The New 'Deus Ex' Game Nails Our Real-Life Cyborg Anxieties

Midway through my hands-off demonstration of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided I'm treated to an animator's impression of what happens when cybernetic implants malfunction. A man contorts in agony before me, artificial muscles gaping from his chest and neck as though to escape their host body, before slumping at my feet in a sizzle of angry circuitry.

It's a scene lifted direct from old nightmares about the invasiveness and failings of embedded devices, even as the rest of Eidos Montréal's new game serves up a cyborg power fantasy familiar from movies like —the thrill of running amok as a guy with tasers for knuckles, wall-piercing vision and a smartphone built right into his cranium. Set just a few decades into the future, Mankind Divided explores both the wonder and the terror of a world in which such technology is ubiquitous. It revels in the capabilities of a partly mechanical body, but also shows how a sneaking fear of the augmented might polarise society.

Due for release this year, the latest Deus Ex game once again stars Adam Jensen, a corporate security chief turned counterterrorism agent, who is endowed with an eye-watering array of implants. As its single player campaign rolls on, you'll pick which of Jensen's various augmentations to upgrade to suit your tactics—prosthetic retinas that help you through conversations by analysing the other person's body language, for instance, or an artificial epidermis that generates a layer of bulletproof plastic during firefights.

Character development systems of this sort are nothing new to video games—comparisons might be drawn with titles as far-flung as Skyrim and Mass Effect—but they seldom enjoy such a fraught relationship with the fiction that surrounds them. Mankind Divided takes place in the aftermath of a worldwide outbreak of psychotic behaviour among people with enhancements, triggered by an audio signal towards the close of 2011's Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It portrays a state of "mechanical apartheid", in which cyborgs are sealed away in ghettos by national governments to appease a paranoid populace.

This is more than free-wheeling speculation: It reflects present-day anxieties about the cyborg's place in society. As is often argued, "cybernetic organisms" of a sort are all around us and have been for decades: from iPads through pacemakers to walking sticks, our lives are permeated and buttressed by devices to a degree that is so comprehensive as to be unnoticeable, at least till something breaks. We're still, however, processing the social and political implications of a life that is physiologically inextricable from and dependent on the operations of a machine.

The idea of a violent rupture between vanilla humans and the enhanced is disturbingly plausible. Speaking to me by email, Reading University professor and self-declared "world's first cyborg" Kevin Warwick suggested that simpler implants such as radio frequency identification chips won't affect our world "drastically" but was bothered by the prospect of a "schism" brought about by brain mods that boost intellect or enable direct communication of thoughts over the internet.

Michael Cook, a research associate at Goldsmiths' department of computing, added that new technology tends to reinforce existing economic divisions, noting that the tech industry is "less interested in where the baseline is for everyone else—instead, we hope it'll trickle down and eventually reach those without."

In the world of Mankind Divided, however, the worry isn't simply that the affluent and powerful will augment themselves to tighten their grip on the status quo. The game represents cyborgs as acutely vulnerable—dependent on the marketplace and its political sponsors for access to drugs that prevent implant rejection, and susceptible to behavioral hacks via wireless connection.

Again, this is more than fantasy. Adam Wood, a software developer who helps run the activist blog Stop The Cyborgs, argues that "it is a mistake to think that cyborgs will necessarily be more powerful than ordinary humans," pointing out that cyborgs risk losing control over their own bodies by embedding devices that are subject to strict manufacturer patents, and which may be linked to networks exposed to surveillance or tampering.

It's certainly credible that a government might attempt to infringe the liberties of a cyborg citizen. Consider the case of Neil Harbisson, an artist with a rare vision disorder who wears an "eyeborg" appliance that translates light waves into sound, allowing him to "hear" colours. At a protest rally in 2011, Mr Harbisson was waylaid by police who mistook the eyeborg for a headset camera, as he later recalled to the .

Artworks like Deus Ex are no substitute for policy review, but they're a way of starting conversations about such troublesome cultural shifts. Talk of crops up frequently in Mankind Divided's script, but its real triumph is perhaps that it treats on the tension at the level of its architecture. Speaking to me after the demo, art director Martin Dubeau discussed how the game's aesthetic reflects both optimism and dread around cybernetic modification.

On the one hand, there are the playful, ornate, attenuated designs of a so-called "cyber-Renaissance"—an example of this style is a haphazard cluster of lighting tubes that evokes the wings of Icarus, hero of Greek myth and a primordial cyborg. And on the other, there are the massy, functional, fortresslike structures of an oppressive, fearful "corporate feudalism". "We always have this confrontation," commented Dubeau. "I would say 90 percent of the game is informed by both styles. There's always a glimpse of one or the other."

Games are uniquely positioned to chronicle the rise of the cyborg because they can be termed pieces of cybernetic technology themselves. Devices or interfaces like controllers, heads-up displays, and VR goggles are extensions of our bodies that allow work to be carried out in a virtual realm. As exercises in recreation, however, games rarely encourage us to think about where such an increasing closeness between organism and mechanism might take us. We need more fictions like that of Deus Ex—a franchise that dates back to 2000, but which has never seemed more relevant—to fill in the picture.