One memorable video game for me growing up was the dystopian science fiction first person shooter and role playing game Deus Ex. The game was released in the year 2000 and received a lot of positive reviews online. Although the game was released in the year 2000, the era of Deus Ex is actually set in the year 2052. This game is a single player game on the computer.

The game starts off in New York city with a disease called the Gray death that is spreading throughout the urban population (the disease is later revealed to be man made). A group called the North Secessionist Forces (NSF) have managed to seize control of a shipment of the vaccine for the disease that would have been destined for key parts of the government. Agent JC Denton, who works for an organisation called UNATCO (linked to the United Nations), is sent in to track down the vaccine. The first level is set on Liberty Statue island where NSF forces have taken control. Interestingly the Statue of Liberty itself is in ruins, and the game reports that a French terrorist group blew it up before the beginning of the start of Deus Ex. The destruction of one of the symbols of American liberty is obviously a metaphor for loss of liberty of the American people.

In terms of gameplay, the levels are large and varied. There are always multiple methods of completing the objectives such as stealth, shooting all the NSF soldiers, or often scouting and discovering a secret passage or hacking a computer system. You can upgrade your skills. Later on it becomes clearer that JC Denton is a modified human being. You can upgrade his legs so he can run extraordinarily fast, jump and drop from huge heights, regenerate from wounds, go invisible etc.

However the gameplay isn’t the best part of Deus Ex. Even the plot which features malevolent global corporations, evil billionaires set on taking over the internet and global surveillance, rogue artificial intelligence systems. These are not the best parts. The best part is the NPCs (non playing characters) you meet as you spend time in New York, Hong Kong, Paris and other places. The world of Deus Ex is one where paranoia runs rife. Many of the NPCs are philosophical, such as the barman in Hong Kong debating whether Westerners have any freedoms at all. All our slogans and thoughts on politics are created by think tanks, which themselves are funded by business. Do the Chinese really have no freedoms? It’s certainly a dystopian world. They have the freedom to make money at least. But this is only one of the many interesting and paranoid people you get to meet and interact with in the computer game world. Another interesting character is the leader of the NSF in level one who remarks that in 1900 a huge majority of Americans were self employed, now only a fraction of them are. He also critiques the tax system where corporations pay a fraction of what the workers pay.

Interestingly the game ends with 3 choices for the player. One where JC merges with the all powerful AI system to become some sort of pseudo all powerful god of planet earth. The other is he joins with a group of billionaires to run things from the background, and the third, which feels favored by the game, is where JC shuts down the internet and global surveillance systems completely and returns the world to city states and decentralisation.