Deus Ex’s creators claim that when they built one of the most political games ever, their goal was never to make a political statement. “What I think is the right future for humanity is irrelevant. It’s all about what each player thinks,” says project director Warren Spector.

Deus Ex was the first game that made me realize video games could be about real, weighty issues. That conversation between the NSF soldiers on Liberty Island—debating whether people are reduced to software updates and functions—was a revelation for a kid who’d only played Rayman or Quake 2 before.

With age, I’ve come to see that, while Deus Ex is still an all-time great, its political vision is… inconsistent. Your allies are the NSF, a band of right-wing militia types straight out of the American hinterland. Their allies? Silhouette, essentially a version of the Situationist International, a radical French Marxist group, with the serial numbers filed off.

It’s an odd coalition, and looming above them are billionaires acting like Sith Lords—sometimes allied, sometimes at each other’s throats, always in it for themselves. That part, at least, feels authentic.

Deus Ex lead Warren Spector has always been clear he didn’t make the game alone and he used the 25th anniversary to reflect on the team’s process. In a PC Gamer interview, original devs said that politics just weren’t on their minds. “I was in my mid-20s, so I definitely wasn’t thinking on that level,” recalls designer Ricardo Bare (later lead technical designer for Dishonored). “I just loved shooters and RPGs, and I was excited to work on a game that combined both.”

Spector, for his part, admits he had political ideas, but he didn’t want to impose them. “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.”

He explains 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 is reflected in all the branching decisions and endings: side with super-AI Helios, throw the world into a new Dark Age, or return power to the Illuminati (the sequel, Invisible War, canonized a blend of all three outcomes).

I get where Spector’s coming from, but I’m not sure it’s possible—or even desirable—to keep a creator’s worldview out of their work. The politics of a development team inevitably show up in the worlds they build and the choices they offer. Deus Ex, at its heart, is pretty liberal—even if its factions and characters seem radical. Maybe the game’s core politics are summed up in JC Denton’s iconic line: “When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror.” But if so, Spector says that was never his intention.

Source: PC Gamer