C:\> Tuesday, October 14, 2025

The Butterfly Effect and Detroit: Becoming Human

Credit: Quantic Dream - Quantic Dream


One of the ways I can get out of my brain is by playing a video game. The complete immersion afforded by a well-written and executed game works wonders, providing a break from the occasional dour, defeatist, or depressing thoughts that still arise daily. You surrender to the plot and become one with the game controller. Solve a puzzle or two, slay a zombie, sit through multiple cut scenes, and just like that two hours have gone by, which can be a good thing.

My most recent game experience has been Detroit: Become Human which I just finished yesterday. This game was originally released in 2018, and a few years later was available as one of the monthly included games that you can download for free if you’re a PlayStation Network subscriber. I get 99% of my games that way because I’m a cheapskate…. I mean, frugal.

It’s an adventure game that takes place in the near future where androids are ubiquitous, but often abused and treated as second-class citizens. There are three story lines that follow three different androids as they try to achieve some sort of freedom and recognition in order to live their lives with rights equal to humans.

The key hook of this game is that in each story line you are constantly confronted with choices to make. These may be dialogue choices, action choices, or plot-direction decisions, and each one of these choices creates a butterfly effect, a branching off of story and plot and outcome that you can view represented as a sort of flowchart showing the choices you made. And like the butterfly effect, these branches and bifurcations lead to a myriad of potential outcomes and plotlines that depend on the different ways you have chosen to proceed along the way.

Many games incorporate aspects of this idea where you are allowed multiple choices in different situations, but I’ve never played one that did it this well or fully. Usually, for example, you may meet a character who has something you need, let’s say a bag of corn, and you are given two choices such as:

“Steal the bag of corn” or “Attempt to barter for the bag of corn.”

Usually it makes no difference to the grand arch of the storyline, and worse, often it’s not really a free choice at all. You may opt to steal the corn, but then they fight you and won’t let you steal it, and then asks you if you want to barter for it. So… why did the game developer even bother with the pseudo-choice when there’s really only one outcome?

Here, the choices are a bit more consequential, with more than just two alternatives, and they’re not just dialogue choices. They’re often choices such as “do nothing,” “grab the crow bar,” “hide,” “run away,” and these end up being real choices which you can’t replay and change until you completely finish the game, at which point you can review all the various timeline bifurcations, offshoots, and branches. You can then replay a focal point and make a different choice, but if you do so all the branches and directions of the plot and corresponding consequences that came after are erased and you won’t know what new outcome awaits you.

Some of the potential directions are dependent on physical choices: you may be in a situation where you are trying to escape some baddies and the screen will display various controller buttons and sequences that you must press quickly. You may have decided to sneak past some guards that are looking for rogue androids, but they spot you, and you must press “down joy stick”, and if you do in time then press “left trigger,” and if you succeed “right side button,” and if you succeed press “the triangle button”, and if you do all that quickly and accurately you scurry past them. But miss just one of those prompts and they clobber you and the plotline changes.

And you can’t reset and try again. The butterfly has been stomped and your direction is now set.

One of the storylines involves you playing as a young woman android in her mid-20s or so that has been purchased by a man to serve as a sort of nanny/maid for him and his young daughter, who’s about 8. It turns out he’s abusive, so you and the little girl escape and the rest of the game in this storyline involves you protecting this young girl as the two of you attempt to make your way to Canada, right across the river, where they value androids and treat them with equal rights. Along the way you have to make several moral as well as tactical decisions as you try to make your way to freedom. My branching led to the denouement where we attempt to get to Canada via a small boat, but other decisions may result in a bus trip.

My first playthrough resulted in the two of us getting to the Canadian shore, but then the little girl died in my arms after asking me, “Are we free now? Did we make it?” It was a heartbreaking conclusion to that storyline, so as soon as it ended I went to the menu where you could view each chapter’s decision and event trees and attempt to make changes.

Luckily it was the final chapter, so I didn’t have to redo much of that timeline. However, whatever I did, whatever different choices I made, the little girl still died. Sometimes she died before we crossed the river, but usually she’d die once we reached the Canadian shore. So I’d load up the game again and try something new.

Try to protect her in the boat from the ICE stand-ins who were shooting at us? Nope. Try to accelerate the boat past the guards shooting at us? Nope. Try to hide low in the boat so they don’t see us? Nope. Try to take a different route? Nope. Try talking to different people first? Nope. In every scenario usually the little girl would die. One time I got “lucky,” and the little girl survived, but I didn’t, and having her protector, her mother-stand in die at the shore, devastated her.

No matter the choices I made, no matter how hard I tried, I could not protect this little girl, I could not achieve a happy ending for her. I could not save her.

Maybe you see where this is going.

Unbelievably, somehow, I did not realize or notice that this was a metaphor for Adrianna. It was almost too on the nose, yet at the time it just didn’t click until I was talking to a friend of mine who’d played and recommended the game years ago, saying to him:

“No matter what I do I’m having trouble getting the little girl to survive.”

And when I read back what I had just texted to him, it did finally hit me and I realized why this game, at this moment, had captivated and held me, and why the original (and subsequent dozen or so other) ending devastated me.

Finally, however, after several tries and swatting different butterflies, making other choices and navigating the treacherous river full of danger and heartbreak, I successfully saved both the little girl and my character. She survived, and as you see headlights from an approaching car in the storm, I new everything would be okay.

In reality, we only have one shot at this life. We can’t really go back and change decisions and hope for a better outcome. Knowing this can cause stress to people like me, because I was always trying to get it right but always fearing I wasn’t making the correct decision. As simplistic a metaphor for life as this game is, it still illustrates that even being allowed to replay an event with hindsight and foreknowledge of potential real future terrible outcomes, one still can’t assure success.

At the end of the day, maybe I should have tried to steal the bag of corn, but I try not to beat myself up about that, and I try to remind myself that this was a multiplayer game in any event. I just wish Adri and I had made it to Canada.


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