#lebedev

Gotta get a grip! ... GAAAAARGH...

He has a theory about mankind and conscience, which means he cares deeply about humanity, but at the same time he deceives almost every human in the story.

He knows that people don't take him seriously, yet he makes no effort to change that. Instead, he relies on humor in most of his interactions.

As I play again through Ghost of Tsushima, one of the most engaging open-world games of the past ten years (up there with Witcher 3 and Horizon: Zero Dawn), with one of the best stories in quite a while, I find myself drawn back to the whole now-mostly-settled controversy about "can games be art?"  We have, by and large, agreed "yes."  So I find myself reminiscing about the first game that inspired a real emotional response in me beyond "whee I have a lightsaber" or "hurr hurr things fall over."

The year was 2001.  Dad had just passed.  I don't remember how I came into possession of it - I think it was included as a freebie with a video card Mom bought - but I got this game that had come out last year, called "Deus Ex."  You play a nanotech-augmented man named JC Denton, working in the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk future for UNATCO, a paramilitary police force arm of the United Nations.  The world is being ravaged by a disease called the Grey Death, and there's only one cure, and it's only being given to the rich due to limited supply.  Your job is to get back a shipment of the cure from the NSF, a domestic terrorist organization that's stolen a bunch of the stuff.

That's the first, like, four to ten hours of the game, depending on how long you spend sneaking around and reading everyone's mail.  It culminates in you tracking down the NSF leader, a man named Juan Lebedev, only to find your brother Paul waiting for you in Lebedev's hangar!  Paul is with the NSF!  But why?  He insists you go talk to Lebedev.

Now, up until this point, you've had a pretty straightforward path.  Granted, you've been able to tackle the challenges in front of you in a number of ways - stealthily, with brute force, by talking and bribing your way through stuff - but you've mostly been going from point A to point B.  But now, you get onto Lebedev's plane.  You confront him.  He surrenders.  You tell him you're taking him in.  And then your partner, Anna Navarre, an older-generation cyborg, tells you to assassinate the guy.  Kill an unarmed prisoner.

And then the game just sat there.

I didn't know what to do.  For the first time in a video game, I'd been presented with an actual moral dilemma.  Jedi Knight had this thing where if you indiscriminately murdered civilians, you would get Dark Side points, and not doing that would give you Light Side points, but that's not a moral dilemma, that's "which set of Force powers and game ending do you want."

He's the guy you've been chasing, he's somehow turned your brother, but he's surrendered and unarmed.  Your partner is telling you to kill him.  But he says he knows why Paul betrayed your agency.

You can walk away, and Anna will kill him once you leave.  You can kill him yourself, and Anna will praise you.  Or you can kill Anna, and learn a *lot* more about the real shit going down behind the scenes in the game.

I'm prepared to argue that, 20 years later, all of the games that are obsessed with player choice and agency still owe Deus Ex, and specifically this scene, *everything.*  Here's two different versions of the conversation with Lebedev, one where JC only kills Anna most of the way through (warning, she explodes into some low-polygon meaty chunks), and another, where the player knows she's going to spawn in after the first part of the conversation, so they set a mine on the wall outside (starts at 3:20) and kill her that way.  She never gets a word in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mdc41byknCc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO8DET8-vBk

I still remember this part of the game, 19 years after playing it for the first time, in perfect detail.  I tried to kill Anna, she whooped my ass, so I loaded a quick-save after she told me to kill Lebedev, planted a mine on the wall outside, shot her once to get her to chase me, and she ran into the mine and died.

Much, much later in the game, you're brought to the HQ of the Illuminati, who are a real thing in this world.  You can walk in, talk to the leader, Morgan Everett, and walk back out to advance the plot.  But if you steal a key out of his laboratory, and find the hidden door behind the mirror in his bedroom, that in no way are you expected or required to find, you stumble across a chamber where he's keeping the previous leader in cryo-suspension to preserve his health.  You also find a prototype AI, named Morpheus, and have one of the most compelling conversations in the history of video games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw

Included are such gems as:

"The unplanned organism is a question asked by Nature and answered by death.  You are another kind of question with another kind of answer."

"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God.  Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

And one of my all-time favorites, "God was a dream of good government."

To repeat this point: this thing is hidden behind a locked hidden door concealed past a mirror.  It's not *hard* to find, and by this point you're used to exploring every nook and cranny looking for stuff, but the developers were *totally okay* with the possibility of you just la-dee-dah-ing your way through this building and never experiencing this.  That makes the whole experience that much more amazing.  Just like with Lebedev, I still remember finding Morpheus and talking to him almost perfectly, 19 years later.

“Мороженое“ С.Я.Маршак (1926) рисунки В.Лебедева