Deus Ex: Mankind Divided promo art criticized for evoking Black Lives Matter movement

A Montreal studio has sparked debate online after releasing promotional art for an upcoming video game that uses a slogan similar to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is set in 2029, where people "augmented" with cybernetic enhancements — called Augs — have been marginalized by the rest of society.

One promotional image released this week shows a group of augmented people confronting a wall of armoured police in Moscow.

The protesters hold a banner that appears to read "Augs Lives Matters." They're facing off against other protesters, behind the police, holding signs that read "Purity first!"

Some critics online say the Augs' banner is an appropriation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which originated in the United States as a response to police killings of unarmed black men and women.

"If Eidos Montreal gives a crap about black folks and diversity/inclusion, they would stop using that image to promote the game," tweeted Manveer Heir, a designer at the game studio Bioware Montreal, located just down the street from Eidos.

'Don't try to spread hate, thanks' says Eidos

Eidos's brand manager responded to Heir, saying the art was created before the Black Lives Matter movement started in 2013. He called it an "unfortunate coincidence."

"Of course I'm a visible minority myself, and understand the current tension," Andre Vu tweeted. "I get your point but we never use BLM, we don't reference to the current issues happening in the world. Don't try to spread hate, thanks."

Heir told CBC News his concern is the "use of these images in a marketing context."

"I fully support and believe that games should tackle political issues, [such as] civil rights issues. But that image is being used to sell a game, without providing me the context as to what it really means and whether it's being handled well," he said.

"It's easy to think that it is belittling an actual, real-life group that is trying to save black bodies, and black lives."

Criticised for 'mechanical apartheid' tag line

Eidos Montreal and publisher Square-Enix had earlier come under fire for their frequent use of the term "mechanical apartheid" in press releases and trailers. The term describes the Augs' oppression at the hands of non-enhanced humans, including internment in concentration camps.

"Just using the word 'apartheid' in the game is a little risky," executive art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete told Polygon in June.

He said the game's creators are "trying hard not to take a side" in the game's conflict between Augs and natural humans, in order to empower players to make their own judgments about the fiction.

"We never say in the game if we're on one side of the debate or another," he said. "If you think they deserve it, that's perfect. If you don't think they deserve it, that's perfect."

Evan Narcisse, a games and comics writer for Gawker, isn't satisfied with this explanation.

"I think it's a cop-out to say, 'You know what, we're going to round up cybernetically augmented people in concentration camps, but we're not going to say whether it's bad or not,'" he told CBC News. "If they're going to present that to you as a plot beat, and then not come down on what it means, or what the player should think, it's kind of hollow."

CBC News tried to reach Vu, Eidos Montreal and Square-Enix, but hadn't received a response at the time of publication.

Transhumanism, racism, oppression

Not all of Mankind Divided's marketing has generated this kind of controversy. Human by Design, a short documentary produced in collaboration with Courageous — CNN's in-house studio for producing branded or sponsored content — examined how cybernetics and prosthetics currently affect people's lives, and their concept of humanity.

Narcisse says their "vision of the world they're presenting, of a future with regards to cybernetics, and how that affects society … seems more well thought-out."

Indeed, most of the game's promotional material suggests the societal impacts of cybernetic enhancements. Aug Lives Matter has so far only appeared in concept art reused for marketing.

'This is not lost to the fog of history'

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided hits stores on Aug. 23. Until reviews start trickling out, there's no way to know whether the game successfully addresses terms like mechanical apartheid or Aug Lives Matter.

But if its story is more concerned with cybernetics and transhumanism, Narcisse argues, it wasn't a good idea to market the game using terms related to racism and segregation.

"The exploration of systematic oppression is not just something you can put on as an overlay to help marketing," he said. "These are real life experiences that are still happening. This is not lost to the fog of history."

Heir agrees about the importance of context. 

"If we take subject matter [like Black Lives Matter] and we don't fully present it with the same context, or we twist it to serve our own context, it looks like we are taking their goals and using it for our own gain."