Right now, one of the leading problems with media today is how concentrated it is becoming. If you weren’t already aware, about half a dozen companies own all the channels on your television sets. Yes, even those fancy cable plans with thousands of channels. Since only a few people own all of this, it’d be pretty easy to force an agenda onto a population? Yes and no. People aren’t dumb, however they like the things they like. This means, in the ratings war television producers find themselves in, it pays to keep people tuned in. And to make sure people tune in and stay tuned in, you have to appeal to what they like. So you don’t immediately follow a show about ghost hunting with a documentary starring Richard Dawkins. The superstitious watching suddenly finds himself assaulted by ideas contrary to their likes and quickly switches off the station. To put this in contrast, have you ever been watching TruTV and notice how at one point in their lineup, there’s about 6 hours worth of Repo/Process Servers shows in a row? Ever notice how you don’t change the channel because you’d rather not see 6 hours of essentially the same thing over and over again, with minor variations?

Do remember, watching things like the Jersey Shore because it makes you feel smarter means that you perceive yourself as being dumb.

This trend means that, overall, television tries to find something that appeals to you and keeps giving it to you. It’s a good business model, giving the customers what they want. The problem is that they are giving only what the customer wants.

Monetarily, there is not a problem. Ratings + Adverts = $$$. Nowhere in that equation does the diversity of your programming line up come into play.

The root of the problem comes from how people tend to act when everything they believe is confirmed unequivocally and without dissenting opinion. When you’re looking to ‘feel smart’ because you feel just a bit self-conscious today (and let’s face it, those orange idiots always make you feel better about yourself) and you submerse yourself in a particular media that caters to that and only that, there is no escaping the demographic. Others who feel self conscious are easily preyed upon by witty advertisements that use microaggressions and other bits of soft language designed to cater to, who else, the self conscious. Want to know why children under a certain age cannot tell the difference between a children’s television program and the commercials that air on them? They’re designed for the demographic. While this makes the most sense financially, the entire system is set up to exploit parts of human nature in order to achieve a goal; Namely, profit.

I could go into conditioning and Skinner’s Box techniques that are used to achieve these ends, but instead of talking about the cause, let’s simply concentrate on the affects. Namely, the effects are concentration. I mean to say that what you experience, what affects you, is concentrated. There’s only a narrow range of experiences that the shows and adverts need to use in order to keep you tuned in. The narrower the range of topics they can get away with, the less work they have to do.

Since the television is controlled by other, more powerful people in media, there’s nothing we can really do about it. But we have the Internet! Surely this bastion of free information and  exchange can curtail the negative effects of television in an effort to free the world from the monotonous and controlling modicum that plagues television?

Unfortunately, the kicker is that the exact same thing is happening. Remember how earlier I mentioned something called ‘human nature’ was involved. That means a lot of these behaviors are involuntary if you don’t watch yourself and instead watch others. And holy shit, after 700 words we finally come to actually addressing the title of this post. A lot of people have forgotten how to entertain themselves because they apply the same rules to the internet as they do to TV when it comes to entertaining yourself. Choose someone whose opinions or services match your own tastes and follow/subscribe/like/track them. Let them continually produce content that keeps you coming back and keeps the ad money flowing in.

This leads to subscriptions that leads to the concentration of opinions and the extradition of dissenting opinions. The vicious cycle takes hold once more.

Case in point: The Machinima Channel on Youtube. You want video game videos? You have video game videos. We’ll stymie the profits off of our content creators, take most of the ad revenue for ourselves, and ‘redistrubute’ their content. Ever realize how god-awfully lacking in quality some of the videos in that channel are? It’s because the more things they have for you to click on, the longer you’ll sit there clicking. And you have to watch an ad before you can even come to the conclusion that the video you are watching is an absolute piece of crap. 6 hours of repo shows. Playlists with 6 hours of MW2 machinima. I think I see a pattern.

However terrible for the internet this seems, there is some hope out there.

If you aren’t careful with your tags, a beautiful thing happens. Youtube is about the only site that allows you to actively view dissenting opinions, due mostly to the fact that dissenting opinions tend to try and slam each other in the tags section. If your video is bashing the latest Rebecca Black video, you bet your sorry ass that the words “Rebecca Black” will appear in the tags. And this means that in your ‘suggestions’ bar over to the right, you’ll have that Sponsored Video staring right back at you, waiting for you to click it and actually experience things for yourself and potentially form your own opinions, assuming you havn’t already accepted everything the televi– Internet tells you.

So, in some instances, you get these little hiccups in the reality you construct for yourself within the confides of your bookmarks, favorites, subscriptions, and groups. The internet does have something over television. Anyone can add content to it.

And by “anyone can add content to it” I mean “people with absolutely no creativity themselves can ‘add content’ to it by stealing content, replaying it, adding some ‘commentary’ and asking for more content to steal/redistribute.” I’m looking at you, Cheeseburger Network. While people on the internet may genuinely have something to offer, I expect at least 20 (if not more) people are willing to appropriate it for themselves and show it off for their own gains.

No, I will not talk about Bill S.978. Maybe later.

The following is a prime example of a person who commits these very crimes.

Notice how there’s nothing particularly entertaining about the video to begin with. She puts her face onto a camera, explains (and doesn’t show) the content in another video, says a few inane things that don’t add actual opinions or commentary, and then asks a question for you to comment on. Let’s go through why this kind of thing is ruining the very principles of entertainment itself.

People who watch this are not entertained. If she were to have at least played the video itself that she is describing it would at least be reposting something of value for others to see, but instead she just gives a short description. I guess this is an invaluable service to the blind who cannot watch videos themselves, but I would think that particular demographic isn’t quite interested in Youtube.

The closest she comes to stating her own opinion on the matter is “I know what this guy means” and ” I hope the officer is watching this right now.” Hey everyone, a single person understands the gist of this video! We totally could not have survived without that startlingly important piece of information. I mean really, how could life on earth continue without this revelation.

She sums up by asking a question that people are supposed to comment on. At best, this is a really cheesy ploy to get higher numbers on the comments window. At worst, this is attempting to take her own audience’s content/creativity and re-appropriate it for herself. Comments don’t get views, they only get thumbs up. Between views and thumbs up, guess which one YouTube pays you for?

Well, let’s quit harping on about the shortcomings of the internet and get to fixing the situation. How does one break the cycle of listening to other’s opinions and start finding content that is not only outside of the demographic they’ve found themselves shoved into and profited off of but also entertaining? Well, by visiting this blog you’ve already failed. I, as well as many other content creators, cater to certain audiences. I could talk about everything I want to on this blog, and I’d still be inadvertently appealing to a demographic that tends to agree with my opinion. And if I wanted more viewers, I’d try narrowing my scopes to cater with this demographic.

If you’re reading this blog, you agree with at least something I say around here.

I guess I’ll call this the “Rage Quit” Theory. When people see things they don’t like on the internet, they tend to either rage or quit. Remember that last shock image you’ve seen? You either complained loudly how someone could have posted such a thing for you to see or you immediately closed it and didn’t think about it any more. This, of course, assumes the shock image performed the task it was meant to perform and actually ‘shocked’ you. Fellow trolls, it doesn’t count if you’ve seen it before and are immune to it’s effects.

When people rage, they tend to see whatever dissenting opinion as a threat to their opinionated bubble they’ve created for themselves, and find they need to fiercely defend it. Thumbs down, downvoting, YouTube comments, and other similar features of the internet are clear proof that people rage. These people aren’t here to stay. They’re here to make sure that their opinion is thoroughly and clearly superior to whatever they don’t agree with. They watch the video to take a stand against it. They often claim Asperger’s or something else if they’re found unequivocally wrong and they can’t escape the situation. They often quit when they’re ahead and others know it.

When people quit, they plug their fingers into their ears and go back to whatever content agrees with them. No more questions asked. Remember, sometimes inaction is the worst action of all.

This behavior forces people into these demographics that others exploit. It’s time to break free.

If you don’t know how to genuinely entertain yourself without this sorting sytem, you have some homework to do.

Your assignment is to, without using the internet, find a true hobby. WARNING: You may actually have to go outside to do this.  Try finding something you like to do with your time without anybody having a say in it. Don’t use a TV either, advertisements tend to try and sway your opinion and may accidentally influence a decision you make. This decision to entertain yourself should be your own. Lots of people find that running is a great way of doing just this. It’s exercise, you get to see local sights, maybe meet people, and in general get to improve your mentality. Most psychopathic, masochistic runners I know can and will run themselves into oxygen deprivation, which they attest is the best natural high that anyone could possibly experience, better than the hardest of drugs. Knowing you can, at will, break your own physical limits is an empowering feeling. Best of all, it’s simple and you can do it right now. However, since I just used that as an example, you can’t use it as credit for completing your homework. I wouldn’t want to influence your own experiences, now would I? Oh, wait, there’s money if I do.

Personally: I found game design was my hobby that nobody else had an influence on. When I played with the G.I. Joes, LEGO bricks, and other toys that others gave me, I would invent rules and parameters that I would tell my self to stay within. I had resources available to me (toys) and I did something with them. I found it more fun than just building whatever the manual told you to build or crashing action figures together and making fights. The Joes already came with limited clips of ammunition, and I was an excellent math student, why couldn’t I keep track of all of this? I started keeping journals with details on different engagements and rule sets I followed. It amazes me, even today, going through old journals and just seeing a shit-ton of numbers on a page. I don’t remember what half of them meant, maybe it was the ammo that the G.I. Joe missing a leg had left, maybe it was the number of steps that this LEGO minifigure had per turn. Eventually, I started making card games and table top games, inspired by all the commercialized world around me. Others collected Pokémon cards to show off to others, I thought about how they were balanced. I eventually started making my own sets of cards for a variety of different games. I wasn’t even out of the 5th grade, never heard of game theory or contemporary game design, and I was entertaining myself through creating games. I never played with anyone else, partly due to shyness, partly due to the fact that hardly anyone else understood it. I had massive tables and user interfaces sketched onto paper, rules dictated, materials created, and nobody else to play. Perhaps this was for the best, creativity unrestricted by other’s thoughts and opinions. I had nobody to cater to, so I did what entertained me. I designed. You can’t use this example either.

Once you’ve found some way to entertain yourself without influence, you can continue. It’s hard if you’ve never done it before, and it may take immense amounts of personal introspection in order to find something without resorting to basing yourself and your attributes off of others. You will surprise yourself. I didn’t have many heroes when I was growing up because I set goals for myself. I wanted to finish this particular set of rules and have it feel complete, not become an astronaut when I grew up. I didn’t think to think into the future, I had something to do right now and I need to finish my homework if I want to work on it.

As a side note: Fuck those personality tests on Facebook.

Once you’ve found something, you can move onto the next step. Involving others.

Have you completed your assignment yet? Oh well, you probably never will, and who’s here to stop you from reading on?

Remember how your parents often went outside to do this thing called ‘playing?’ TV wasn’t as encompassing as it was, and if you didn’t like the sparse amount of programming it offered, then you had to find some other way to fight off the boredom. They often talked with other people without first being sorted into a demographic.

No, I’m not going to talk about Brown v The Board of Educations and its effect on the internet. Maybe later.

These people often had differing opinions. These people often had discussions about these differing opinions. Without Wikipedia and other sources of information readily available, these people often had to ask questions. They had to sort and cope with a wide variety of  content all by themselves. When it comes to TV, you have this singular authoritative figure telling you things and entertaining you. You cannot fight it directly. If that kid down the street is telling you things you don’t want to hear, you can confront him. Do any television executives actually read the mail they get anymore? I assumed a PR firm handled it all for them. Discussion forces people to cope with dissenting opinions.

When was the last time you had a genuine discussion on the internet?

Have an example yet? If you do, reexamine the situation and make sure none of the parties involved could possibly be trolls. That’s what I thought.

If you have the answer: “Someone on Omegle” then congrats, that’s one of the answers to this multi-faceted quandary. And it’s a rare thing to actually exchange ideas successfully. Most of the discussions in the presorted demographic entertainment the internet has to offer is made up of everyone agreeing on things. The few dissenting opinions are quickly dismissed because there’s an overwhelming majority by design. Break down the boundaries imposed upon you by meeting random people. There’s no “set me up with people who like X” or “set me up to cyber” buttons, it’s just click a button and be matched up with someone. No telling what’s going to happen. While actual discussions are rare, they are some of the most enlightening and interesting things that happen on the internet. Keep your cool and you’ll see insights you could never imagine by simply browsing the “recommended videos” tab. Even better, you may influence/inspire/fascinate others.

Guess how many suicidal people I’ve ‘talked down’ online just by sharing insight and actually engaging them in conversation? Too many to count.

Another of the best answers I’ve found is a random content aggregator. I don’t think this exists in its purest form, but a lot of sites get close to the concept. Stumbleupon is nice, even though it has categories you can choose from to pull content from. These take the bias out of the hands of people and puts it into the hands of a random number generator. You will find something interesting, all you have to do is have the willpower to consume it.

Combine this new-found insight with the absolute freedom that the Internet provides, and you have something akin to the original purpose of the internet. Something akin to the Enlightenment ideals of true freedom.

If you should take anything from this, it’s that you can and should find something that gives you drive. You can do so much with it. You can derive a purpose from it. It gives meaning to what you do. It gives you power. It makes you truly unique, free from a crass demographic. You will never be bored again. Best of all, it’s never too late. Mid-life crises are often the result of finding this drive, and realizing that you’ve “wasted” time because you didn’t find it earlier. ‘Too late’ is a state of mind, a certain perspective. You have all the potential you’re willing to take. Hopefully, if you share these insights, you can take others with you.

Well, this post is sufficiently uppity and heartwarming. I think I’ve achieved my maximum amount of moral lecturing today. Take what you will from it. If you’ve been listening to me, you might find a need to not simply follow what I’ve told you here. Skepticism is important. In fact, you get extra credit if you actively refused to do my little homework assignment.

That YouTube video itself reminded me about how bad ‘entertainment’ can be. Reminiscing about my past and other ideals attempted to keep this low, but ultimately failed when in comparison to the state of media in the world. Maybe if I get enough comments with stories about similar experiences or detailing how I’ve helped people grow, this count will go down without having to goto TED.

Good, you saw what I did there.

The hype around this game is massive, and according to initial views it plays much like it’s predecessor, but with significant tweaks. They have added a cover system. Now, I have standards already set up for cover systems, since I do enjoy tactical shooters, A LOT. This game’s gameplay is going to be centered around tactical shooting because the game plays so much like a puzzle, but with guns.

To set the standard for the cover system: the game Breach contained one of the biggest letdowns of a cover system I have ever witnessed and actually purchased. A game like Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6: Vegas (I+II) contains an extremely well done cover system. If the cover system turns out to be gimmicky, hard to control, and interferes with gameplay: expect no credit, because they’ve essentially taken a very important aspect of tactical shooters/stealth games and ruined it along with all of their gameplay for the entire game. If, on the other hand, it’s a smooth system that generously improves on the old “crouch behind a container and wait for the enemies to reload” kind of Max Payne cover system common in games of that timespan, it shall receive full credit. Of course, extra credit if they improve on the dynamic like Rainbow 6 did and add surprising angles to it (e.g. rappelling down a wall and using the wall above a window as cover: I never saw that working as well as it did).

Resource management was always one of the things that irked me about the last game. I hated the notion that there was only a limited amount of time you could use augmentations for (only so many batteries you could ever buy/find) and even worse so: extremely limited augmentations themselves. The first few augmentations are laid out on the counter for you, but then you have to start actively searching for them, and not having them is a recipe for disaster. The original game found itself on the tail end of the generation of PC games that players were expected to fully explore worlds and look for innocuous secret doors all over the place. While it may have worked as a nice dynamic in Doom: I feel now-a-days we shouldn’t need to limit the content a player can experience based on time/exploration constraints. Not everyone scours every inch of every map for every little item they can find. Also: the inventory system. While I’m a fan of both limited and unlimited weaponry (Vegas and Saints Row, as respective examples) the block-based system akin to Resident Evil has always irked me. It makes sense on paper, but nobody likes to have to run an algorithm to determine a best fit model necessary in order to keep all your guns and ammo. It’s a nice way of having players be more conservative with their ammo, and probably encourages the exploration (because who doesn’t like walking around hoping for certain kinds of ammo to appear?) but the system feels forced. Major improvements are needed in the resource management department in order for Deus Ex:HR to receive full credit.

Graphically, there are major improvements, and as the game has told its audience it’s going to strive for the AAA top-of-the-line graphical experience, I expect no glitches or serious graphical defects.

The story is going to be the hardest aspect of the game to design in order to impress me. I am a fan of the genre of Dystopia. This game deals heavily with issues of government, trans-humanism, racism, societal orderand hierarchy, love, drama, and a variety of philosophic and existential topics that I could list and interpret here for ages (I will try not to fill this blog with only that sort of thing). To put it rather bluntly: the story better be damned well impressive. Stringing together random conspiracies may have worked for the original Deus Ex, Assassins Creed, and Jessie Ventura, but I think the concept is now overblown. It’s going to take an engaging and highly creative story to get full credit. I can’t even begin to imagine what I’d give extra credit to, but I know it’d rank high in my theoretical “best stories ever” list.

I’ve addressed everything I can think of about this game, and now it’s time to test some laurels.

The cover system was 90% there. It would have worked perfectly if not for a few assumptions I could see the engine taking, namely some of the cases where I was supposed to be stealthy and the difference between being spotted and being seen was pressing a single button (take cover). Even if you were crouched in the same spot, apparently a single hair just happens to go over the threshold of the cover you’re within and the enemies can see that. I liked the haphazard nature of stealth in the first Deus Ex, granted it needed something to make it a bit more predictable, because some people base their entire game off of it. The cover system kinda forces them to stay within the cover system, if the cover system was just a bit more pliable, then I would only have just a single problem with it.

It felt clunky during high stress situations. I appreciate something quick, intuitive, and instantaneous in order to get me into cover and make sure that those bullets heading towards me don’t hit me. This was especially prevalent during the boss fights. I felt like I was either constrained to these walls and unable to make key split second decisions or I had to abandon cover all together in order to effectively counter the bad guy’s abilities. Cover doesn’t help against the invisible guy who can leap over walls and has perfect aim. I’ve tried to think of solutions to cover mechanics that don’t require mapping of areas you can take cover in and don’t require the player to press buttons.

The closest I’ve come is an almost Full-Spectrum Warrior approach, with the key difference being that there’s an awareness between the player object and the other objects and obstacles in the map around him. If you draw a line between the center of mass of an enemy and a player, you get a fair if not quick average of where the bullets intend to fly. Once that enemy appears, there can be a change of state where the first shots ring out and the player basically ‘flinches.’ During this flinch, the game calculates the best position someone can take for this incoming fire, so the character scrambles for cover, no buttons need pressing. Great for being caught unawares, because the player shouldn’t know in which way the enemy fire is coming from anyway and the on screen character ‘instinctively’ finds cover. The period of time you can no longer control the character is short enough so that most players will not notice, and it makes for a bit of realism. Granted, most characters should probably be immune to being “scared” if you’d go so far as to call it that, but having the game activate a reflex that the character has is probably better game-play wise than just the player flailing about with the controls. This system doesn’t really help during boss fights, but I would only apply the above when the player is being ambushed. During boss fights or other encounters with an already known enemy (no flinching, because you’re already being shot at) I would think the character would have the self preservation to not stick to the same animation cycle and maybe crouch-run or change the kind of locomotion they undergo in order to put more things between bullets and enemies. Run keys are great because they tell the character, “screw cover, just GO” while not depressing that button says, “take it easy” or is used for more precision. I’ve always thought a mechanic like in Assassin’s Creed that could be used for an FPS was the “active” vs. “passive” mechanic, where pressing a trigger changes you from trying to navigate with some caution to full out escape. Flight vs Fight – except when you’re fighting with guns, you tend to take cover instead of directly confront the enemy. So, take cover if you’re not holding the left trigger, and run/jump/do a pirouette when you are holding that trigger. To be honest, it’d be kinda nice if cover didn’t automatically mean go and hug a wall. Movement is just moving the player’s center of mass instead of the center of the walk animation. It’s a bit more difficult and would require more resources to actually do these kind of things, but we can take shortcuts that at least look nice and help gameplay until then. Still, Deus Ex doesn’t completely fail with cover and earns at least Full Credit for being a (mostly) smooth system that at least works and is fun.

Okay, let’s recover from that tangent into game design with my next few kinda-gripes.

The augmentation system got a bit more RPG-ish on us and relied on XP amounts in order to unlock more abilities. It’s okay, but it doesn’t really break the mold. Resource management also hampered things a bit, as I would needlessly have to organize/sell things before every mission. If the game had additional storage (perhaps in the helicopter, where you get your first gun) and a bit more intel on what exactly you’d be doing before every mission, it would be better. I hate having a limited inventory that has to last me the entire game instead of just picking and choosing certain equipment for certain situations. Would help with a lot of the clutter and wondering if this certain item is going to be useful in 4 missions or if you should just drop it because you can’t carry that and another thing of ammo and etc. etc. etc.

The battery/power meter was fairly useless because a single takedown (which is 90% of why you used that battery in the beginning of the game) would use an entire battery icon. This gives no incentive to eat food as you’d just be wasting it on something that will simply recharge if you wait long enough. Sure, there are one or two instances where my stealth field could use 2 battery icons, and I’d carry a candybar around for that, but I never used more than 3 consecutive batteries during the entire game on the hardest difficulty. It’s generally unnecessary. I’d have suggested that the batteries slowly fill all the icons and could be sped up by candybars/other food items. That way, there would be more of a tanking system where your metabolism is producing so much energy that your augmentations need and you’d run out after 5 seconds if you’re not under the effects of a candybar and 10 if you are (numbers subject to balancing). Maybe you shouldn’t be able to use augs when you only have 1 battery icon. In any case, if takedowns only took 95% of the battery and you could recharge the one you just depleted back to full without bothering the rest, then that alone would have settled most of my concerns. Pacing out your takedowns all of the time is better than pacing them out only when you don’t have food.

The story also didn’t quite make it up to the same depth of content as, say, 1984 or even the first Deus Ex. There’s great potential, but it never really got fleshed out. While the issues are certainly presented, they’re taken out of the lime light far too quickly to really get the player thinking about these sort of things. Sure, there’s that bum in the street you have a quick cutscene with and he explains his position on the matter of people being augmented vs not, but there’s no afterthought or discussion. Jensen just says, “I never asked for this” and keeps going. I guess its his character trait to get the job at hand done and not think too philosophically about everything, but that kind of thinking turns into a great idea into a dreary thematic implementation. Why was the first Matrix so great and the others sucked? Because the first one focused more on the philosophy while having an action movie thematic and the rest focused on the action movie with a slight philosophic thematic. There’s more depth to the story when the characters are debating the issues. I think the best way to add more of that dialogue without having the game become a movie is to just give the player the social enhancements early on in the game and make them more widely applicable. It was great debating key characters in the plot, but getting more people involved with the ongoing dialogue and narrative in the game and having them directly interact with the character as a part of gameplay would have made for a deeper meaning to the game. And if you don’t like all these opportunities to talk to people, you can just bad-ass Jensen push them aside and say “I never wanted this.” Completely optional and makes for great encounters and conflicts without combat and with deep philosophical meaning. Perhaps losing an argument is a key step to winning the level, forcing Jensen to reconsider his position in all of this.

Jensen sounds like a really good skeptic and completely capable of debate, even if he’s not all that knowledgeable.  He’s a powerful character but was completely stymied throughout the game, having to take orders and do things without really thinking about it. I did play through and win all the “argument” sections (on my first try, no less) and even then, the characters you talk to, in defeat, find some way to say “we’ll just have to agree to disagree” without really confronting the subject head-on. The first couple of arguments worked really well, because who wants to confront a major philosophic subject head on when you have a gun to the head of a hostage and you’re trying not to get killed. However, later on in the game there’s great opportunities for this kind of gameplay that are more or less wasted on action and level after level of ‘go in this room and kill some people, or not, and repeat.’

Even though I found the dialogue mechanics a bit underutilized and shallow, the regular gameplay itself had that subtle nuance that Deus Ex excels at. This is one of the first games in a very long time that made me feel like there was a use to non-lethal weapons or the good guy approach. The first mission is a perfect example of using that moral gauge. There’s been a terrorist attack under the guise of activism, many of the people you talk to on the ground say that the people don’t look like terrorists, but the higher ups want the job done and they want it done soon. So the people you have to ‘deal with’ in the mission are ambiguous. You can go in guns blazing, assuming that everyone in there is committing a crime, or be more subtle and spare them, because maybe they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Everything about the mission seems suspicious, and even the enemies are confused as to what’s going on, indicated by their frantic dialogue. There’s a logical reason to use non-lethal weapons, and you’re given the opportunity. There’s no overarching “bad” or “good” label that blocks you from getting certain content, but people treat you differently depending on how you handle certain situations. Later missions resort to using cookie-cutter mercenary bad guys without much context other than “they’re in your way.” Because of boss fights and the previous reason, I started using lethal weapons halfway through the game. I found that there wasn’t as much incentive to spare the nameless mercenary forces defending the bad guys. Sure, they might have had families, but they aren’t exactly victims of circumstance and they’re shooting at you with a clear and professional intention. Better defining the bad guys might have helped the later iterations of ‘useless mercenary bullet-sponge’ turn into more likable characters that you’re more willing to spare. I don’t want to play through that game again to get the pacifist achievement, simply because I can’t stand the attitudes of some of the goons you encounter.

One of the cool things about video games is that they’re not only a visual medium, but an interactive medium. The best things go unsaid. One thing that always piqued curiosity and irked me so was the fact that Jensen apparently had a hobby of fixing/building clocks and watches. His apartment is littered with the evidence of tinkering around with analogue clocks.

There’s one thing I could think of that would make this little detail a mind-blowing look into Jensen’s personality

*SPOILER ALERT*

When you’re on the mission Shanghai Justice, where you investigate Malik’s friend’s murder, you discover that she was killed by an antique clock. If Jensen would have had an interesting reaction towards the clock as a murder weapon, perhaps more concern over the clock than the murder victim, it would have been one of those ‘holy shit, this is deep’ moments for the more observant. All it would have taken was a different tone of voice when Jensen’s first finds the clock: a bit more shock and hesitation, and you could see just a bit more of this pretty dull character unfold.

People do notice the little things. Adam Jensen is the first human to be specifically raised or, if you will, created to be able to completely coexist with augmentations. Adam also happens to be the biblical character who is the first man created by god. There’s a computer terminal in the police station that belongs to a username pdick, which relates to Philip K Dick. The password is lectriclamb, which alludes to a book he wrote: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” There’s plenty of other allusions, some biblical, some classical, some contemporary (anyone else laugh at the Forever Alone stickynotes?).

While I’m still under a spoiler tag, I might as well talk about the ending. If ever there was a more ridiculous way to end a game, this is it. Usually games that have differing endings require you to play the game a certain way in order to achieve that ending, then you have to go start over and play it the other way in order to get the other ending. Human Revolution skips all that by just giving you a choice of buttons based on who you were able to talk to at the end of the game. Then you get a cut scene with some irl footage of riots and other pretty things, voiced over in a slow catatonic and rather uninspiring droll that is Jensen. Swing and a miss, the cutscenes themselves could at least carry a heavier message if you’re not going to give proper endings based on actual decisions rather than just derping on the nearest button you have not pressed earlier in a rather tragic save-scumming for achievements kind of way. Sure it’s nice to see all the endings, but you don’t need to hand me an achievement for doing it. Then again, maybe some people need to be exposed to alternate viewpoints and the only way to give them that is to hand them a shiny metal afterwards. I would think curiosity alone would give someone the wherewithal to actually look into what happens when you press the big self destruct button, thereby ruining any chances for the rest of the series to occur (I would think, I’m not too keen on if it’d be possible to recover DNA from essentially the bottom of the ocean).

I also didn’t feel anything between Malik and Jensen. It was a nice relationship, but her death was just underplayed. Sure, Jensen might have lost his cool for maybe a few seconds, but he just goes on with it. At least you have some control over his actions and can frantically work to save Malik and just kind of ignore the voiceovers.

I made the scene into more of a tragic downfall: Jensen, starting off as a perfectly moral person trying to do the right thing, slowly realizes the power he has within him. He may have spared lives early on, but now there was no stopping him, he had bigger fish to fry and found that as the subtlety of the web he was slowly unwinding fell apart, so did his methods of unwinding that web. These assumptions that augmentations make people more powerful and less human are embodied in Jensen’s tragic flaw. The power becomes so corrupting that he slowly loses the meaning of humanity he once held, fighting for some truth he holds in his highest regard to the exclusion of all other things. He started out wanting to know and eventually find his long lost love, but found himself tangled in this web of power struggles and a so-called greater truth to the matter. The conspiracies get to him,  and he starts to place more regard onto them than why he got involved in the first place. Then, when he’s on the top of his game, about to confront the demons that beset the world, he has his tragic downfall. History repeats itself. In the blaze of an instant, a loved one (if you could call it that) is taken from him. This time it’s for real, no conspiracy, no distractions. He finds himself just as helpless as he was in the beginning of the game, lying broken on the floor as someone he held dear was taken from him. He descends into the madness of the moment, just briefly, before he rediscovers why he was here in the first place, and vows to continue on. And with that power and moral guidance he finds through tragedy he’s able to ‘save’ the world and blah, blah, blah. I like writing better stories for myself than the ones that are presented.

Of course, you can save her, but that just introduces more awkward dialogue that really harms the story more than it could ever help, turning it more into a really cheeky and badly thought out kind of teenage drama than acting in defiance due to a genuine sacrifice. I don’t think she makes any significant contributions from then on. I guess Jensen may have been holding feelings back because of the potential for Reed still being alive, but it reminds me of a certain other storyline that fleshes out how useless these kind of relationships are.

For the people who are curious enough to want to know what I talked about in the spoilers section but still want to play the game, I just discussed the plot points and minor nuances in the game that worked and did not work and discussed the ending a little bit.