I’m not an adventure game or visual novel head, if I’m honest. I’m not sure what it was about Minds Beneath Us that made me want to step out of my norms and give it a try. It looks good, a sort of tactical use of flat colors and shading really gives an eerie, dream-like aura to its futuristic setting. Lots of games that heavily feature big landscapes or detailed portraits – pretty standard visual novel stuff – look good, but this does more than just off the page. It whispers something the adventure itself screams once you get into it, and I think that’s what lured me.
Any good sci-fi setting is one that feels like a commentary on particular aspects of our current society. Blade Runner’s moral duel about the specifics of humanity in a world where a corporation can make people never feels too far fetched, especially in a modern world with a global business class that is running, not walking, towards technology that grows every more capable of replicating functions that used to be done by flesh and blood people. In 2049, Minds Beneath Us imagines a world where an entire city can be run by a fleet of individual AI, each with their own tasks, buildings, and even personnel to manage. As with our modern 2024 Earth’s growing AI presence, the fictional city of Weipei’ it doesn’t really replace the need for human input or labor all together, but rather changes where the divisions of this labor are.
Marxist interpretations of divisions of labor suggest that the concept of hierarchy in the workplace only exists to strengthen the position of the capitalist class – those who own all the stuff and the places that make the stuff. In Weipei, that class it as small as its ever been, and seems populated not only by CEOs but by AI themselves. Jason Dai, whose shoes you walk in for a part of the adventure, is looking for work and applies for a consultancy role in a big power plant. The woman he meets about the role, who runs the day to day operations of the building, is constantly at odds with the AI that also runs the day to day operations of the building. It decides who can come and go from room to room, or who’s inquiries or applications get elevated to higher decision makers, or even what departments potential job seekers should be assigned to. She is constantly overriding and second guessing the machine’s judgment. Even though they essentially share the same seat in the C-suite, the actual human has to assert themselves often so as not to be completely obsolesced by the algorithm.
Jason would potentially be working what is essentially the sort of role a call center for a social security or unemployment office would have, assessing applicants for eligibility for another role further down the labor totem pole at the plant. In order to earn the job, he has to do it on the spot with zero training and only minimal guidance given to him by a friendly potential peer. Whether he does it well or not is up to the player, but the concept itself is scary enough. Jason, applying for the kind of job our capitalist society would consider “low skill” because it requires no formal education or prior experience to do, has perform the role in order to earn the role, hoping that the soft skills he’s developed in his life up to this point would help him intuit how to essentially be a psychiatrist to strangers. The people he’s tasked to screen are asked to simply talk about themselves without real prompt of direction, hoping that they can simply intuit what the company is looking for in them in order to give them a spot at the bottom rung of the business. That rung, by the way, is to sell their brain power as energy, becoming human batteries to keep the city’s many AIs running. Humans are still involved in all this, but they’ve simply been turned in cogs in a greater machine, sometimes uncomfortably close to literally.
The kinds of people you interview are a desperate sort, but not all that out of touch with our reality. A man losing his farm to pollution caused by capitalist expansion. A young woman who’s angst about her economic future lead her to make desperate and misguided decisions. And elderly lady whos pension isn’t enough for her to live without economic insecurity. Minds Beneath Us imagines a future where technology changes how society fundamentally operates, but comes to the correct conclusion that easing human suffering will always be lower on the list of the priorities of the capital class than increasing profits. Jason sitting behind the glass and assessing the worthiness of people who want to sell their ability to think and move, potentially their lives, to a company that only barely considers them people at all is just so on the nose.
This is all before even addressing the greater sci-fi macguffin at play here – that Jason isn’t really Jason so much as a consciousness placed inside Jason’s body by an alien organization that uses beings like him for war and espionage. The Jason that sells his body and labor to a big faceless power company has already done so to the military industrial complex both in his world – hes a former vet – and out of it as a subject in the alien organization.
Before it even really ramps up into it’s way-out-there sci fi tale, it sets a stage that tells its own story without having to resort to shape shifting bio weapons or overseers from beyond reality. The city of Weipei – gorgeous, grungy, and gruesome, feels like a hop, skip, and a jump away from any modern city today. As our real lives continue to be encroached upon by capitalist devices intended to replace us, its hard not to find these seemingly mundane set dressings of Minds Beneath Us’s story to be the most chilling parts of it.
