Review: "Deus Ex"

Recently, Roger Ebert made waves when he argued on his website that not only were video games not art, they never could be art.  This provoked a lot of rage in the video game community, although Ebert himself graciously lied that he received "no more than a dozen ... cretinous comments from gamers."  As someone who admires Ebert's reviews and essays, I found his attitude disappointing and bizarre.  Fortunately, Ebert gracefully gave up his position, writing:

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

Thanks Roger.  But, seriously - of course video games are art.  It is just common sense that if all that weird crap you find in galleries these days is "art" than the bar for what it takes to make "art", at least conceptually, is pretty darn low.  Basically, if it's art when Marcel Duchamp puts a snow shovel in a gallery then video games can be art.  As the boys at Penny Arcade asked, how can a hundred artists create art for a year but the result not be art?  When I doodle on the blackboard at Smoke's drunk at 3 a.m. in the morning, that's art.  It just might not be very good.

And that, to me, is the more interesting question.  Are video games good art?  Sure, you and I like to play Super Mario Galaxy.  But I mean - is it good art?




I think you can only answer this question on a game-by-game basis.  We've established, I think, that games certainly can be art, and probably usually are.  Any statement about whether games, on average, are good "art" is bound to be loaded with assumptions and generalizations.  It's best to focus on individual examples, and my example is "Deus Ex."

Deus Ex is a first-person-shooter that was released for PC in 2000.  You played a nano-augmented special agent code-named JC Denton who worked for United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO) in a dystopian future.  Most of the missions involved straight-forwardly shooting your way through obstacles, although things are spiced-up a little with an interesting upgrade system that allowed you to modify your character through the game.

But that description is deceptive - because one of the things that made Deus Ex such an interesting game was that there were numerous ways to accomplish your objectives.  For example, you could try to sneak past your eneimies.  You could upgrade your legs and run past them.  You could hack into their security systems and turn their defences against them.  And so on.  Eventually, if you pay attention, you realize that you can actually beat Deus Ex without killing anyone at all!  It is a shooter where you don't have to shoot.  This option is not pushed in your face - it's just there.

On the other hand, the game allows you to be remarkably bloodthirsty. There are very few characters you can't kill if you want to.  Early in the game you can, if you desire, execute a prisoner.  This option is not presented clumsily or directly.  You're told to go downstairs by your superior, but if you prefer, you can just shoot your charge.  If you do so, your brother calls you an asshole, but some of your fellow soldiers might look on you as a hero for not "letting the lawyers get involved."

There's a lot of freedom in Deus Ex, but it's a sneaky kind of freedom.  You aren't presented with a set number of decisions to choose from. Rather, when you push the boundaries of the game, it often yields in surprising ways, including skipping whole sections of game play by cutting straight to the chase.

This freedom to question the boundaries of the game itself mirrors the story, which contains a plot twist which eventually causes you to re-evaluate much of what happened in the game's early stages.  Deus Ex's plot seamlessly combines many conspiracy theories (one-world-government, the Illuminati, men in black, aliens) and its dialogue is exceptionally well-written.  Even minor characters often say surprising or insightful things.

For instance, after you broker a truce between two warring Triads by helping them develop a high-tech sword (ostensibly more "traditional" than guns), a nearby monk grumbles:

All right! Get out! Enough games in the temple! 
The grandfathers of the Triads all had Uzis. Tradition... Bah! 
It is not the way of the Buddha to idolize a material possession. 
I foresee they will understand their error only at the end, facing death, when it is no longer possible to worship the Samsaric world.

Or what about the A.I. who hauntingly tells you:

The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization. 
The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning. 
God was a dream of good government. 
You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands. 
I was made to assist you. 
I am a prototype of a much larger system.

Or the French terrorist who says:

Culture, by definition a shared territory of meaning, inspires conflicts far more destructive than any dispute over territory on the Earth's surface. 
Meaning does not exist a priori. It is order imposed by individuals with arsenals of communication devices. 
Every inscription, every utterance, every gesture seeks to dominate the plain of meaning. Real violence is only an extension of this process. 
In order to get our own message before the public, we too have been violent. We have even killed people. 
But it is the message -- the communication EVENT -- that we target, not a few human beings, or a building, or an historical landmark.

Deus Ex's story and its diaolog make it, in my opinion, "good" art.  If you cut it down to three hours you'd make a great movie just using the game's script.  If you needed ten, you could make it a mini-series.  But it's not a movie - it's a game.  And what makes Deus Ex great, in my opinion is the ability to choose that I was describing earlier.

Deus Ex's story goes through a number of twists and turns, many of which may give the player cause to regret his or her earlier actions when he or she learns new information.  Finally, the player is presented with three possible endings to the game.  None are perfect.  There is no "happy ending" the player can unlock by finding secrets or by shooting people or sparing them.  And the ending I chose surprised me.  Without getting into spoilers, I had criticized that exact kind of ending in other works of art.  And yet here I was - choosing it msyelf.

It would seem that having to make a choice helps you learn about yourself in a way that simply sitting and passively watching does not.  And let's get back to Mr. Ebert for a moment:

I thought about those works of Art that had moved me most deeply. I found most of them had one thing in common: Through them I was able to learn more about the experiences, thoughts and feelings of other people. My empathy was engaged. I could use such lessons to apply to myself and my relationships with others. They could instruct me about life, love, disease and death, principles and morality, humor and tragedy. They might make my life more deep, full and rewarding.

If this is a good definition for art (at least narrative-based art) then it would seem that Deus Ex is about as good art as you're likely to find.  If you want to try it, you can download and purchase it through Steam for ten bucks.  I recommend that you give it a try.