In 2011's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, there are riots in the streets. The people of Detroit—and, the player has to assume, other cities across the world—are rebelling against rapid technological advances, which are leaving those without money behind. Sensing a zeitgeist, developer Eidos Montreal imagined a vision of the near future in line with the concerns of its contemporary audience. The world in 2011 was still reeling from the Great Recession and the drastic class disparity it brought into focus. The Occupy movement filled headlines—even for those typically sheltered from the ramifications of economic inequality, it was hard to ignore debates, at the time, around the viability of modern models of capitalism. A game able to dramatize this reality, to use the upper classes of its fiction literally becoming superhuman as metaphor for economic and class divides, is, regardless of its faults, fairly truthful. Many stories about the future of humanity are optimistic. They present space exploration, advancements in medicine or energy-gathering, and the creation of artificial intelligence as sometimes complicated, but universal developments. 2001: A Space Odyssey imagines not just the technological expansion of humankind into space, but its transcendence into something above and beyond Person; in Demolition Man, all crime has been eradicated. The reality of our own world refutes these tales, however. Cataract removal and laser eye surgery may be routine forms of vision correction in the United States or Britain, but far rarer treatment options exist for citizens of the Central African Republic or Bangladesh. (Even within prosperous nations, the ability to afford cutting-edge healthcare is limited.) Access to computers and smartphones, now daily staples for so many, is still far less than universal. Technological innovation, regardless of its uses, is tied to capital. Rather than suggest that augmentations, like powerful cybernetic limbs and enhanced brains, will be widely adopted once created, Human Revolution portrays a (far more depressing) world where, much like today, the best is only available to those with money. In its fiction, people riot because increasingly vital technology is too far from their grasp. Aside from ideological differences (some advocate for a “pure,” non-augmented humanity), the greatest conflict in Human Revolution revolves around the rich becoming physically better than the poor and middle classes. Part allegory, part speculation, the game understands that just because our species is capable of great advancements, there's no reason to believe everyone will enjoy their benefits. Not even player character Adam Jensen is uncoloured by Human Revolution's cynical portrait of technology. Working as a security guard for an augmentation-producing corporation, Jensen is seriously injured protecting his employers during an armed break-in. Nearly dead, his boss (for not entirely altruistic reasons) loads him with advanced, life-saving cybernetics. In a more optimistic story, the incredible new powers these implants grant might make Jensen ecstatic. Human Revolution instead depicts him as anguished. His famous muttering of “I didn't ask for this” is summary of the complicated, fundamentally pessimistic view of technology taken by both Jensen and the game itself. Mankind Divided, set two years after Human Revolution, seems to forget basically every overarching point made by its predecessor. In this game, even though only a short time has passed in world, its social and economic dynamics have completely flipped. Now, the non-augmented are oppressing the Augmented. Those with implants, rather than a more mobile, enabled, wealthier upper class are subject to police crackdowns and discriminatory laws aimed at segregating society. There is a slum, clumsily dubbed Golem City, to which augmented people are being relocated. Technology, previously used by Deus Ex as metaphor for privilege and wealth, is now synecdoche for second class citizenship. Where Jensen's implants represented power and ascension before, they are now—crudely, insultingly—used as a stand in for non-white skin, non-male gender, non-heterosexuality, poorness, the working class, and all other things which place a person, in innumerable countries around the world, at a social and legislative disadvantage. In Human Revolution, to Jensen personally, augmentations were unwanted but never a hindrance. (Just try and complete that game without them.) In Mankind Divided, society is more or less unchanged. Governments remain shady and underhanded; corporations and their CEOs are all powerful and controlling—but augmentations and their users have been demonized and relegated to the underclass. They are still not a hindrance to Jensen, and by extension the player, in combat, but multiple times as one explores the streets of Prague, police will demand to see identity papers, causing inconvenience to Jensen and triggering a frustrating, slowing cutscene for the player. The starving, dirty, homeless people of Golem City are being killed because of their augmentations. Late in the game, there is a curfew that bars augmented people from being in Prague's public areas entirely and the player is forced to sneak and fight through difficult waves of guards. By this point, Mankind Divided make itself much clearer: to be augmented is to suffer. And what a perverse, self-serving sentiment that is. In its tangential way, Human Revolution empathized with the disenfranchised. In that game, not having wealth—or the possessions permitted by wealth—placed characters at a disadvantage. In Mankind Divided however, to be materially better off—to have—is a burden. The game endeavours to depict augmented people as impoverished and downtrodden. (The Golem City section, for the first half, is a veritable safari of human suffering.) But the implication that owning and having is as much if not more a struggle than having nothing, remains. Men will respond to feminism by asking “but what about male rights?” White people will appropriate Black Lives Matter into All Lives Matter. And Mankind Divided, presumably made, as most videogames are, by middle-class, educated people with penchants for technology, will, in a fictional society nevertheless comprised of people of colour, women, poor people, and gay people, cast the materially advantaged as the true and most noble sufferers. The game's villains—Victor Marchenko, Bob Page—are augmented also, and one might argue that, since corporations provide most of Mankind Divided's antagonists, the game still errs toward empathy for the disadvantaged. However, when the entire cast of Mankind Divided, heroes and villains, empathetic and hate figures, are comprised of materially wealthy or technologically advanced characters, the game feels less like an examination of anything and more the product of writers with a limited, self-observing worldview. Almost all of the sustained and significant interactions in Mankind Divided are between characters either opulently or metaphorically better off. By that measure, it has no interest in people who are truly disadvantaged. Its characters are either wealthy, politically empowered humans or augmented, technologically advanced superhumans. Emotionally, mentally, it's hard to equate the suffering of a science-fictional man-machine, with the power to shoot electricity from his hands or turn invisible, with that of a flesh and blood person whose very society denies them enough money to buy food. Mankind Divided's attempt to do so is vulgar.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and editor based in Toronto. His work has appeared in Kill Screen, Playboy, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter. Ed Smith contributes to Vice, The Observer, Edge, Play Magazine, and Kill Screen. Find him on Twitter @mostsincerelyed.