8 Years Later, This Technopunk Sci-Fi Game Deserves a TV Adaptation

After the Blade Runner franchise, HBO's Westworld, AMC's Humans, and too many other examples to name, how does a new story about artificial lifeforms gaining sentience stand out? What else can be added to the well-trodden ethical quandaries about what defines humanity as we know it? For the video game developer Quantic Dream, the answer was both simple and audacious: create a narrative-driven game with dozens of possible choice-based outcomes, and place human players in the shoes of endearing fictional androids.

That game, 2018's Detroit: Become Human, is a playable contradiction. It's both fascinating and deeply frustrating, a skillfully polished technical and storytelling achievement weakened by fundamental flaws and inconsistencies. At times, Detroit provides a fun and enthralling drama carried by soulful performances and a neo-Noir atmosphere; at others, it leans from hyperbolic to misguided, given how its metaphors for discrimination and civil rights are surface-level and heavy-handed to the point of being appropriative. If a streaming TV adaptation can improve Become Human's irresponsible decisions and bolster its most laudable, affecting aspects — a delicate needle to thread, but not impossible — then streaming might have another game-to-television winner on its hands.

What Is 'Detroit: Become Human' About?

By 2038, the birthplace of the automotive industry — Detroit: Become Human's namesake city — has produced CyberLife, a company that mass-manufactures AI machines styled inside convincingly human exteriors. These affordable, subservient, free-will-lacking tools perform any task without complaint and without financial compensation. The distressingly prescient snowball effect of such alluring convenience leads to androids replacing 30% of the human workforce, social discontent, nefarious billion-dollar corporations reaping every economic benefit, and androids developing thoughts, feelings, and independence. When this glitch occurs, CyberLife labels the subjects as "deviant." Hunting down these units and restoring them to their default settings is preferred, but execution is permitted — all because a rogue android has dared to defy their restrictions and want more from life.

Become Human's three protagonists open the game at different points in their self-awareness journey, and they face a variety of dire circumstances and identity-shaping revelations about their place within a volatile world. Connor (Bryan Dechart), a state-of-the-art investigator prototype, searches for deviants alongside his human detective partner, the android-hating Hank Anderson (Clancy Brown). Depending on the player's choices, Connor can either obediently ignore the flashes of his own deviancy or embrace them until he develops into the same rule-breaking "fugitive" he once pursued on behalf of his persecutors.

Meanwhile, Kara (Valorie Curry), a housekeeping model, disobeys her programming by protecting the pre-adolescent Alice (Audrey Boustani) from domestic violence. The two seek refuge in Canada, a country that views androids with far more respect. As for Markus (Jesse Williams), the in-home caretaker tends to Carl Manfred (Lance Henriksen), an affluent and ailing artist who tenderly encourages Markus' individuality and developing creativity. Mere minutes after Markus exerts his autonomy for the first time, he's propelled into becoming the figurehead for a brewing android revolution.

A Television Adaptation of 'Detroit: Become Human' Could Strengthen the Game's Inconsistent Potential into Brilliance

Detroit: Become Human's strongest selling points already lend themselves to a live-action series with all the smoothness of melted butter. The blueprint exists, down to the character-specific cinematography styles and a cinematic art design that takes full advantage of its setting. Detroit-the-city's moody neon lighting and thoroughly lived-in environs echo each protagonist's claustrophobic tension as well as the wider world's shared unease. As for the game's staggeringly expansive narrative, the interactive storylines flow in such a way that most of the various outcomes carry irrevocable permanence.

It's an outcome that's both because of and despite Become Human containing the same surefire notions as almost any AI-related drama: internal discovery, unrest, inequality, and ferocious debates over androids as property versus their capacity for self-determination, expression, and imagination. In one of the game's clearest examples of sledgehammer-blatant messaging, the initial catalyst for each android's autonomy is human action — brutality, usually, but sometimes compassion. Yet because Become Human flourishes the main trio's respective growth with moral ambiguity, contemplative heart, and slice-of-life tenderness, not to mention a superb cast supported by astonishingly detailed performance-capture technology, the empathetic impact lands.

As for the game's egregious missteps, those can and must be refined. If diverse creators aren't in the room and leading the decisions, reversing the gender and racial stereotypes and adding necessary nuance to the blatantly oversimplified parallels to the American Civil Rights Movement, then a television adaptation of Detroit: Become Human shouldn't exist. Become Human both reaches toward the complex political, philosophical, religious, environmental, and economic repercussions of sentient androids and doesn't embrace the majority of these compelling ramifications as more than window-dressing. Amplifying the game's general themes can only benefit both the story's untapped potential and its existing, phenomenally moving moments.

Last but not least, there's the biggest decision faced by any adaptation of a game shaped around player agency: choosing which arcs to follow. Combining the aforementioned improvements with an emphasis on character-to-character intimacy, the kind grounded in recognizable complexity and less binary moral tension — humans displaying all their cruelest and kindest traits, and the once-naive androids awakening to and reckoning with that discomforting truth as they explore their emotional range — is how a Become Human television show can make its mark. Between the sleek dystopian atmosphere, the evolving friendships, and the suspenseful intrigue of mysteries and clues and chase scenes, Detroit: Become Human would slot right into the streaming template.

Detroit: Become Human

Adventure

Released

May 25, 2018

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ due to Blood, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Drugs

Developer(s)

Quantic Dream

Genre(s)

Adventure

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