, as is the history of civil rights and LGBT rights in America. But apparently a lot of people, usually pacifist liberals, have forgotten this.

Whether or not a revolution is “successful” or “worth it” in the eyes of many rich liberals, however, is not usually measured in the actual changes made to the society (which, you know, is the actual measure of civil rights, how society treats them), but usually expressed in how much violence there was in order to gain that victory. War is hell, say the rich liberals who have never fought it. While actual war participants like Dwight Eisenhower will echo those sentiments, those sentiments are not understood, instead commodified into little soundbites and quotes that easily get turned into memes for liberals to consume.

A more nuanced approach to war can be found in the later writings of both Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, both of whom described their actions in the 1917 revolution as necessary, but over time their positions softened a bit, with both men questioning whether or not all of the violence that was done was completely necessary. However, this is not to say that either man ever doubted the necessity of the revolution itself, and that’s a perspective that rich, usually white liberals often lack. Some rich liberals are keen to play around with the idea of revolution, but do so without understanding anything about it, other than what the TV tells them.

So when a game was announced called Detroit: Become Human, a game about an oppressed android working class rising up against human oppressors, I was excited for it because I wanted to see what kind of depiction it would be, whether it would take cues from historical revolutions, how to handle the politics of revolution itself; including weeding out spies and saboteurs, counter revolutionaries, whether violence changes the revolution into a more totalitarian structure, and other issues that real, historical revolutions faced. Unfortunately, DBH did almost none of that, because it was made by Quantic Dream. When I found that out, all of my excitement for the game went out the window. In addition to being a poorly written, poorly directed, and at times horribly acted game with a myriad of cliches and tropes, Detroit: Become Human is the laziest, most tone-deaf depiction of a revolution I’ve ever seen. But then again, what do I expect from a rich game developer?

49-year-old game auteur David de Gruttola, better known by his moniker “David Cage”, is the founder and CEO of Quantic Dream, a French game studio known for graphically impressive games with stunning visuals, awesome cinematic opening scenes, and great musical scores. But literally everything else about the games are terrible; the themes, the controls, the in-game camera, the script, the dialogue, and the creative direction. David Cage personally writes and directs every game, and his writing is some of the most clichéd, hackneyed, terrible writing ever. There is a reason why Cage is often compared to such auteur filmmakers as Tommy Wiseau, and Uwe Boll. For context, Uwe Boll is a low-quality filmmaker who mostly makes hyper-sexualized movie adaptations of video games, and not a single one has ever been good. Petitions exist to have him legally barred from making films ever again. Uwe Boll is reported to have once on set screamed sexual instructions at two actresses in a sex scene.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Uwe Boll has a reputation for fistfighting movie critics who say that his movies are bad, and all of them are, meaning he’s fought multiple critics. If he wins a boxing match with the critic, he demands that the critic rescinds their criticisms. Wiseau is a somewhat similar case, with his watershed moment in film being “The Room”, a film that cost millions in reshoots, set rebuilds, bizzare marketing, impromptu cast firings and hirings, and people angrily leaving the project because of Tommy Wiseau’s erratic behavior, unprofessional demeanor, bad acting, his strange demands, and random emotional outbursts, multiple uncomfortably long sex scenes, and tons of sound redesign and dubbed lines. Wiseau insisted that his nude buttocks be featured multiple times on screen, arguing it would sell the movie. Cage is a similar director; his games are more akin to interactive movies, though actually polished and visually impressive. But fans of Cage’s so-bad-they’re-hilarious games can literally play David Cage Bingo (this is a real thing that actually exists), guessing and betting on what tropes he will write in.

Almost every Quantic Dream game contains the following: separate scenes of short-haired women peeing, showering, and having sex for no real reason. The fat character is literally always the bad guy. Characters who fall in love for no reason, who haven’t had time to get to know each other, and have sex without any chemistry. Wise homeless people, usually black men. Literally black people who are magical. Clumsy symbolism and ham-fisted moral allegories. Cage’s apparently random emotional outbursts on set when actors ad-lib lines, or when one of his ideas is called bad. Bad detective stories with weird, spiritual mumbo jumbo. Plot holes, confusing character motivations, and eleventh hour, M. Night Shyamalan-style plot twists that completely invalidate half of the game. If you like all these things in your games, Cage will deliver. He even made a nude model of Ellen Page in a game without her permission, resulting in her suing him. David Cage does most of these things in every one of his games, without fail, and never learns from these mistakes. It really is that bad.

So when Detroit: Become Human was announced a few years ago, I was very excited, only to be completely devastated upon learning that it was in fact a Quantic Dream game. The depiction of an android revolution in DBH is laughable. David Cage wrote a game with the subtlety and care of an alcoholic trying to perform brain surgery while drunk. It is terribly written, and borrows from real life struggles for equality, freedom and justice, while both denying that it is, and not understanding anything of the social and political situations that made these struggles necessary, correct, and just. David Cage initially denied, and then confirmed, that DBH is a story about civil rights. He just happens to know or understand nothing about the subject.

The player plays as three androids in a futuristic Detroit. Connor, a prototype police android gifted to Detroit PD by the company that develops the androids, who is partnered up with Hank, an alcoholic cop who hates androids, a clear nod to “In the Heat of the Night” where Sidney Poitier’s black homicide detective is partnered up with a racist. Then there is Kara, a housekeeper android who can choose to run away with a little girl, Alice, who is being physically abused by her drug addict, obese father. Finally, there is Markus, a special prototype caretaker android gifted to Carl Manfred, a dying brilliant painter, by the android inventor and CEO of the company that makes them, CyberLife’s enigmatic Elijah Kamski.

These characters all become intertwined in events that eventually lead to an android rebellion against Cyberlife, and against the city of Detroit, which almost immediately starts putting the androids into literal concentration camps…no, really. The President in the game is a completely politically ignorant and inexperienced entertainment YouTube vlogger who is holding a White House press event about the android struggle in the city, and a reporter asks her if she sees any real-life parallels to any historical events, which she flatly denies because androids aren’t people. Hitler said the same thing, but this is never examined or mentioned again. I think David Cage thought that was a good idea.

There is literally a scene in which a tortured dying android asks Kara, “who are the real monsters?” When I first saw this scene, I broke into hysterical laughter, it’s that bad. Android future America is a weirdly economically devastated nation, because the President can’t run the economy properly, but somehow everyone has enough disposable income to purchase androids at thousands of dollars each, in a country with a stated 35% unemployment rate, the threat of war with Russia in the Arctic, and ecological disaster. In spite of all of this, the first dramatic scene is, “The androids are taking our jobs!” Yes, really.

The androids are simultaneously slaves and segregated at the same time, which doesn’t even make sense. The androids are literally forced to sit in the back of the bus. They are forced to do domestic housework and manual labor, they are raped, abused, destroyed and rebuilt constantly. They have no rights, are not legally recognized as people, they do not feel pain, and are designed to mimic human emotions in order to be docile and agreeable, but are not supposed to actually feel them. Their android clothing literally has armbands and triangles on it to denote them as androids, very similar to the same practice in Nazi concentration camps of identifying Jews, Gypsies, LGBT people, and others. When an android experiences “a shock of emotion”, they “wake up” and break their programming, thus becoming “deviant”, and they immediately start acting with free will.

This is seen as a problem by both the city and CyberLife, who have developed Connor in order to hunt down deviant machines and presumably kill them, a la Rick Deckard from Blade Runner. Kara runs away with Alice, falling in love with the child and becoming a surrogate mother, while Markus is shot by police during an altercation with his rich, white owner’s drug addict son (Markus is black), and left in a scrap heap. Kara needs to run to Canada with Alice where they can be free, whereas Markus wakes up, repairs himself with dead androids, finds and then becomes leader of an android collective called Jericho, needing to choose between peaceful or violent revolution.

Jericho’s strategy includes using tactics and iconography associated with past revolutionary social changes. They can sing, march, rally, or riot, and they can do this while appropriating the Black Power raised fist symbol, spraying Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” on walls as techno-graffiti, kneeling in front of police in the same way that NFL players kneel to peacefully protest police brutality, historically used sit-in protests, raising their fists while marching, or Black Lives Matter’s famous “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture. There is also a literal Underground Railroad to Canada, led by a black woman who is an analog for Harriet Tubman, who helps androids flee because black people understand slavery. Yeah, it’s that ham-fisted and on the nose, written by a jaded Frenchman.

Whether or not any of these choices will succeed or even occur depends upon the player. Endings of the game include: a successful peaceful revolution which convinces America to consider whether androids really are alive (which arguably does not improve their situation and leads to hundreds of them dead); a successful violent revolution that forces the US to surrender and acknowledge that androids are people (arguably better in terms of the legal status of androids); a failed violent revolution involving a dirty bomb that instead of getting the US to stop dehumanizing the androids just leads to ongoing uncertain civil war; the revolution can fail if Markus dies, leading to the city eradicating androids in concentration camps, and nobody will care; or finally, Connor can kill Markus and become the leader, where the corporation can reveal to Connor that they built deviancy into androids in order to control and manipulate the revolution for CyberLife’s political agenda. Kara and Alice can either get to Canada or die trying, and this is entirely independent of the revolution.

But do these so-called choices even matter? The revolution is heavily slanted toward peaceful options, which are given more emotional weight, and are less punished by the game blatantly telling you that you’re wrong if you decide that violence is better. In reality, revolutions are complicated, messy, and terrifying regardless of tactics. Violence is often inevitable, and it’s never clear if the choices that are made are correct, either during or in hindsight. But David Cage disagrees; in his game, the peaceful option has almost no drawbacks, is effortless, works 100% of the time, and that the public opinion of the people is the only factor that matters. If you choose violence, everyone argues with you, many important characters die, and your character is depicted as a monster regardless of the reasons why you choose the path. And yet, regardless of the path you choose, you are constantly being shot by police and military, from the onset of your first protest march. It’s their first and only response. Their second response is to immediately build camps, and regardless of the public opinion meter, nobody appears to have a problem with concentration camps in Detroit. Given that immigrant children are currently held in internment camps just like the Japanese were in World War 2, this is so far on the nose that David Cage might as well be sitting next to the player as they play, going: “See? I did these things based on real events!” Yes, we know, and it’s bad.

No humans join your protests, as whites did for Dr. King’s marches, or men did for suffrage in the 20s. There is no sympathetic media depiction of the androids even if you go 100% peaceful. If Markus dies, the revolution fails no matter what. There are just about two good humans in the game, all the rest of them are racist, violent monsters, and every android that Markus frees joins Jericho immediately, without question or dissent, and immediately starts worshiping Markus as a Christ figure called “rA9". Who or what is rA9, why do the androids do this? Have they spontaneously developed religion?

This is never explained, and turns out to be a plot MacGuffin. rA9 is nothing, it’s meaningless, it’s just a thing that David Cage did because he thought it would be cool. Markus even develops magic powers to free androids from bondage, first with a touch, then with a wave, eventually with a look. Markus actually becomes Robo-Jesus a quarter of the way into the game, and this is never examined, explained, or even asked about…by anyone. Markus isn’t even surprised, he just accepts it as if he knew he could do those things the whole time. As if everyone somehow knows and accepts that Markus is literally a magic black man.

Even if this game wasn’t set in a robot future, that’s just not how reality works. This depiction of the revolution and its possible outcomes is completely bad, hackneyed, clichéd, and lacks all humanity, real-life depiction, or a realistic understanding of the pros and cons of nonviolent resistance, violent resistance, or civil war. Regardless of Markus’ choices, as long as he lives the revolution will win, peaceful or violent. The game never confronts the idea that in reality, real revolutions have spies and saboteurs. In reality, people sympathetic to oppressed people will fight and march alongside them. There isn’t any explanation why these real life historical possibilities never happen, as if David Cage either can’t conceive of them, or has actually never read a history book. I don’t think David Cage even understands why people revolt. He doesn’t know how to write a story.

Public sympathy and media exposure to a righteous cause of people who are clearly being disenfranchised by entrenched power structures is often framed as “all we need” in order to make substantive change, and David Cage endorses this to a T. This tone-deaf, emotionally reactionary response coming from upper class liberals is so much more palatable to those people in power who operate the entrenched power structures that oppress us, as if the tears of rich white liberals are the fuel of civil rights. In reality, change comes through taking social structures and “hierarchies” to task, and making a substantive change by radically changing or dismantling the power structures that uphold that oppression, such as capitalism, the military, the police, or a court system with baked in racial profiling laws because drug laws are heavily slanted against non-whites. David Cage doesn’t understand any of this, he thinks that you need to make the President shed a single, shameful tear by kissing your sexbot girlfriend while journalists take your picture, and then you start singing a sad song as your people are being shot by the military. Yes, that literally happens in the game.

That’s not understanding the politics of revolution, that’s understanding social change as depicted by American TV. David Cage thinks that putting a flower in the barrel of a gun will stop someone who doesn’t see you as human from shooting you in the face. David Cage thinks civil rights can be won by sharing a Coke across the nation. If David Cage ever made a Holocaust game, he’d have the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto get Hitler to cancel World War 2 by holding up a crying Jewish child, either that or by offering Hitler a Pepsi. That’s what a jaded, uneducated rich white liberal thinks revolution is.

He thinks revolution is neat, tidy, and easy. What about Dr. King, who was blackmailed by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI with photos of his infidelity, and they demanded he either give up civil rights or kill himself? Dr. King was a human, a flawed pastor who tried to get a concealed carry permit in Alabama and was denied, who was protected by Black Panther bodyguards and still got shot. What about Ghandi, who first tried and failed to arm India to revolt against the British when Winston Churchill orchestrated a famine for the expressed purpose of eradicating the Bengali? What about Imi Lichtenfeld, who tried and failed to get the Warsaw Ghetto to revolt against the Nazis?

Nah, didn’t happen, says Cage. Sugarcoat all of it for the purposes of a bad game, says Cage. They should have just cried, and the Nazis will start crying too and stop killing. Malcolm X who, Huey P. Newton who? Nah, just stand there really dramatically while hundreds of you are being shot, and it’ll stop eventually. No sympathetic people will protest or riot on your behalf. David Cage doesn’t understand social change. He’s a goofy French moron of a game developer who thinks that “all you need is love”, and his country beheaded their royalty.

If you’re going to make a story with historical allegory to real civil rights struggles, make sure that you understand those struggles first. Understand how hard it was, whether they succeeded or not. That’s the point, it’s not about whether they used violence or not, what matters is were they successful. There is just as much value in reading about the successful Haitian revolution in 1791 as there is in reading about John Brown’s failed raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, both of which were violent. Don’t just look at Kylie Jenner’s Pepsi commercial and think that’s all you need to do to make a game about oppressed peoples. Because if that’s what you’re doing, you’re a hack.