Surveillance and Voyeurism in Deus Ex: A Criminal Past

Don Everhart, Contributing Editor

Cyberpunk thrives on voyeurism. Think of the scene in Blade Runner in which Deckard’s hunt for one of the replicants, Zora, takes him to her job at a strip bar. It isn’t enough that he goes to watch the show - he also goes backstage, posing as a safety inspector. Once Zora barrels past him in justified suspicion, Deckard gives chase and guns her down in the street. Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth’s camera captures her, still in strip club gear that’s barely masked by a transparent plastic jacket, falling through plate glass storefront windows in repeated slow motion shots from different angles. It’s a violent apotheosis of voyeurism that would make a J.G. Ballard character flush.

Deus Ex, one of the longest running cyberpunk series in videogames, likewise thrives on voyeurism. And while the series has its share of violence, depending on the approach taken by the player, its thrills come more from trespassing and the power that comes with unseen infiltration. The series invites the player to crawl through every possible window and vent, hack every computer, and rifle through every drawer. For every hour I’ve spent playing the main story of each Deus Ex game, I’ve probably spent 4 or 5 more crawling into every last apartment and office in its representations of New York, Hong Kong, Cairo, Detroit, Hengsha, and Prague.

All of that unfettered videogame freedom would seem to be in stark contrast to the setting of a maximum security prison in Arizona. Yet that’s the setting for the last story, in the last bit of downloadable content, that Eidos Montréal told about current series protagonist Adam Jensen. How, I wondered, would the series’ hallmark freedoms of movement, intrusion, and infiltration collide with the restrictions of cyberjail? What kinds of voyeuristic opportunities would be created for current series protagonist Adam Jensen high on a desert mesa, far from neon-drenched city streets, back alleys, sewers, and rooftops?

The short answer is that the designers of A Criminal Past place only the briefest of restrictions. It isn’t that there’s a lack of story or things to do at the Penley T. Housefather Correctional Facility, colloquially referred to in-game as “the Pent House.” Rather, there’s a lack of… imprisonment. The game is in such a rush to let Jensen loose from his cell, from his cell block, and even (should the player so choose) from the bioelectric implant that prevents him from using his cybernetic abilities that the player can be looting the security office of Cell Block A within minutes of starting the scenario.

Once Jensen is behind the scenes, the curtain rapidly falls on any illusion that he needs to play along with being imprisoned. It’s all about vanishing into the walls. Once prisoners are released into the yard, there’s a secret panel in one of the open cells that takes Jensen right out the back door. There's also a vent above the shower room that leads to a guard’s secret stash. If the player chooses to aid the resident agitators of the Pent House, righteously angry as they are at the prison’s corrupt head of security, they will provide Jensen with a general access keycard. Any and all of these means let Jensen into the back hallways used for maintenance, surveillance, and (as is shortly revealed) the nefarious butchery of the cybernetically-augmented inmate population.

There’s still some challenge in the game, of course. Jensen is in a prisoner’s uniform, and the guards are empowered by the state’s Terminal Violation Policy, which authorizes lethal force against any augmented prisoner found to be breaking prison rules. If he’s found behind the scenes, whether that’s by a human guard, a drone, a camera, or an automated turret, things get messy fast. If Jensen wears the wrong uniform into the wrong cell block, he will be shot on sight. Luckily, it’s relatively easy to find a stash that includes a uniform for block B, so Jensen can blend in and switch back and forth if the player so chooses.

If only the scenario of A Criminal Past was more insistent on the player’s need to keep a low profile. Shortly after finding his contact, the other inmates stage a violent riot. The rest of the story plays out in the aftermath of that first revolt, with armed inmates and officers controlling different areas of the prison. Access becomes a matter of which team controls which zones. Inmates largely populate “safe” zones, while the remaining guards and automated security systems make other areas hazardous. After the start of the uprising, there’s no chance the player will be able to quietly observe, manipulate, and slickly slide through prison life. There are still computers to hack and hidden paths to tread, but some of the thrill is diminished once the whole setting’s on high alert.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece on some other videogame representations of futuristic prison societies for Unwinnable Monthly. That one was titled “Everyone’s Already in Jail,” and it focused on games in which characters experience little to no escape from institutions that exert total control, from secret police stations to panopticons. In the plots of the Deus Ex series, its writers pit their protagonists against more subtle, but total, structures of social control, masterminded by cabals and conspiracies. In A Criminal Past, the developers gave themselves the opportunity to explore the friction between the relative openness of the series and a more overtly controlled setting.

Apparently, that friction was too much to bear. The scenario buckles under the weight of expectations for how Deus Ex ought to be played. That’s ironic, given the flexibility that the series has helped pioneer for the genre of immersive sim games, but perhaps the attempt should be celebrated. In A Criminal Past, perhaps the series found its limits - namely, that it refuses to put too many limits on the player. It seems that Eidos Montréal felt compelled to open the scenario up further and further, providing Agent Jensen with a role as a wild card, rather than someone bound to the role of inmate or jailer.

But how wild can a card like Jensen get? He quickly has the run of the Pent House, so what possibilities are granted to the character? He could conceivably become a broker, an intermediary between sides. Or he could throw in with one side or the other, seeking to gain a clear advantage that would make it easier to complete his mission. Or perhaps he could discard his mission entirely, recognizing that he has an ethical responsibility to bring some resolution to the conflict at hand. There are plenty of possibilities, but there’s really only one that’s provided for Jensen: to be a cop.

So, Jensen sets out to solve a few interconnected crimes, his standard operating procedure: Who hijacked a drone in order to kill a rival? Is there rhyme or reason to who gets sent to die in solitary cell 6, and if so, who calls the shots? How deeply has his contact fallen into the gang he was sent to investigate? How dirty is the Pent House’s chief of security? But the questions the game barely asks are: Beyond the obvious oppression and mysterious deaths in solitary, why did the riot happen? Why now? What do the rioters plan to do next? It’s a shame that Jensen is too busy being a cop to care much about what’s going on right in front of him.

With that said, the game isn’t solely made for Jensen. It’s also made for the player, in their role as voyeur, investigator, or even cinematographer. If the player cares more than Jensen, they can find records of the everyday workings of the prison, together with some grisly scenes that resulted from the first stage of the riot. It’s a funny thing - the designers of Deus Ex lay the environmental storytelling on thick, even if their main character doesn’t care for it: There are marks of violent group executions in parts of the prison following the riot. In the cell block showers, there’s a pile of officers’ bodies at the back of the room and a mass of bullet casings scattered on the floor. There are civilian casualties in the administration building: on the floor in the Warden’s office, the player can find three civilian corpses, on their knees in a circle. The player can read their emails, discovering concerns about probation and the inability of the facility to work with an influx of inmates who have serious substance abuse and mental health issues. Nobody is doing anything radical here, but there’s evidence that some people were trying to help, to get some resources, and they seem to have been slaughtered in cold blood. Jensen finds none of this to be remarkable. It’s up to the player to be the voyeur, but also, in this situation, the game’s social conscience. One has to be looking at every detail to get a fuller picture of just what’s been going down in Arizona. 

There’s a nihilism that accompanies the riot and these killings, mirroring Jensen’s general attitude that he’s just passing through, just getting on with his job. It’s reminiscent of Blade Runner’s Deckard, with his hangdog disposition and unwillingness to face the nature of his work. But Jensen has no Roy Batty to drag his hand through a wall, lecture him, break his knuckles and force him to become involved with those around him. It’s not for Deckard’s benefit that viewers see Zora’s death in multiple angles: he only has one perspective. It’s for the viewers. A Criminal Past provides this as well, providing players with the opportunity to be their own cinematographer of macabre digital sculptures of corpses, underground body chop shops covered in plastic sheeting, and skirmishes between inmates and their jailers.

In contrast to all of the contextual information and staging strewn about, the reason and aims of the rioters are minimal and flat. Players can find that its leader is one of only two inmates on a “no-kill” list from the organizer of the organlegging operation, but it’s unclear why that operation cares about his life. Maybe it’s partly due to his facility as a smuggler, or maybe his charismatic status made him a likely candidate for martyrdom: before the riot, that leader is presented as having enough connections that he can arrange for drugs that free inmates from the pain of their control chip implants. After the riot, he occupies the Warden’s office, loudly demanding a television interview. Even if he gets one, it’s hardly clear what he plans to say. It’s not about escape: when Jensen asks to pass through the office and arrange things such that he can leave, the leader of the inmates says to be his guest. Mostly, it seems like a drawn out suicide, a last stand on the orange rocks and rusty soil of the mesa. In the end, the rioters don’t even take retribution against the organleggers - only Jensen even knows who they are with any certainty, and the only ones within arms reach are dealt with in his part of the story.

That’s where players leave the story of the Pent House, its inmates, its guards, and its workers. Jensen just glides through, largely untouched by its carnage and brutality. In a way, the most surprising thing about the cyberjail of A Criminal Past is its mundanity. While it has all the trappings of future dystopia with its lethal robots and cybernetically-augmented inmate population, it’s still full of cell blocks for the efficient storage and subjugation of human beings. It has its guard towers and ramps overlooking open yards with weight training equipment and basketball hoops. It has administrative buildings and offices, sewers and electrical wiring. No wonder, then, that after some initial rough treatment, Jensen moves through it as though it were anywhere else. It’s up to the player to stare.

For more cyberpunk musings, check out our “Cyberpunk Primer” and our article on Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis.