The Logic of Game Theory and Culture| "Playing" and "Reading" in Detroit: Becoming Human

As a narrative RPG game, Detroit: Transfiguration tells the story of bionic humans becoming humans. The game is set in 2038, and Detroit has long since transformed from an "industrial wasteland" to a "bionic human industry capital". Humanoid bionic humans (Android) are produced, traded, and used in large quantities, and undertake different tasks in the city, such as police assistance, housekeeping services, security, construction workers, urban cleaning, sexual services, etc. Due to the frequent disappearances, loss of control, injuries and even killings of "Deviant", the relationship between humans and bionic humans has shifted from the maker and commodity, the consumer and the commodity, the master and the servant, and the antagonism between man and the inhuman. The protagonists of the story are three ai-powered bionics: Connor, Carla, and Marcus. They represent each of the three identities, and Connor is set up as a male auxiliary police officer, helping the police solve cases and hunt down abnormal bionic people who commit crimes. Carla was designed as a female domestic maid, responsible for housework and childcare. Marcus was designed as a male personal assistant to a distinguished painter. As the game progresses, the player plays each of the three protagonists and advances the three plot lines from three perspectives. All three plot lines are driven by the core of the "Bionic Awakening", in which the player completes Connor's hunt for the Awakened Bionic Man, Carla escapes with Alice, and Marcus becomes the leader to save the Awakened Bionic Man. The world of Detroit Transfiguration offers players plenty of options to include both rich dialogue options and dramatic big decisions, as well as moderate quick-reaction event (QTE) missions. These interactive choices made through joysticks or mouse and keyboards will lead to different plots and story endings.

Detroit: The Changing Man poster

From reading to traversing

Regarding the openness and interactivity of text, Roland Barthes's emphasis on "the writerly text" in S/Z is considered an insight that drives the theoretical turn of text. Post-structuralist concepts such as "writable text" and "inter-text" certainly provide excellent theoretical perspectives for interpreting game texts such as Detroit: The Changing Of Man, but if they stop here, video games are seen as a new form of literature, thus losing their "gameplay.". In this sense, it is rather that Detroit is a certain degree of realistic realization of the literary ideal expressed in Borges's "The Garden where the Paths Divide.". In The Garden where the Path Bifurcates, a "work of infinite literature" is imagined, like a labyrinth of labyrinths, but the end of the book is also the beginning. In the book, the sinologist Albert describes to the protagonist Yu Zhun Peng's "garden where the path is bifurcated":-

"Under what circumstances can a book become infinite? I think there is only one situation, and that is the cycle and the cycle repeats. ...... In all fiction, whenever a person is faced with several different choices, he always chooses one possibility and excludes the other; in Peng's intricate novel, the protagonist chooses all possibilities. ...... He argues that time has countless series, divergent, converging, and parallel to form a growing, intricate web. A web of time that draws closer, diverges, intertwines, or never interferes with each other encompasses all possibilities. ”[1]

Obviously, if the material carrier of literature and the writing strategy are not innovated, Borges's unlimited literary works can only be a literary imagination. In RPG video games, the player (reader) controls the character through the narrative process, moves between the main plot line and the side lines, and chooses the player's own story among various possibilities. If "hypertext", named after the concept of "hyperlink", has become a term and text type recognized by the text theory community, then in the face of the more complex "game as literature" and "literature as a game", it is necessary to introduce the "cyber text" defined by the game research theorist Espen Aarseth. The key to cybertext research is to think of the text as a "machine", which is not a metaphorical logic, but a realistic examination from a cybernetic point of view. In other words, Arthurs is not trying to give cybertext a clear definition of literary history and aesthetics, but to use cybertext as a perspective to describe and explore the information exchange strategy of dynamic texts.

Arthurs points out that the core quality of cybercodes is ergodic, and that the interaction between the user and the text is a selective process of travel rather than a process of reading acceptance. "In the face of the user (player, reader) completing a sequence of symbols through optional operations, while constructing the object, many of the concepts of 'reading' no longer have explanatory power." [2] As a key property of cybertext, traversality "cannot be examined according to any linguistic-based textual theory guidelines (e.g., grammatical, semantic, pragmatic)". [3] The most fundamental problem with studying cyber text is not the linear and nonlinear problems of narrative, but the focus should be on "where to read from". When reading a text of a traditional linear narrative, the reader may be convinced that "reading from War and Peace" and "reading War and Peace" are the same thing. But in the face of a cyber text, the reader is constantly reminded of the existence of difficult strategies, unchooled paths, and unheard voices. The traversality of the cyber text draws the reader (the player) through effort, trying to exhaust the various possibilities of the various paths of the text.

Post-structuralist text theorists reveal delays in the meaning of texts through analytical and interpretive activities, while cyber text itself demonstrates the multiple possibilities of texts. Even though Barthes has declared the "death of the author" and invited the reader to "enter" the text, this is still a rhetorical statement. In fact, no matter how proactively the reader is to enter the text, participate in the narrative, unfold associations, and interpret at will, he cannot have the pleasure of the player, because the pleasure of the reader comes from voyeurism, and the pleasure of the player comes from manipulation. To illustrate this point, Arthurs gave the example of a spectator at a football game, he could guess where the game was going, getting excited, disappointed, and shouting as it went, but he wasn't a player after all. The reader of cyberspace is a player, and his/her relationship with the text is not only to accept and react from the perspective of insight and interpretation, but more importantly, the player has to work hard and struggle to manipulate and control the narrative.

Detroit: The Transformation game screen

Aestheticians and literary critics have a habit of using games as metaphors to analyze works, working within the rhetorical vision of "game-like literature." This rhetoric largely leads to the absence of "literature as a game" and "a game as literature". Compared to previous games of the same type as Rainstorm and The Amazing Twins, traversality is more intuitively and visually presented in Detroit: Transfiguration. At the end of each chapter, the structure and branches of the chapter plot are counted and identified by a tree map, the line selected by the player in the game is lit, while the unselected is identified as unlocked, and the player will realize that there are some key nodes in the game based on the information conveyed by this statistic and identification, and different choices may trigger some events, but the specific content is locked. Obviously, such a process may still be interpreted as "reading" in traditional text theory, and in the perspective of cyber text theory, it is regarded as a selective "journey". If the player wants to choose all the possibilities as imagined in The Garden of Bifurcation of the Trail, they will have to return to the game and constantly re-select from different nodes, triggering different events, traveling through different plots, and ultimately completing different stories. In the game, the player's travel actions are no longer metaphors, but rely on the topological mechanics of the cyber text itself to wander, discover, explore, and even get lost. All the travels here are based on one driving force: I want to tell my own story in this text.

Games and movies cross the line in both directions

Narrative is one of the core issues in game research, especially when focusing on narrative RPG games, whether it is game designers, players or game researchers, "how to tell a story" and "whether to tell a good story" are their important concerns. When story makers try to use new technologies to effectively implement narrative strategies and create new user experiences, repeated experiments that combine technology and narrative become inevitable. Without regard to the transmission mechanism, the cyber text is "the narrator and technology that master traditional narrative concepts are connected to the reader together" [4] Game researchers, including Chris Crawford, Janet Murray, and Andrew Glassner, can then see gamers judging that interactive storytelling is the future of narrative and that, relying on digital technology, storytellers place greater emphasis on reader engagement. This investigation and analysis of video games from a narrative perspective is summarized as "the narrative orientation of game research".

Whether it's treating narrative games like Detroit: Human Beings as cyber text, or analyzing them using French narrative theory, the logic is essential: treat them as texts. Even though game research is already quite large in the West, most of the theoretical researchers in this field are still from the field of literature or use literary theory to work. The existing researchers in China who directly analyze "Detroit: Changing People" are concentrated in the field of film and television research, and they position "Detroit: Changing People" as an interactive film, and identify interactive movies as a new form of film, which is a film work launched on the game platform. However, ontological questions and debates remain, namely, whether a visual cyber text like Detroit: The Changing Man is a cyberspace text or a cyber game text?

Detroit: The Transformation game screen

Among the mainstream online community platforms, Detroit: Becoming Human, along with its developer Quantic Dream's other products, Phantom Killer, Rainstorm, and The Extraordinary Twins, are classified as interactive films, but in the larger genre system, they are classified as games. And the same interactive film, "Black Mirror: Pandasnake" is classified as a movie, as if there is no doubt. From the perspective of platform carriers, the genre division of these works seems to be clear and recognizable, "Black Mirror: Pandasnake" was broadcast on the film and television platform Netflix, while "Rainstorm", "Extraordinary Twins", "Detroit: Change" and so on rely on game consoles and personal computers as carriers, sold in online game stores. Once separated from factors such as producers, manufacturers, and platform carriers, ontological problems arise again in terms of the product (work) itself.

In the research horizon with interactive narrative as the main topic, there are indeed different orientations of narrative and gameplay, as well as relatively complex compromise attitudes. Traditional narrative forms such as epics, dramas, novels, movies, television series, etc. have long gained the legitimacy status of literature as literary genres, and video games have caused controversy precisely because their essential definitions and attributes have not been determined. Although there is a "ninth art" in the discourse system of popular culture, video games have not been fully embraced by the serious field of literary and artistic research, and game research itself has not demarcated boundaries. Obviously, the focus of the problem is not "narrative" but "interaction". So when it comes to interactive storytelling, is it based on movies or games?

In the film, the interaction enhances the audience's engagement and initiative, and the audience's every choice is driven by the need to drive the plot, and this interaction also realizes the openness and multiple possibilities of the story in a practical sense, which has gone beyond post-structuralist text theory and the interpretation of the acceptance aesthetic. In the game, each choice of the player is not only to keep the story narrated, but more importantly, interactivity is one of the basic qualities that make up the gameplay, and the player's actions in the game have a clear goal and follow limited rules. Each choice made by the player in Detroit: The Transformation does mean that they may be involved in telling a different story, and at the same time, it also determines what tasks are completed, what plots are unlocked, and what trophies are won in each chapter of the game. In What is Gameplay? In the book, Shuji Watanabe and Akiaki Nakamura point out the importance of "player effort" in defining the game and discussing gameplay, "players who work hard to win the challenges shown in the rules and improve their skills can eventually change the outcome of the game." [5] Thus, in Detroit: Becoming Human, the interactive narrative is not only presented as the player's choice of character lines and actions, but also in each QTE event, such as Connor's pursuit, Carla's theft, Marcus's resistance, etc., and the player's operational reaction is likely to directly affect the direction of the plot. For the movie, the audience's efforts are secondary, and for the game, it is precisely because of the different difficulty of the task and effect feedback that the player is inspired to participate in the interactive challenge, and the player gains through his own efforts is the "unique story". All in all, the sense in which the interactive narrative embodied in the cyber text of Detroit: Becoming Human is realizing the "reader as the author" that was originally a metaphor is a very critical but extremely complex issue, and it requires literary critics and game designers and researchers to participate in dialogue and discussion.

"The aesthetics of interactive narrative require that the choices be broad enough to give the user a sense of freedom, that the narrative patterns be fully adapted to these choices to produce instantly generated effects." Ideally stated top-down design should masquerade as a self-generated story: both to convince users that their efforts will be rewarded with a coherent narrative, and to make them feel that they are exercising free will, not a puppet of the designer. [6] It is difficult for today's interactive films to meet this requirement, and video games already have a relatively mature design mechanism. Although detroit: Becoming Human as a game requires players to make efforts in the process of interaction, and even repeat the operation in some levels, from the perspective of storytelling, it is still a continuous and effective whole, and the player gets a complete story after completing the level. Whether it is an interactive narrative film or an interactive narrative game, how to reconcile narrative and interactivity is complex and difficult. Maximizing this reconciliation may require further two-way cross-borders between games and movies.

Frankenstein Myths and the Posthuman Imagination

It is important for a game to provide an interactive experience for players in terms of structure and mechanics, creating a more freedom and more optional traversal game space, but what attracts players to continue to play is the story that combines traversal choices and interactive narrative means, and the player is personally involved in telling the story content. The story of Detroit: Becoming Human continues the "artificial man" theme of the earliest science fiction novel Frankenstein. It can be said that since the birth of Frankenstein in 1818, "artificial man" has no longer been a fresh story theme. However, a re-examination of the Frankenstein novel itself and subsequent spin-offs shows that most film and television versions based on Frankenstein depict "artificial monsters" somehow contradict the original. These works depict him as an almost mechanized figure of a robot, unable to express and think in normal language, and driven by primitive and irrational desires. In recent years, in the discussion of artificial intelligence and post-humanity, film and television dramas such as Blade Runner, Mechanical Ji, She, Superbody, Westworld, and Real Humans have been widely mentioned. These post-human imaginations of science fiction are always filled with human fear of the powerful power of artificial intelligence and concerns about loss of control.

Returning to Frankenstein itself, from the appearance, the artificial monster composed of corpse blocks in the work is much larger than a normal person, and its appearance is extremely ugly, but in other respects, he shows a very "human" feature. He speaks eloquently, is able to make moral judgments, can make arguments and reflects on himself. Emotionally, he experienced and experienced fear, joy, and sadness. At the action level, he is agile, complex and even contradictory. Thus, exaggerating the differences between artificial creatures and humans may ignore the core of the novel: "artificial humans" challenge the categories of human nature and the way in which the boundaries between humans and non-humans are judged. On this question, will bionic people dream of electronic sheep? further exploration. The main way used in the novel to distinguish between humans and bionic humans is the "empathy test". That is to say, the novel sets the essential attribute of human beings as empathy, that is, people will have feelings such as sympathy and fascination with the same kind and animals, while bionic humans do not have this attribute. The novel's protagonist, Michael Decard, empathizes with bionic people because they look just like people, even more perfect than people. In turn, bionic people began to possess emotions, making the "empathy test" ineffective as a way to distinguish between humans and non-human beings. In the novel-based film Blade Runner, the "brilliance of humanity" of the bionic man is presented at the end of the film, and the touching last words of the bionic man Roy Barty reflect the inhumanity of human beings.

Detroit: The Transformation game screen

Coming out of the human-centric discourse of "out of control fear", we can see that as a literary imagination that explores the boundaries between humans and non-humans, Frankenstein and Bionic Humans Dream of Electronic Sheep? Itself presents the ambiguity rather than certainty of the boundaries between man and man, and they tell us that the boundaries seem clear, but they are not. 200 years later, the "Frankenstein Myth" continues with the game as the medium, and "Detroit: Change" as a "heterotopia" illustration not only participates in the demarcation of the human and the inhuman from its textual content, but also generates a differentiated game space that separates the player from the real space and subject identity of daily life, and it itself intervenes in and constitutes the player's daily life and way of thinking. The sci-fi world of Detroit: The Man is not a virtual unreal utopia full of perfect imagination, nor a bad trotopia like Huxley's Brave New World, but a Foucault heterotopia like a "mirror". As a heterotopia, Detroit: Becoming Human becomes a "foreign land" that perceives and relates to the real space, while also reorganizing the real space. Thus, the nature of science fiction heterotopias is not merely a reproduction of the social reality of a particular historical period and a particular region, but a more complex "reflexity", that is, foucault's "certain effect of reflecting my occupation of a place". [7]

This reflexiveness is especially evident when the player makes key choices that affect the direction of the narrative again and again. In the chapter "Going to See Camsky", the player plays as the Bionic Cop Connor to meet the Bionic Creator Camsky, who asks Connor to make a choice: whether to shoot and kill the Bionic Secretary Chloe (this option is called the "Camsky Test"). In the face of the "empathy test" in Blade Runner, the audience is only a viewer who resonates with the character, and in the face of the "Kamski test", the gun is really in the hands of the player. Players may guess the different story directions after the two choices, but they must make their own choices at this moment. "What is its essence? A piece of plastic that imitates human beings or a person with a life and a soul? The player and Connor are tortured by Kamsky. The player manipulates the bionic character to complete the test, an action that itself has what Foucault called reflexes. The core of the test is that if the bionic person is a machine, there is no sympathetic sympathetic attribute, and it is inevitable to shoot and kill another bionic person. And if it doesn't shoot, it means that it has sympathetic empathy, and it already has human attributes. And this choice is actually done by the player. The game world as heterotopia is not so much about the bionic human being as it is about reflecting the problem of human inhumanity.

In Future Archaeology, Jameson explains Philip Dick's Do Bionics Dream of Electric Sheep? He keenly pointed out the "bionic thoughts" reflected in the novel: I think, so I am a bionic person. Bounty hunter Phil Resch realizes that his boss is a bionic man, identifies himself as a human by having a pet (claiming to really love a real squirrel), but without hesitation brutally kills the bionic man Ruba Left. The "empathy test" can either screen out non-human beings or torture whether people are human. Jameson points out that the external problems of the "bionic thought" empathy test are inverted into an eternal crack that lies within self-consciousness itself. [8] In this crack, it is no longer just the bionic man who has to ask such self-referential questions, but also humans. In Detroit: Transfiguration, the human player plays the bionic Connor, Carla, and Marcus, and every step he/she chooses answers questions like this: whether to kill a bionic man; how to communicate well with others and work together; how to protect and care for a human child (later proven to be a bionic man); how to unite the same kind and save his companions; whether to choose peace or violence... Both the "empathy test" and the "Kamski test" point to a heterotopian realm where the inhuman is more human than the human.

Afterword

Theorists of the second half of the 20th century worked to liberate textual meaning from the myth of authorial intent and to reach the literature of the reader. Literary writers have also tried to explore the limits of narrative, building Borgesian "garden labyrinths" or Calvino-style "cities of crossed destiny" or lighting Nabokov-like "faint fires" from the level of textual structure. In the 1990s, driven by computer technology, Michael Joyce's Afternoon, A Story became the first truly hypertext novel text. In his Digital Literature, written at the turn of the century, Kosquima asserted that the interactive novels of the future would be primarily visual and most likely based on virtual reality. [9] This "future" is actually not far away, and in recent years, what Kosquima calls interactive fiction has evolved into interactive movies and video games. The game "Bliss Disco", released in 2019, can be described as a serious literature in the style of a game-novel.

Compared with the infinite extension of the meaning of interpretation, the freedom in video games is realized through "physical" operation. Players are free to choose to travel in the game world, each time going to a different storyline, but even in games with a high degree of freedom and many story lines, players still have limited freedom. During the course of the game, the player has limited options, the storyline and final ending are limited, and the player always has the moment to reach the traversal by walking all the paths through multiple weeks. This embodies Sartre's paradox of freedom, namely that "there is freedom only in circumstances and only through free circumstances." [10] It is precisely the paradox of freedom that gives meaning to the finiteness of circumstances and the freedom of choice. The game world is a space where players can exercise their free will within the limits of their rules. Although freedom is limited, the interactive narrative world that produces the story offers many perspectives of multiple paths, even imperfect ones. Intentional or unintentional choices by the player can lead to counterproductive results, such as the death of the protagonist. In Detroit: The Transformation, the player operates Carla to escape from the Bionic Camp with Alice, but most likely fails due to an operational error. Players experience interactive stories with their own unique personality and free will, which means that this interaction choice should be made a sufficient number of times, not just a choice on major plot twists. Because players need enough opportunities to choose freely and believe that they are telling their own story in the game.

Although the sci-fi story brought to the player by the game itself is not a new theme, it still makes the player's actions infinite through the limited rules in a form of game in which the player participates in telling the story, and also triggers thinking and scrutiny from multiple angles. In the game, the player completes the transition from watching a bionic man story (Blade Runner) to becoming a bionic man, and in this sense the act of playing the game opens up the political empowerment of "I Am the Other". This kind of physical ectopic experience is difficult to achieve with traditional literary reading and film and television viewing. As Zhang Wei said in "The Nature of The Game", the loss of man's subjective status is not the beginning of man's decline, but the beginning of humility. In humility, not in worship, one begins to truly understand the world. [11] After completing the Detroit: Human Race, players are faced with a final choice, choosing whether to let go of the one who accompanies you through each game experience, chat with you, ask you questions, and even sing to your main interface guide, Bionic Man Chloe. With each of your games, she also has consciousness, and she asks you for help, wanting to be free. Let her go, the next time you enter the game to meet you will be a blank main interface, do not let her go, you will harvest a machine image that no longer opens her mouth after resetting and no longer interacts with you. The game has reached the end, but the human torture issued in this science fiction story continues, the game intervenes in life in a "playing" way, contemplating human reality by post-human imagination, arguing about the joy of boundary chaos and the responsibility of boundary construction, inspiring us to constantly advance a two-way thinking: post-human everything is too human / All human beings are too human.

exegesis:

Borges. The trail bifurcates the garden. Translated by Wang Yongnian. Hangzhou:Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House,2002:51-52.]

[2] Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,1997: 1.

[3] Markku Eskelinen. Cybertext Poetics: The Critical Landscape of New Media Literary Theory. London&New York: Continuum, 2012: 90.

[4] Kelly McErlean. Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling. New York: Routledge,2018:14.

[5] Shuji Watanabe, Akihito Nakamura. What is gameplay. Translated by Fu Qixin. Beijing:People's Post and Telecommunications Press,2015:12.]

[6] Mary-Raul Ryan. The transformation of the story. Translated by Zhang Xinjun. Nanjing:Yilin Publishing House,2014:95.]

[7] Michel Foucault. Different spatial//radical aesthetic edges. ZHOU Xianyi. Beijing:Chinese Min University Press,2003:22.]

[8] Frederick Jameson. Future Archaeology: Utopian Desires and Other Science Fiction Novels. Wu Jingyi. Nanjing:Yilin Publishing House,2014:492.]

[9] Ryan Kosquima. Digital Literature: From Text to Hypertext and Beyond. Shan Xiaoxi, Chen Houliang, Nie Chunhua translation. Guilin:Guangxi Normal University Press,2011:121.]

[10] Sartre. Existence and nothingness. Translated by Chen Xuanliang et al. Beijing: Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore, 2007:594.

ZHANG Wei. The nature of the game. Shanghai: Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, 2018:381.