David Cage Comments on Detroit’s Portrayal of Domestic Violence

A new Detroit: Become Human trailer was shown yesterday during Sony’s Paris Games Week 2017 press conference. While the video featured the choice-driven gameplay that players have come to expect from the game, it also featured some pretty heavy scenes of domestic violence and child abuse. Naturally, Quantic Dream director David Cage was asked about the scenes they chose to sell the game on, and the enigmatic creator had some interesting responses.

Here’s a snippet of what Cage had to say about the scene when asked about it by Eurogamer:

You don’t choose to talk about domestic abuse. It’s not like I was like ‘oh, let’s write a scene about domestic abuse’. It’s not how it works. When you’re a writer you talk about things that move you, that you feel really deep inside you that’s something that moves you, and you hope it’ll move people too. You know there are two ways you can do this – ‘oh let’s do something cool and let’s have someone beaten by a man’, that’s one way of doing things, because people are going to write about it and it’s going to sell my game. That’s one way of doing it.

The other way is to say I’m working on something important, something meaningful and something moving. There’s a meaning behind it, there’s a strong story I need to tell – it goes through dark moments, but I think the story I have to tell it as it’s something important for me. And I think when you do this, you do your work as an author, you do your work as a writer. You go into dark places, in order to create something positive about it. It’s never a conscious decision to say let’s talk about something cool and violence – no, I want to talk about something moving and meaningful, that’s my job as a writer. I’m the first judge, and I hope that people will feel the same.

The full conversation is worth checking out, as Cage and interviewer Martin Robinson have quite the back-and-forth on the subject. It’s quite the look inside Cage’s thought process, so definitely read the full piece.