![]() Exalted is about the nature of power and how people use it, Vampire is about addiction, My Life with Master is about co-dependency, and Dogs in the Vineyard is about - among many things - the terrible things people can do when trying to make a better world. On the other hand, there's games that are ambitious on a scale larger than the dungeon crawl. Not only do such questions rarely, if ever, get considered in our non-gaming lives, the further degree of separation arising from the fact that the "human" in question literally boils down to a page full of numbers, lacking even a full narrative existence, makes the questions all but inaccessible to players. Yeah, while I can imagine some groups being immersive enough to really care about whether or not their character considers himself or herself "human" anymore after extensive cybernetic replacements and/or repeated excursions into a shared-consciousness network.but none of my groups have ever approached a cyberpunk game, or indeed any game at all, with that mindset. You can't really expect people to show up for a dungeon crawl and be confronted with the idea that we're all essentially a single consciousness being filtered through a trillion human lifetimes in a holographic universe. ![]() ![]() It's also perhaps unfair to ask, say, Paranoia to address the deeper meanings of 1984 and Brave New World, or for Over the Edge to address the unholy opium sex nightmare that is Naked Lunch. Gaming has a hard time with those questions, though, and perhaps it's impossible to ask or answer questions as literary as the ones that Gibson is proposing. The Dixie Flatline is a literal ghost reading over Case's shoulder, but he's just a bunch of ones and zeroes on a drive is human consciousness that simple to mimic? And if that's the case - if the soul is digital - is cyberspace the closest we're going to get to heaven? (Case's fall from cyberspace feels like the fall from heaven, given his reaction to regaining it.) Ignore, for a second, the future that Gibson predicted and look at the moments where Gibson asks incredibly disquieting questions about the nature of human consciousness and its need for the transcendent experience. The archetypal cyberpunk novel is Neuromancer, which is a brilliantly deep novel with the superficial gloss of a criminal caper over top of it. The innovations have grown stale, and the messages have become moot. Some of the themes still have legs - wealth and power disparity are still very real, but bereft of the threat of imminent collapse, cyberpunk seems more like an alarmist worst-case scenario these days than a look at a grim but all-too possible future. Add to that the miniaturization and unprecedented spread of communications technology, which both eliminated the need for a grand centralized "matrix" and blurred the lines between the technological "haves" and "have nots", a relative strengthening of governmental power as compared to corporate in response to the rise of global terror organizations (leading to more legitimate fears of being abused by one's government, rather than some faceless corporation), and.well, it's just a different world, now. Coupled with high-profile corporate scandals (looking at you, Enron) leading to increased consumer skepticism, corporate dominance over modern life is a very different experience than Gibson predicted. Even predicted economic heavyweight Japan soon suffered from the "Lost Decade" of financial stagnation (which some might argue continued until the beginning of this decade). I think the biggest contributor to that fact is likely that the world to which Gibson held a darkened mirror was itself a flash-in-the-pan, destined to fall with the recession of the early '90s. In short, as soon as it was gameable, there was nothing more that could be said.ĭavid here, and I have to agree, really, despite the fact that a cyberpunk game to be discussed briefly in a bit is perhaps my favorite RPG of all time. As soon as the innovations turned into tropes, as soon as the surface elements became the substance, as soon as the complicated ideas could be discarded for the facile and the glib, as soon as the imitators crawled out of the woodwork with nothing of import to say, the movement was dead. Cyberpunk, as an idea, was pretty much dead the second that it was named.
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