this tweet is evergreen
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And what’s really workable and interesting about these stories is they’re trying to explicate a world morality, and they’re using detective/crime fiction construction to literalize problems as monsters and think about trauma in a pre-psychological framework. They’re working out how stories process cultural events and correspondingly shape culture, and in that detective framework they can contrast it to modern storyelling (not to mention, the detective framework is superbly functional for generating world-hopping quests).
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i guess ive never understood the trans urge to describe ones self as “cyberpunk.” like i get the transhumanist angle for better or for worse but it just seems like revisionism to me…i dont think cyberpunk has ever been aspirational. it seems like the product of aesthetic obsession more than anything else, and if people want to take the genre seriously they should probably look at what it is and not what they want it to be. that being said trying to defend the sanctity of the genre like the nerds yelling at William Gibson for saying this game looked like shit is stupid
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It’s worth mentioning, although I don’t really want to defend them, that CD Projekt Red is a development studio that was created to make Cyberpunk and has not released any games yet
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I mean, ideally not, but nerds.
I do agree that insofar as cyberpunk’s essential insight is “Reaganism extrapolated” it’s an outdated cultural frame, which is why every ostensibly “cyberpunk” setting made in the past 15 years feels like a Fallout retro-future instead of a legitimate depiction of our actual future. But, you know, on the other hand, Blade Runner looks awesome.
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I mean, I get it. If you’re someone like me that thinks a lot about changing one’s body, modifying it, and rebuilding it, shit starts getting really close to the most interesting concepts that turn up in ‘cyberpunk’ when transitioning. Like I think a lot about ‘I want to do this, or I want to do that’ and what aesthetic and gender image I want to project.
I fully understand, however, this is not how everyone views things, and I would not want to imply it is.
I think there’s a lot of issues with the term Cyberpunk in general, and I’m not sure it was ever anything approaching the genre as people claim it to be before Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, both of which have much more anti-capitalist values than anything Gibson wrote. Or blade runner. Or ghost in the Shell.
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I mean, their history on Wiki says they were created to make the witcher games so where is this coming from?
Ok, I think my info is out of date; the new Wrocław studio was the developer at least until Witcher 3’s DLC ended.
Fair enough. I was just really curious if there was some inside scuttle or something, because this has been sold as “from the people that made the Witcher games” from like day 1.
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Gibson doesn’t read as anti-capitalist? Neuromancer is about a wealthy family locking that money up in a space station and turning incestuous while attempting to clone themselves into immortality
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And Count Zero has an integral part of the plot centered around a trillionaire who exists mostly in jars hooked up to computers trying to find a way to make himself immortal by literally throwing money at the problem.
Mild counterpoint is obviously Gibson’s fascination with clothing consumerism, but it’s a really mild counterpoint.
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Yeah, he’s definitely a creature of society and loves a lot of consumerism and the rotting remains of consumerism. But that feels really elemental and a core part of the post-industrial milieu cyberpunk grows from: we love consumerism, but are aware of what it’s doing to us, and only seem to be able fight it in doomed individualistic actions against implacable systems
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His current extremely neoliberal politics where he complains about kids these days kinda convinced me that those were accidental ideas rather than intentional ones.
I guess it’s possible his politics just changed over time.
Even then Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 both have explicitly heroic ecoterrorists, and by the time you get to Cybergeneration (the sequel game to 2020) you have an implied motivation to fight an entire system rather than just individual wealthy people.
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Sure, but even after identifying the problems they’re still explicitly doomed, because the myth-framework implies that our western and consumerist individual hero is doomed against the structures we’ve built. It always lives within doomed romance
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It’s more of a case that tabletop RPGs don’t have endings unless you write them in your game, IMO.
And Cybergeneration was pretty explicit about being about actually fixing things instead of just treading water.
(That said, Cybergeneration is very much the exception, rather than the rule).
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“plz ignore the implications that my imagery has in the modern world and only react in the context of this COCKSUCKING vidyagame setting DAMMIT” I guess idk I’m not educated enough 4 this
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the theme of this video game is that. society… is bad
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we live in a [bad] society
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i mean dont get me wrong ghost in the shell meant a lot to me as a baby trans and it still does, like ive spent most of my life at this point with major kusanagi hair. so obviously i get the aesthetic obsession with cyberpunk people can develop, but i do think the way people treat it is dangerously close to missing the point. also to say william gibsons work isnt anti-capitalist is a pretty uncharitable reading of his older, more traditional cyberpunk work. like in part its obviously fueled by frustration with reaganite excesses under capitalism and even though hes a neoliberal dweeb now i think the intent there was genuine
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