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If anything that's probably why, Shadowrun's owners think they have a niche they own and don't need to try, Cyberpunk needs to stand out and one way to do that is simply to put in effort.
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Dec 16, 2022 13:19
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Ghost Leviathan posted:If anything that's probably why, Shadowrun's owners think they have a niche they own and don't need to try, Cyberpunk needs to stand out and one way to do that is simply to put in effort. This may be true, yeah. But it also means they're deeply misunderstanding the medium and their own product. Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Dec 16, 2022 |
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Dec 16, 2022 13:37
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Archonex posted:This may be true, yeah. But it also means they're deeply misunderstanding the medium and their own product. Well yes, obviously. That and given it's seen as a niche of a niche, it's unfortunately pretty standard nowadays apparently for RPGs to be incredibly half-assed products, at best running on Kickstarter fervour for funding.
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Dec 16, 2022 14:08
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Archonex posted:It's just deeply ironic that Shadowrun as an IP has been botched so hard despite the wasted potential it has while Cyberpunk 2077, the most watered down interpretation of a cyberpunk setting, is getting a second breath of life at the hands of CDPR's lovely behavior.
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Dec 16, 2022 17:21
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Magnetic North posted:So, weird tangent but: I hated basically every inch of Snowcrash and I would call that book style-over-substance. In your seemingly informed opinion: is something like Neuromancer still worth reading if I reacted so negatively so something everyone seems to like? I read The Diamond Age and liked it, so  ?
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Dec 16, 2022 17:40
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Halloween Jack posted:May I ask why you think so little of CP as an IP? I mean, I'm not a CP defender or anything, and I spent my high school years playing Shadowrun because it was much more accessible for several reasons. But CP never struck me as offensively crappy or anything. My biggest criticism is that I wish it had leaned more on the post-apocalyptic and punk inspirations rather than "classic" cyberpunk novels and contemporary anime. Honestly Cyberpunk has some surprisingly deep thoughts in its background the more I looked into it; I particularly like that it didn't just make the dystopic parts all just a result of terminal stage capitalism but actual fascism screwing things up. The US basically broke up because it got taken over not-so-secretly by a fascist cabal (and still has some elements of that fascism to this day), and of course the main "bad guy" corporation Arasaka is led by an actual WWII Japanese fascist fanatic. It's not just that everyone's greedy idiots, it's that most of the power figures have swallowed down the idea they should use their power to dominate everybody else for more than just getting money. Like the video game itself argues, once they got everything else they just kept going to try to steal everybody else's souls too (and oof, the ending where you sell out to let them do that is UGLY). Shadowrun has these elements in its background, but it doesn't tie them directly into the upper echelons of power as obviously, and it kind of chickens out in some ways (it argues prejudice against all the different magic races has more or less replaced regular racist and sexist stuff, whereas in reality I presume bigots would quite happily just add despising orcs/trolls/etc. into the rest of their bigotry and continue hating all of them).
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Dec 16, 2022 18:52
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Halloween Jack posted:May I ask why you think so little of CP as an IP? I mean, I'm not a CP defender or anything, and I spent my high school years playing Shadowrun because it was much more accessible for several reasons. But CP never struck me as offensively crappy or anything. My biggest criticism is that I wish it had leaned more on the post-apocalyptic and punk inspirations rather than "classic" cyberpunk novels and contemporary anime. So this is a fairly complex topic for me, and I doubt I can really get all my thoughts out in one go but i'll try. My apologies in advance if I don't communicate my thoughts entirely clearly or leave crucial details out: Cyberpunk 2077 is from what little exposure i've had to it as a tabletop game seemingly fairly shallow insofar as exploring the themes of the genre. What it does show is often present in other games (even the Shadowrun video games and tabletop game had the whole capitalistic exposure of human bodies as commodities thing in the background and foreground, sometimes as main themes when it isn't doing something else.) and can be picked up easily enough in literally any other setting that has cyberpunk or dystopian near-future scifi as a thing. In general, as far as the original tabletop game goes I don't see anything that really stands out compared to other offerings. That doesn't make it good or bad. It's just "meh" to me. I'm not really for it or against it. I just think there are better options overall assuming the IP holders capitalize on what they have. Now, the recent take on Cyberpunk 2077 is a different matter altogether. It hits on a number of big pet peeves of mine insofar as game design and storytelling goes. Not helping my appraisal of it and where it's likely to go is the latest take on it by CDPR, which is leaning hard into the whole "characters suffering = good story telling" fallacy that every overly edgy and inexperienced storyteller i've ever had to deal with made the mistake of thinking was true. It's not even creative about it once you've seen some of the best hits of lovely and awful storytelling. At one point you can literally run down a checklist for "absurdly edgy treatment of a female character" in one female character who gets about the most hosed up treatment possible by getting forced into prostitution, getting mind raped, getting actually raped, getting mutilated, and then committing suicide as a result of the trauma, and beyond her introduction and some expository content exists as much as a prop to showcase how terribly dark and edgy the whole of the setting is. Combine it with the shallow and sometimes outright offensive criticisms* the game gives of capitalism and it all just comes off as tacky and low class by people who don't understand the medium that well. Quite a bit of the rest of the main plot follows a similar downward beat. Like, this poo poo is the same poo poo as to why a lot of people avoid the World of Darkness games, since a lot of storytellers there also confuse "dark" with "Rocks fall and if you don't die you're hosed no matter what because i'm going to make sure everyone is going to die at some point in the story. Also this is my sadism showing through in managing the game poorly for the players." levels of bad storytelling. Which runs into the same problems that many players can be heard complaining about all over the net (and sometimes in the past on these very same forums). Unfortunately, as much as i'd like to say otherwise this also isn't a criticism that's one off just to the video game since the anime they produced to try and turn around an absolutely abysmal release and post release reception literally does the same thing to a tee. Like, where is the fun in taking a bunch of characters and watching them slowly get ripped to shreds as they suffer and die? How is that cyberpunk? That's not cyberpunk. It's not even punk. You could get that anywhere, ironically, a lot like how you can get Cyberpunk 2077's core themes in any cyberpunk oriented game. It's just edgy narrative sadism masquerading as something else. * This is an article all to itself. Like, to just give one example out of many: All of the stuff with trans people is just one of an endless litany of bad portrayals with no commentary on the effect of it in game or why it's bad. If you want to criticize the exploitation of a minority than you have to put actual criticism beyond advertisements sexualizing them in the game. Even the artist who designed the in game advertisements is on the record as assuming they'd do something more than just throw the pictures of hyper-sexualized trans-people they designed up into the game world without comment. And this is without taking into account CDPR's transphobia on the company end of things. As for the punk aspects of cyberpunk as a genre, the punk aspect sometimes goes completely out the window. If you want, you can even take jobs from the (extremely corrupt, extremely brutal) police! Like, that's literally the most anti-punk thing possible. What do you get in a version of that Cyberpunk 2077 if it doesn't develop further? To me it it basically feels like the theme park take on the genre. And that's if it just isn't more violent nihlism as opportunism masquerading as punk. Something i'm not the only one (https://screenrant.com/cyberpunk-2077-story-tabletop-rpg-origins-punk-meaning/ amongst others) that has noticed can be an issue at times with the latest take on Cyberpunk 2077. Which is just depressing compared to what the genre could be if people were in charge of it that cared a bit about the stuff that makes cyberpunk cyberpunk. Basically: Ghost Leviathan posted:it's unfortunately pretty standard nowadays apparently for RPGs to be incredibly half-assed products, at best running on Kickstarter fervour for funding. Archonex fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Dec 16, 2022 |
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Dec 16, 2022 19:08
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Well, now I feel like a jerk for prompting you to write all that; I haven't actually played 2077 yet. My spouse and I decided to play it as soon as it's free or super-discounted. All the stuff you mentioned sounds pointlessly edgy. I was just thinking about the setting in general. The historical timeline, the society it proposes, the NPCs and organizations and all that. In that regard, Adam Smasher just doesn't hold a candle to Hatchetman, and so on. (It's hard to compare the social realism in the two settings since so many Shadowrun events hinge on "a super duper big magic happened.")
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Dec 16, 2022 21:36
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Halloween Jack posted:Well, now I feel like a jerk for prompting you to write all that; I haven't actually played 2077 yet. My spouse and I decided to play it as soon as it's free or super-discounted. All the stuff you mentioned sounds pointlessly edgy. It's no biggie. As an addendum to that, some of what Cyberpunk 2077 does it does right, so don't assume that it's all poo poo all the time. But there's just so much that comes off as wrong to me that it's hard for me to not to write it off if that's where the setting is going. Archonex fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Dec 16, 2022 |
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Dec 16, 2022 21:53
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Archonex posted:Again, this doesn't really disagree with what i'm saying. Shadowrun needs better managerial oversight to ensure it's massive gently caress ups and lack of modern publicity don't screw it over. Cyberpunk by contrast only has that attention to begin with because of CDPR's gently caress ups and ridiculous hype alongside the transphobia bullshit that gets extremist right wing culture warriors rocks off. I think I am disagreeing with what you're saying in a few important ways. I don't disagree that Shadowrun could probably be a much bigger IP if it had real investment behind it in terms of marketing and design. But I think we disagree on why CP has become popular. You pin it on CDPR's lovely behavior. I pin it on CDPR investing a lot of money and effort to make it into a brand name. I also think we disagree on how much more depth there is to Shadowrun's setting. I think Shadowrun's setting is just as generic as CP's, only it adds generic fantasy poo poo into the mix. Post humanism is a basic part of cyberpunk. As are ecological collapse and exploitation and the marginalization of different peoples. You don't need orcs or ghouls to explore racism. You don't need magic bugs from another dimension to explore climate change. I love that Shadowrun mashes up cyberpunk with fantasy, but I don't think it gains a great deal of depth by doing so. As for vampire lady, I did befriend her and was very excited to see her show up to help me at the door to that last dungeon. Then the game broke because her dialog window would not completely close and so I couldn't interact with that door and actually enter the last dungeon. CP2077 never broke in a way that prevented me from actually completing the game. It's doubly infuriating because Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a great game that I would like to finish. quote:As for the punk aspects of cyberpunk as a genre, the punk aspect sometimes goes completely out the window. If you want, you can even take jobs from the (extremely corrupt, extremely brutal) police! Like, that's literally the most anti-punk thing possible. This, like the Screenrant article you linked (and -rant articles in general; don't follow those sites--they are just the most basic of trash), is kinda missing the point of the "punk" part of cyberpunk. Sterling didn't coin the term because the characters in the genre should be anti-police or anti- other institutions. He coined the term because the writers he was promoting were all young "punks" coming from outside the SF establishment. There's nothing un-cyberpunk about working for the cops. The main character of the seminal cyberpunk film is a former cop who now works as an assassin for the cops. And heck, the basic premise of Shadowrun--the Shadowrun--is doing an illegal job for a corporation. That's just as anti-punk in the sense you're using it as is working for the cops.
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Dec 16, 2022 22:14
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PeterWeller posted:I think I am disagreeing with what you're saying in a few important ways. I don't disagree that Shadowrun could probably be a much bigger IP if it had real investment behind it in terms of marketing and design. But I think we disagree on why CP has become popular. You pin it on CDPR's lovely behavior. I pin it on CDPR investing a lot of money and effort to make it into a brand name. I can't comment much on screenrant as a whole. If the screenrant article isn't good enough I can provide others. It's a sentiment i've heard echoed elsewhere by people who were dissatisfied with the punk aspects of it. As for punk, punk also has roots in anti-establishment and anti-authority. It was just, for lack of a better word, colonized by various corporations and marketing attempts later on. Heck, the gothic punk in WoD is a great example of this. Sure, the anti-establishment types are representative of an authority, but it's one against the actual authority that is openly corrupt and old world in it's thinking. Working for the police in a setting where the police are one of the prospective bad guys (and you are one of the downtrodden masses they police.) representative of that establishment type authority is an example of siding with the latter over the former. To make a comparison: Shadowrun's Shadowrunners can weirdly often meet the requirement for the punk part of cyberpunk despite working for corporations, as the methodology behind most runs is explicitly working in between the cracks and exploiting the corporation's hatred of each other for your own benefit rather than just signing up for a direct salary or paycheck (in fact, in the games siding with the establishment/antagonists can end up being bad ends depending on the game and how deep into the lore you are) to shoot people for the cops part time. And this isn't taking into account that on many runs that there's a good chance you end up shooting the representative at the end of the run (especially if they betray you) or botching it intentionally due to a double cross or just because the corps crossed ethical lines the characters can't stomach (Looking at you, Saeder-Krupp, Horizon, or Aztechnology.) rather than taking the paycheck. Unless I forgot something that sort of thing generally doesn't come up more than a few times in Cyberpunk 2077 because the characters tend to not have that amount of freeform agency. Most of what we get is go here kill poo poo, take the money, and get out. You're basically a part time employee with a grudge against certain factions. Like, I get what you're saying, but I think insofar as the politics of _____ punk games go we're going to have to agree to disagree here on the Shadowrun parts of things and the depth of each of the two settings in general. Also, that sucks about the vampire lady. She's hands down one of the strongest melee characters in the trilogy. Which is fitting for an awakened HMHVV I infected character. Probably is patched by now though, if that helps Not sure if Shadowrun Hong Kong keeps saves on the steam cloud.  .
Archonex fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Dec 16, 2022 |
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Dec 16, 2022 22:28
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Archonex posted:I can't comment much on screenrant as a whole. If the screenrant article isn't good enough I can provide others. It's a sentiment i've heard echoed elsewhere by people who were dissatisfied with the punk aspects of it. Yeah, it's a perspective I've seen elsewhere as well. I just wanted to take the opportunity to get a dig in on the -Rant sites. They're such low-effort clickbait garbage. Inverse and Kotaku articles have made the same point with a lot more thought and nuance. But I think that perspective overlooks the origins of the term Cyberpunk. As for the -punk part of cyberpunk, I think we're talking past each other somewhat. Yes, capital P Punk has its roots in anti-authority, anti-capitalism, and anti-establishment. Yes, it has been colonized and commodified by capitalist forces. But those aren't the reasons why Bruce Sterling coined the term and assembled the original Mirror Shades authors. He called his "movement" Cyberpunk because it was a reaction to established SF of the 60s and 70s. Now a lot of the Punk ethos does make its way into Cyberpunk--a lot of it was there from the start--but maintaining that Cyberpunk is not cyber-punk without that ethos is a very narrow way to look at the genre. Punk style and aesthetic is another thing that Cyberpunk takes from Punk, and Pondsmith's mistake is overly focusing on that aesthetic, but Shadowrun also really plays up the aesthetic side of Cyberpunk. The side hustles in 2077 are largely trash, smash and grab missions. The problem with them is less that they're not punk enough and more that they're just the same kind of trash you encounter in Fallout 4 radiant missions. But that's a little tangential to the working for the cops thing. I don't remember actually working for the cops in 2077. I remember working for a politician to solve a murder that he thinks the police are covering up, in the process befriending a detective, and then helping that detective go rogue to solve a case the rest of the department is not interested in. That's not really working for authority or helping tread on the downtrodden. There are other times you work alongside some cops, and you can take Netwatch's side in the whole Voodoo Boys plot, but there you're not really invested in their conflict and have all sorts of reasons to turn on the VBs. I might be forgetting some other big plot. It's been about a year since I've played the game. I also think you're being unfair to use the rote side missions in CP2077 as the only examples of CP's potential depth. lovely side missions in an open-world game simply won't have much depth to them. Would you use FO4's crap radiant missions to suggest that the FO setting is shallow? As for HK, I played it on Gamepass, so my save is good. I'll go back and replay one day because it was generally an excellent game and I want to see its ending. E: Oh I just remembered there are those NCPD dispatch encounters where you can shoot up some gangers for the cops. Yeah, those are very un-punk trash. PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 00:04
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Sorry to double post, but I want to look at a few things from CP2077 that I think are "deeper" and more clever than they initially appear. Hiring Keanu to play Johnny is on the surface just really smart fan-service. Everyone knows Keanu. Everyone loves Keanu. He's the star of the most successful cyberpunk or at least cyberpunk adjacent film franchise of all time: The Matrix. In that he is a literal messiah who discovers the path to salvation lies in compromise and a shared desire to live. In CP2077 he is an uncompromising psychopath with a messiah complex who leads a daring and successful terrorist attack, the sum result of which as far as you can see is a bunch of unnamed innocent people die, the corporation he attacks is perhaps even more powerful and just rebuilds their fancy headquarters, and he gets his "soul" trapped by their gizmos, leading to him, or maybe just a recording of him, living in your head as an annoying, cantankerous drunk. Hiring the Refused to play as his band Samurai is equally inspired. Here's a band who 20 years ago had a massive impact on punk music and even named their opus, The Shape of Punk to Come. But in the decades that followed, their influence has wained and their bombastic claims about changing the shape of punk music seem just that. This is exactly the same place Samurai finds itself in the year 2077. The goons who are about to reply to this post and tell me how I'm not giving Refused enough credit here are that dude selling the Samurai memorabilia or that other dude collecting it.  Some of the major conflicts you come across are cyberpunk as all get-out. Take Panem's plot. You have this nomad clan (a really neat concept that is one of the few cyberpunk tropes that Shadowrun lacks) who are essentially torn between Saul's desire to take the false security of working for the corps and Panem's desire to remain independent even if that threatens the clan's security. The problem with that sequence is you really don't have any opportunity to take Saul's side in the major conflict. It's do Panem's missions or let it drop. The weird crucifixion is edge-lord as all hell, but it's also all about commodifying human life and experience. Do you tell this dude he is deluded, ruining his last moments on Earth but also ruining the corp's scheme to make money off his death, or do you let him maintain that this act is redemptive and also provide the corp with a product that will make them millions? On the trans ads, let me first say that I'm the cissiest of fucks, so take what I say with the biggest grain of salt. Those ads are gross, but I don't think the point is to send up or express transphobia. Instead, I think the point is how capitalism will banally exploit trans acceptance just like it would anything else to sell loving energy drinks. The game is gross and juvenile about sex and sexuality in general, so it's easy to imagine the devs yucking it up over their dumb transphobic "joke". (It probably doesn't help that the devs are mostly straight dudes from a conservative eastern-European country). But aside from those ads, the game is very chill and nonchalant about trans people. You run into a few characters who are trans, most notably the bartender, but it's never presented as their defining characteristic or a problem. The bartender's problem is that she's obsessed with avenging an accidental death. That's not to say that CP2077 is much more than a FO4-grade open world adventure. It's ultimately pretty shallow, and Archonex is correct to describe it as a theme park. I'd describe it as a juvenile love letter to the genre. To compare the recent HBS Shadowrun games to it, I'd say that Returns is equally light on nuance, while DragonFall and Hong Kong have it beat on narrative depth. Hong Kong probably does the best job of marrying Shadowrun's cyberpunk elements to its fantasy ones. I'm not sure I'd describe the plot as deeper due to that marriage, but it finds a really great point of overlap between the two in which to set its story. I would ascribe the better stories in DragonFall and Hong Kong to making better use of their setting than necessarily having the better setting.
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Dec 17, 2022 01:13
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Funny how different that is from Reeves` more classic Cyberpunk role as a literal Gibson protagonist in Johnny Mnemonic.
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Dec 17, 2022 01:16
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Funny how different that is from Reeves` more classic Cyberpunk role as a literal Gibson protagonist in Johnny Mnemonic. Yeah, great point. I figured I was already gonna be long winded enough, so I skipped over that. E: Though I should add that being a recording of a dead guy is also a classic Gibson cyberpunk character.
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Dec 17, 2022 01:21
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PeterWeller posted:Yeah, great point. I figured I was already gonna be long winded enough, so I skipped over that. Old Dixie Flatline. Let's not try to dig into why "Dixie" of all nicknames. 
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Dec 17, 2022 01:24
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Old Dixie Flatline. Let's not try to dig into why "Dixie" of all nicknames. This is from the guy who decided his story needed a classic mol and named her Molly.
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Dec 17, 2022 01:36
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PeterWeller posted:This is from the guy who decided his story needed a classic mol and named her Molly. Now that I appreciate.
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Dec 17, 2022 01:38
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Funny how different that is from Reeves` more classic Cyberpunk role as a literal Gibson protagonist in Johnny Mnemonic. It doesn't hurt that that movie is total poo poo. The tie-in game is arguably more famous.
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Dec 17, 2022 06:28
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Fuschia tude posted:It doesn't hurt that that movie is total poo poo. The tie-in game is arguably more famous. How dare you, that movie owns.
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Dec 17, 2022 06:33
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Magnetic North posted:So, weird tangent but: I hated basically every inch of Snowcrash and I would call that book style-over-substance. In your seemingly informed opinion: is something like Neuromancer still worth reading if I reacted so negatively so something everyone seems to like? i quit snowcrash after a few pages because it sucked rear end, but neuromancer is still readable
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Dec 17, 2022 12:58
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PeterWeller posted:
e;fb: You misspelled "Johnny Mnemonic."  I think a lot of people miss the satire in CP2077 the same way they miss the satire in Snow Crash, and the same way a lot of people missed the satire in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers. TheCenturion fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 14:40
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PeterWeller posted:On the trans ads, let me first say that I'm the cissiest of fucks, so take what I say with the biggest grain of salt. Those ads are gross, but I don't think the point is to send up or express transphobia. Instead, I think the point is how capitalism will banally exploit trans acceptance just like it would anything else to sell loving energy drinks. The game is gross and juvenile about sex and sexuality in general, so it's easy to imagine the devs yucking it up over their dumb transphobic "joke". (It probably doesn't help that the devs are mostly straight dudes from a conservative eastern-European country). But aside from those ads, the game is very chill and nonchalant about trans people. You run into a few characters who are trans, most notably the bartender, but it's never presented as their defining characteristic or a problem. The bartender's problem is that she's obsessed with avenging an accidental death. Not really disagreeing with a fair bit of this, just want to say that CDPR's PR management team was notoriously transphobic and would shoot off snarky transphobic bullshit on twitter to get the right wing throwbacks riled up prior to people calling them out and the account getting somewhat squelched on that front. So in light of that it came off as kind of lovely since y'know, regressives gonna slip in regressive bullshit in whatever way they can. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Dec 17, 2022 |
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Dec 17, 2022 15:19
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Archonex posted:Not really disagreeing with a fair bit of this, just want to say that CDPR's PR management team was notoriously transphobic and would shoot off snarky transphobic bullshit on twitter to get the right wing throwbacks riled up prior to people calling them out and the account getting somewhat squelched on that front. So in light of that it came off as kind of lovely since y'know, regressives gonna slip in regressive bullshit in whatever way they can. Ahh. I didn't pay one lick of attention to the game before it came out, so I missed out on that poo poo, but it's not surprising in the least.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:40
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I'm not sure how one could read the first chapter of Snow crash and think "Yes, this is a 100% serious book."
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Dec 17, 2022 19:59
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The two options aren't "100% serious book" and "satire." There are other things.
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Dec 17, 2022 20:14
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It's okay if you can't really figure out what Snowcrash is supposed to be doing. Neither could Stephenson.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:08
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Yeah, even though I wasn't on-board for some of the silliness, that book has loving problems. Like, the idea of Barbies and Clints is quite an interesting one, and has borne out in real life in some ways with "defaults' becoming a classroom insult, allegedly. But then the mutant guy is super tall in the metaverse and that means he would have to be that big in meatspace? Why? By what mechanism would that possibly operate? Wouldn't it have been more interesting and narratively compelling if maybe Hiro made note that it was a Clint that visited he and Dav5id with the Snowcrash and maybe only afterwards realized it was weird that anyone would go to a place moderately trendy without a custom avatar, not immediately realizing the anonymized danger? That book is not one where stuff just works or happens for narrative convenience; stuff just works or happens for literally any reason. I never played it but I remember hearing about the Deadpool PlayStation game where it changes gaming genres as a send up to certain gaming tropes. It was criticized because, for those tropes that are considered annoying or bad, presenting those gaming tropes as 'Isn't it silly that Deadpool is doing this?" meant that those negative tropes were faithfully recreated in this game, which was not appreciated by players. That's Snow Crash.
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Dec 17, 2022 22:41
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The whole metaverse thing is something that people who haven't played video games have a real hard time understanding. I suppose it's gotta be heartbreaking for them to realise that as cool as the idea of a full-immersion virtual world is, no one actually wants to do that for casual things. There's a reason everyone now accesses the internet through handheld mobile devices that are portable and allow for easy multitasking. Weirdly, Star Trek got that more or less right. The Holodeck even basically has game modding, indie development and, of course, porn. It's always funny when authors are the most accurate about technology when they focus on the relationship people have with it and how they choose to use it, rather than trying to figure out how it 'works'.
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Dec 18, 2022 02:56
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The politics of cyberpunk as a dystopian genre are really weird because they flipped completely after the turn of the millennium happened and computers (like cell phones), wireless communications , and the internet proliferated everywhere. The metacommentary of the original cyberpunk stories was that capitalism is an alienating, anti-human force that rules the world. If you want to escape the capitalist prison of everyday existence, you can be a punk and live on the edges of society doing crimes. But to survive, you have to sell off your humanity, one slice and implant at a time; you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Even if you're a hero, you're a tragic one, and capitalism always wins. The oWoD was also on this page where the designers really wanted to make game mechanics about trading humanity for power. In newer stories, that ship has sailed. In real life we're plugged in and online 24/7 anyway, but with better living through technology, you can at least do it more powerfully. It's hard to make a corporate surveillance debtor-prison state look like dystopian fiction that needs to be resisted by anti-heroic rebels when we're already living in one. Sure, there are nod to losing your humanity if you turn yourself into an invincible gundam warmachine, but the idea that superior technology is anything but superior typically isn't around anymore. It's purely a power fantasy of using sci-fi tech to do action movies and heist films against faceless villains, with dingy window dressing to pretend it's edgy.
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Dec 18, 2022 18:46
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There's also a kind of transhumanist zeitgeist that's gotten popular. "What is my 'humanity' that I'm supposedly selling off and why should I care when it lets me become my truest self?" These days the idea that altering the body is inherently icky is (probably rightly) seen as conservative and reactionary. Like, there's still definitely a thing about corporations owning those implants, but it's hard to see that as the technology's fault and not society's. Edit: Like I'm sure it works fine as a theme in plenty of the original cyberpunk stories, but when you game-ify it like cyberpunk and shadowrun do it just gets weird and ableist/transphobic. Clarste fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Dec 18, 2022 |
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Dec 18, 2022 19:31
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In Shadowrun, it was mostly a balancing mechanic so you couldn't be an awesome wizard AND full of hardware. It wasn't that you were losing your humanity, it's that you replaced your chakras with hardpoints and gadgets.
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Dec 18, 2022 19:59
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Clarste posted:There's also a kind of transhumanist zeitgeist that's gotten popular. "What is my 'humanity' that I'm supposedly selling off and why should I care when it lets me become my truest self?" These days the idea that altering the body is inherently icky is (probably rightly) seen as conservative and reactionary. Like, there's still definitely a thing about corporations owning those implants, but it's hard to see that as the technology's fault and not society's. It's also harder to sell technology advancing as being a net negative when so much of it is popular and has in many ways been a net benefit. As an example, prior to Elon deciding to sabotage Twitter into being a chudhole for his own gain it was immeasurably useful in exposing bigotry and corruption in society. Say what you will about social media as well, but having the ability to talk to someone on the other side of the globe in seconds is a net positive from the older standard of having to rely on a landline service or whatever. A good chunk of recent social progress can probably be partially attributed to social media highlighting how painfully obvious it's become that in the US a certain right wing party and it's financial and legislative backers are bigoted as gently caress and have been responsible for holding back the rights of many groups of oppressed people for their own profit political or otherwise. Real cyberpunk literature going forwards is probably going to focus on the dark aspects of transhumanism. Like, the Elon Musk's of the world slavering at the bit to commodify human flesh by making a paid baseline through augmenting the expected capabilities of workers. This is stuff ethicists have worried about for decades and it was lost in the tidal wave of literature going "Wow capitalism and government bad (No we won't examine why it is bad because we want to sell this book under capitalism and we are a bit too self conscious to pull off serious criticisms that are forward thinking.).". In that regard the cyberpunk genre and tabletop games similar to it are very much still alive and a potential view into the future. It's just that the future looks more like the leverage and rights of labor (A left wing concept in most areas of the world, with many past cyberpunk writers being not left wing at all. Not hard to see given that why so much of cyberpunk has focused on fantastic displays of what is essentially governmental overreach and not the actual nitty gritty of how transhumanism under capitalism can go wrong.) getting devastated by the added cost of giving your kid robot hands or whatever the gently caress is the first parasitic attempt by some vulture capitalist at establishing a new baseline of hirable requisites. Ironically, rebelling in this system would be creating working and sustainable alternative systems of legal revenue that doesn't require going into medical debt or selling parts of yourself off to be chromed up. Which is a much trickier concept to envision in a game or a book while keeping it as entertaining as "edgy outsider shoots authority figures to make a living" or whatever. Ironically, cyberpunk in this context might also end up being somewhat luddite albeit in a positive way due to overreach of moneyed interests into the bodies of others being the problem. Edit: Also, Shadowrun gets around the ableist and transphobic thing so it probably shouldn't be listed as one of the cyberpunk settings that gets it entirely wrong. In particular, people who are transgender don't suffer essence loss from moving to their appropriate gender. In fact, in setting this is assumed by some to mean that they were supposed to be that gender to begin with (in fact if essence loss is linked to brain patterns as some lore suggests it may be correct to assume this as studies in real life have shown that people who are trans tend to have brain activity that matches the gender they claim they are) and they're just moving towards what they were meant to to be to begin with if a fluke of genetics hadn't screwed them over. The same thing can apply with replacing missing limbs. And as the conversations with Rachter show, there's increasing evidence in setting that essence loss might actually be caused by the brain more than anything else. The mods that actively gently caress up your body are also deliberately designed in that way too. For instance, there's a nervous system augment that can turn you into a character out of the Matrix (or the Cyberpunk 2077 anime). How does it do this? It turns out it does this by inducing a permanent controlled set of seizures on the body, which obviously wrecks the nervous system and brain over a year or two and leaves the user in permanent agony from pretty much the moment it's installed. Obviously, runners don't want to install this thing and it's mostly used by corps that want to dispose of employees that know too much or stupidly think they're going to get ahead by installing a seizure inducing implant on behalf of the corporation's combat interests. Unfortunately as far as I know Cyberpunk 2077 is still ableist as gently caress in that there's no logical workaround for modding your body in the "wrong" ways. In particular, loving with your brain or your nervous system with mods ala Sandestivan or whatever it's called is usually a one way trip to crazy town. Archonex fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Dec 18, 2022 |
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Dec 18, 2022 20:10
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I think the idea of slicing off perfectly functional parts of yourself to replace them with unfeeling, unhealing metal is still kinda gross, and it's easy to see how things could go wrong, or how cyborg bodyparts that give you some superhuman functionality would have tradeoffs and mean giving up some of the human experience. Can't really eat a sandwich with an arm you replaced with a backhoe. In the world of prosthetic organs you have a mixed bag. One company that provided artificial eyes to the blind has gone out of business meaning those people with artificial eyes in their skulls are no longer technically supported, which could be hazardous when they run into future issues. There's also one of the last users of an iron lung who a little while back made some desperate internet pleas because he could no longer find replacement parts for the machine he needs to live (since polio has largely been eradicated in the US, there haven't been much call for iron lungs in recent days, so there's no production). But also you have some people who hacked their own insulin pump implants to be power-users and better service their needs. But also also, organ implants with wireless access introduce hacking vulnerability into your own body, which isn't good. There's plenty of ways new technology can go wrong, especially without oversight or regulation. I think Ghost in the Shell might be one of my favorite cyberpunk things, and it can be fairly neutral and maybe more often than not positive perspective on the technology itself although it showcases many of the ways they go wrong.
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Dec 18, 2022 20:39
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Archonex posted:Ironically, rebelling in this system would be creating working and sustainable alternative systems of legal revenue that don't require going into medical debt or selling parts of yourself off to be chromed up. Which is a much trickier concept to envision in a game or a book while keeping it as entertaining as "edgy outsider shoots authority figures to make a living" or whatever. I've joked occasionally to some friends that Stardew Valley, with the overreaching megacorp and actual supernatural poo poo hanging around, is secretly set in Shadowrun and you burn your SIN to escape to this back-to-earth enclave. It's not super-realistic in most cyberpunk settings that such an enclave could hope to keep the megacorp out, but Shadowrun might allow just such a one guarded through various magical means. Now phrased in this light, I... actually want that? Like maybe it's just me slowly calcifying into an old man who lives in bumfuck nowhere but I do some of the hobby animal-raising and gardening and such, and a game that gets into that actively in such a context sounds really oddly appealing.
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Dec 18, 2022 20:51
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Lots of good points there. Arguments about what is or isn't cyberpunk aside (we've never agreed and never will), a lot of cyberpunk betrays its roots in the 80s and the early cyberpunk fiction. The (anti-)heroes are loners, outcastes, fighting the Man. Corporations run the world. Drugs are good but drug addiction is bad. Music is powerful, man. Japan is the future. From the point of view of TYOL 2022, a lot of that looks incredibly lame. Corporations do run the world, but through money rather than before force. Japan has massive demographic & social problems. Musical artists are just corporate power in themselves. Outsiders are ... outsiders, who suffer being cut off from the mainstream. Which is not to criticise the original writers or creators of cyberpunk, but a lot of their premises just don't hold anymore.
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Dec 18, 2022 22:46
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Clarste posted:There's also a kind of transhumanist zeitgeist that's gotten popular. "What is my 'humanity' that I'm supposedly selling off and why should I care when it lets me become my truest self?" These days the idea that altering the body is inherently icky is (probably rightly) seen as conservative and reactionary. Like, there's still definitely a thing about corporations owning those implants, but it's hard to see that as the technology's fault and not society's. And what happens when those corporations go bankrupt and nobody else can do anything to support or fix them quote:BARBARA CAMPBELL was walking through a New York City subway station during rush hour when her world abruptly went dark. For four years, Campbell had been using a high-tech implant in her left eye that gave her a crude kind of bionic vision, partially compensating for the genetic disease that had rendered her completely blind in her 30s. “I remember exactly where I was: I was switching from the 6 train to the F train,” Campbell tells IEEE Spectrum. “I was about to go down the stairs, and all of a sudden I heard a little ‘beep, beep, beep’ sound.”
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Dec 18, 2022 23:45
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...were any of those things different in the 80s?
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Dec 18, 2022 23:46
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That whole transhumanist zeitgeist involved poo poo like Google Glass wearers not understanding why people at the dive bar they were gentrifying out of existance might hate them and the I loving Love Science-ification of the thoughtspace. You can see something similar with the softening of the Technocratic Union in the WoD. Which involved a very Western playerbase not grokking why folks might still be pissed at the group that did A Colonialism at the entire metaphysical world because, like, everyone has smartphones now!
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Dec 18, 2022 23:58
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Absurd Alhazred posted:And what happens when those corporations go bankrupt and nobody else can do anything to support or fix them Yeah, which is why the corporations owning the stuff is still a problem (and patents and right to repair and whatnot making it impossible for anyone else to fix it). I mean, the thing did help her see, apparently.
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Dec 19, 2022 00:03
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