Uplink hacker elite themes deus ex series#

Pearce can use this data to inform his actions – he can choose to siphon money from bank accounts or dish out a healthy dose of street justice, empowered by hardware (both technological and ballistic) to be judge, jury, and executioner of Chicago. One of the features of Watch_Dogs often touted by developers is the ability to point your smartphone at random passers by and magically abracadabra details of their personal information: age, profession, income, even sexual orientation. Both Watch_Dogs and Deus Ex: Human Revolution encourage you to vent your aggression on unsuspecting citizens, gang members and petty criminals. More importantly, these protagonists eschew the traditional power dynamic central to much of cyberpunk. Both are proficient killers and have access to significant financial and material backing. Jensen especially embodies this, as the private bulldog cyborg of the biggest biotech firm in the world, who lives in a Detroit penthouse. Neither of these men fighting existing power structures. Both of these men are much more Van Damme than Thomas Anderson. Similarly, Adam Jensen of Deus Ex: Human Revolution peers disinterestedly at the world through his perma-shades, taking on the criminal underbelly in a sleek combat suit and leather duster. Even the box art shows Pearce with his gun hand featured prominently in the foreground, his cell phone and hacking device clutched close to his chest, almost as an afterthought. Watch_Dogs’s Aiden Pearce, a protagonist whose very name was designed by committee to sound like a one-two punch, prowls the streets of Chicago flagrantly gunning down petty criminals. In contrast, games like the recent Watch_Dogs apply the hacker mentality to the burly white brick shit-house character of most videogames. He’s a 24-year-old drug-addicted alcoholic who is virtually useless unless he’s plugging away at his console. Neuromancer’s Henry Dorsett Case-a name so unmanly I got a wedgie just typing it-is a protagonist and a hero, but he’s far from powerful in the traditional sense. It’s a modern-day expression of slave morality in which we’ve given up trying to wrest power from The Establishment and instead pride ourselves as underdogs, embracing subversiveness as a way of life.Ĭyberpunk protagonists are not powerful in the ways that are valued by traditional masculinity. It is a reactionary genre, posited by our generation as a means of reclamation in the wake of the hyper-capitalist dystopia that has been creeping forth steadily for centuries. The tenets and mainstays of the hacker ethos represent a different kind of power fantasy than the one seen in so many other genres cyberpunk tends to prize tenacity and intellectual aplomb above physical strength or military might. It was born out of an expression of a social and political power struggle. Cyberpunk is more than a radical future-tech aesthetic. The more prominent cyber-intrusion has become in blockbuster games, the further it has drifted away from the political undertones that guided the genre through the 80s and 90s. The explosion of hacker-chic videogames could be refreshing, but in its current form, it’s disingenuous.

Uplink hacker elite themes deus ex series#

Even BioShock, set in a steampunk dystopian future-past version of the early ‘60s, enabled players to hack machines by manipulating a (literal) series of tubes. Many contemporary games either center themselves around the idea of the hacker protagonist, or at least highlight a hacking feature or mini-game, especially mainstream blockbuster titles. With glowing tattoos, neon signage and cryptic omnicode, the cyberpunk aesthetic has become a mainstay of the videogame consciousness. The political milieu of “cyberpunk” (if you insist on genre classifications) has re-emerged and expanded into greater relevance in recent years so too has the prominence of the “hacker” in popular media, especially videogames. These hacker heroes represented everything we wanted but could never attain: a single entity striking out against the established power structure using tools native to our generation. We millennials and digital natives grew up idolizing these anti-heroes, bastions of individuality and counterculture in a world shaped by Reagan and Thatcher, the Star Wars Program and Bank of America. But it wasn’t until the 80s, when William Gibson teased our brains with promises of cyberspace and console cowboys, that the term gained any sort of major traction in entertainment media. The nebulous term “computer hacking” has been around in some incarnation almost as long as computers have. It does not seek to transcend the masters, but to make them slaves as well. Slave morality does not aim at exerting one’s will by strength but by careful subversion.