I write cyberpunk short fiction and I’m working on a pair of novels that are grounded in many of the old tropes from the 80s, but my goal has always been to bring the punk part of the word back into the work. Watching this thread has been a trip. I’ve been back and forth on this stuff myself, but I think that, from an academic standpoint, as someone who loves the genre… I have to play this game. In the same way I had to read Bruce Bethke’s Headcrash (which I don’t recommend anyone do) I have to play this game to understand where and what capital C culture and capital C capitalism think cyberpunk is as popular culture. Because that’s what this game is. It’s popular culture pulling niche to light for everyone else to see. I’m fascinated by it tbh.
lol
By Samuel Delany, tweeted by Cameron Kunzelman, retweeted by Austin, etc. etc.
Considering @EXWeis statement upthread that 2077 is “pop culture pulling niche to light,” I remember being initially a little skeptical. Cyberpunk? Niche? When we have movies like Mute dropping on Netflix to mediocre reception? (Side note, but perhaps the sign of mass exploitation of an aesthetic is the production of unremarkable, artless examples of said aesthetic).
But then I considered how many people over the years I’ve floated the term “cyberpunk” to. How many people, even, when they ask me what my favorite book is haven’t heard of Neuromancer. Give it a few months. People are going to be talking about 2077 the way my seventh grade geography teacher in the middle of horse country talked about Skyrim.
The part of me that is a child is honestly kind of afraid of that. The shit that people say about this capital G Game is going to be, in greater rather than lesser proportion, dumb. But the part of me that has done some growing up recalls that I also have a long-standing love for westerns, and RDR2’s release wasn’t that bad.
Rewatching the “guns with wires on them” and “race war” trailers made me realize how much of CDPR’s political incorrectness is born from a kind of center-right political apathy; a kind of showroom-floor, quietly political, bourgeois antipolitics. It’s no surprise that their claim to fame thus far is a franchise based around a character who crystallized “neo-liberal anti-politics.” Only people with no perceptible skin in the game are able to think that politics are something loud and boring for wonks and college students.
They’re people, essentially, who don’t live in the real world. And their fiction reflects that. For better or worse, Japanese zaibatsus like Arasaka made a kind of sense in the speculative fiction of the '80s. What if the world went in that direction? Except we know that it didn’t. And yet, the proliferation of tentpole media like this that lives in a mirror-world will probably inspire the thinking of at least a few thousand people.
Looks like they’ve updated the character creator. Looks like pronouns are still attached to voice, which is a bad choice. I hope they patch it or someone mods the ability to chance your pronouns.
I haven’t watched the new Wire, but I’m guessing they didn’t talk about the Crunch story.
They’ve dodged crunch stories even when “addressing” them since before Witcher 3, they’re probably right to think they can get away with it now. Especially since Daddy Rockstar got the biggest exposé yet for RDR2 and it didn’t do shit.
The pronouns thing reminds me of that South Park game that increased difficulty based on how dark your skin tone was. Like wow way to quietly invoke an actual cultural problem with zero elaboration when it’s a topic that most of your demo (that’s not already grotesquely misinformed beyond repair) are completely uninformed about, I’m sure that couldn’t affirm any common shitty ideas about how to treat people.
If by “crunch” you mean a long ad for Keanu’s motorcycle brand, then yes, they address “crunch”
The Porsche ad was weird as fuck as well. I like cars, but I guarantee Porsche has put a ton of money into fossil fuel lobbying to keep combustion engines viable in their market space.
i cAn’T wAiT tO DrIvE mY pOrScHe tHrOuGh tHe cLiMaTe cHaNgE rUiNeD wAsTeLaNd!
Those are some pretty, well-modeled looking vehicles.
Watching the “Styles” video that this pic is from affirmed, more than ever, that CDPR just made a GTA. It’s just so fucking… Tawdry.
Not that it effectively absolves them of suspicion or anything else but doesn’t Porsche have a Formula E team?
I mean, I’m sure they’ve adapted, but I am sus of every car company.
Can’t say I agree with that notion but, then again, cars have rather been a positive thing in my life.
…
This thread’s supposed to be about Cyberpunk, isn’t it.
God! It’s just such a rote unimaginative take on the genre. Every part has been done to death and realized to be mostly racist. It is aesthetically almost completely uncompelling. Oh, to have this instead be a super high budget Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun game.
And why the Hell is Morro Bay a megacity? Cambria was right there, 10 miles north. Hearst Castle, one of the great capitalist relics, is right there.
Remember how the end of Shadowrun Hong Kong was you and your crew fighting the spiritual embodiment of Capitalism buried in the heart of the city by a megacorporation to literally bleed the people dry. That shit slapped.
Anyway fuck CDPR this game looks like boring GTA level trash satire lol
Remember in Dragonfall how the only white male in your party is an old punk rocker sticking hard to the best tenets of classic punk like some sort of German Joe Strummer and his sidequest is all about keeping his nephew the Hell away from and slaughtering science-fantasy white supremacists. And it’s also elegantly subtle and complex enough for it not to seem distasteful that they went with racists in Germany, instead focusing on Dietrich’s disgust at how these groups have taken on the trappings of punk and poisoned it’s image… also that they’re violent racists that all need to be removed tout suite.
So yeah, what’s Harebrained Scheme’s up to right now?
Milfgaard
Just, Milfgaard
You know, I don’t wanna count my chickens or anything, but, I think this game’s gonna be bad
The tone of this game feels like 80s/90s Dredd… There has to be a term for it, not just cyberpunk but like… McDonalds-Punk?
Oh my God. I hadn’t made that specific connection before, but oh my God. You’re dead on. It’s Stallone Dredd/Demolition Man.
That’s actually a pretty cute joke. I got a kick out of it.
Heh, there’s something about THIS very style of cyberpunk. Lots of red, yellows, and sickly colors, very offensive portrayls of overweight people, sex workers, gangs… Everything looks like a McDonald’s ad. It’s a post reagan look at the world, for better or worse.
I’m rewatching the most recent Dredd movie, and while it has that visual style in a lot of areas, the film is also sympathetic to a lot of disenfranchised characters.
a genuine answer to your question but someone on twitter (cant remember who, I just saw it in a reply) used “sighberpunk” to describe stuff like this and Watch_Dogs Legion, another game extremely in love with its own aesthetic but looks awful, and I think its approprately corny for the level this game seems to be operating on.
