Deus EX / Social Enhancer
It absolutely does make it "gamey," which is actually kind of
brilliant. It plays very well to some of the game's core conceits
regarding augmentation in that, if you "upgrade" yourself in this way,
you're no longer connecting with other human beings; you're looking at
readouts and emitting pheromones like some sort of malicious robot air
freshener. The readouts distract you and you may even become dependent
on them, losing all interest in actually engaging with the NPCs you're
verbally sparring with and what motivates them. The augmentation
tricks you into behaving as a machine rather than as a human being. I
watched my roommate fall into exactly this on his first playthrough,
while I didn't take it (I didn't "fail" any conversations, and only
came across one instance where it was clear the aug would've opened up
unavailable avenues of discussion), and it even came back to bite him
(in a way that was, for me as an observer, highly satisfying).In this respect, the CASIE aug is a surprisingly subversive piece
of game design, and arguably the most convincing piece of in-game
evidence that Humanity Front might be right about a few things.
– JobeGDG