Wither Cyberpunk?

Hello and welcome back. Today, we’re taking a break from milquetoast white middle class takes on socio-political issues and getting back to what I’m really good at: Nonsensical waffling about deeply nerdy shit. That’s right, today we’re going to talk about cyberpunk.

Here’s what I said about the genre back in March:

Cyberpunk is a wonderful genre, so fun, so full of cool gadgetry, bass-ass mofos, gangsters, mercs, techno-blitzkrieg action, neon, rain and bare buttocks gyrating to electronica. I love it, really I do. But damn is it a limited, self-referential genre.

It is. It’s a narrative straight-jacket capable of telling about three possible stories, all of them involving a hacker, a gun-toting mercenary and a prostitute with a heart of gold. Spoilers: They all die and live happily ever after.

That said, it’s surprising how long and how well the genre has survived since it downloaded itself into the public infosphere back in the early 80s. In the 90s it was rebooted through Neal Stephenson’s books and the Matrix trilogy, the Shadowrun RPG as well as William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (peak Gibson, to my mind), then saved from the Y2K bug by things like the “Blade Runner” sequel or Richard Morgan’s “Altered Carbon” series (covered here, here and here), which later became a Netflix series (here and here). Everything from “Black Mirror” to “Love, Death and Robots” owes a deep debt to this genre.

And it keeps going. Pandemic willing, we are currently four months away from the November 19 release of CD Projekt Red’s latest game, “Cyberpunk 2077” (which I wrote a little about here) and its promise of infinitely customizable genitalia. A tie-in anime has also been announced, slated for release in 2021. Cyberpunk has never been hotter, or cooler, or whatever your desired ambient temperature may be.

The question is, Why?

Why does this genre, so evidently a product of a very specific place and time (my bedroom, circa 1990) continue to enjoy such popularity?

Part of the reason cyberpunk is enjoying a revival, as British author Adam Roberts suggests in his blog Morphosis, is probably because kids like me who grew up in the 80s are now in positions to make creative decisions about what gets made, and we’re all feeling a little nostalgic for some babes, bikes and Blade Runner.

Another part of the reason may be pure fashion. Black never goes out of style. William Gibson’s seminal novel “Neuromancer” published in 1984 gets a lot of the credit for kicking off the genre, but it’s worth pointing out this was actually two years after both Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga series “Akira” (movie-fied in 1988) and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner”, which together established a set of aesthetics that have survived the intervening 30 years as a shorthand for effortless dystopic cool.

It’s the aesthetics that have stuck with us more than anything, but I’m not sure those alone explain the longevity of such an (apparently) niche genre. To be sure, the fact that cyberpunk gives artists a fig leaf to cover the fetishization of gratuitously bloody gunplay and large-breasted girls is attractive to some. That doesn’t explain, for example, Altered Carbon’s use of the genre to explore themes of resistance to power and control though, or Blade Runner: 2049’s more mournful contemplation of the definition of self.

There is, I think, an ideological core to cyberpunk which still resonates with us, even 30 years later. The concerns the genre raises have not gone away, and indeed, have become ever more pressing.

What is the cyberpunk manifesto? Let’s have a look.

Tenet 1: Technology will become increasingly ubiquitous and invasive

The first and most important assertion cyberpunk makes about our future (looking forward from the 80s) is that we will become dependent on technology in every aspect of our lives.

Information networks will become connected and regulate everything from finance to consumption to politics.

In parallel, technology will also invade the body, leading to physical enhancement or even the total separation of mental and physical selves, but also a growing alienation and loss of control over ourselves. As your mind and body become increasingly digitized, you will suffer the same vulnerabilities as all digital devices—subject to manipulation and hacking.

Tenet 2: Privatization of everything and societal collapse

Cyberpunk’s corollary to the increasing colonization of every aspect of society by technology is that such technology will make it easier and easier for wealth and power to be accumulated in private hands, while public institutions grow weaker and weaker until they are effectively useless.

The lawless vacuum their collapse creates will be filled with private armies, mercenaries and assassins, drug dealers, sex workers, gangs, especially the yakuza, cyborgs and killer robots.

Tenet 3: It’s up to the lone-wolf antisocial rebel hero to save the day

The governments, the police, the corporations, and pretty much every institution you can name is either powerless or corrupt or more likely some neon-blended combination of the two. As a result, it’s up to individuals to fight back against oppression, exploitation and evil.

Okay, so that didn’t happen

At first glance, it seems easy to dismiss many of the predictions cyberpunk tried to make about the future of society.

Cyberspace, for example, has not become an immersive VR experience, but instead a Matryoshka collection of nesting screens growing paradoxically both smaller and more intrusive.

Governments have not collapsed, as electorates and oligarchs have increasingly turned to “strong men” clamping down harder and harder the more they sense the world is slipping from their grasp.

Japanese corporations, far from continuing to buy up larger and larger swathes of North America, have gone into retreat. Indeed, the 90s yellow-peril specter of Japanese domination (see Michael Crichton’s “Rising Sun” and Tom Clancy’s “Debt of Honor”, ’92 and ’94 respectively) now seems positively quaint.

Yet if you stop for a moment and look past the surface aesthetics and focus instead on what cyberpunk is actually saying, it’s clear many of these issues are very much still with us today.

Has technology invaded our lives? Are we dependent on it?

Ooh you betcha. Uploaded consciousness or total body prosthesis is still the realm of SF, but come on.

We all carry little rectangles of plastic and wiring that connect us 24/7 to a global information network of reaction gifs, porn, unhinged political tweets and inanely niche blogs. Social media is in the process of monetizing every aspect of our private lives. Facial recognition software and surveillance technology mean we are never truly alone. Your phone might be listening to everything you say. Your car is evaluating how well you drive, and telling your insurer. Your TV is talking to your fridge, and they think you’re a loser.

Technology has never been more omni-present in our lives, and despite appearances, I don’t think we’re any more comfortable with it than we were 30 years ago. We’ve just adopted a kind of learned helplessness, accepted that there’s nothing we can do to avoid it.

Have social institutions weakened? Are corporations becoming laws unto themselves?

I mean, come on. High-tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple or Microsoft are effectively ungovernable. Septuagenarian senators haven’t the faintest clue what these companies even do, much less how they might be regulated. Meanwhile health costs skyrocket, education fails to deliver either basic life skills or post-graduate employment, families are divided across Facebook battlezones, and ununionized workforces trapped in the gig economy Uber-drive in their spare time just to get by.

While corporations themselves have not accumulated power into the hands of faceless boards, that role has instead been played by the charismatic hero-CEO, the Jeff Bezos, Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world, the infamous 0.1% against whom even the wealth of the 1% pales into insignificance. Cyberpunk is worried about the way technology creates an inequality of information that in turn accelerates the inequality of wealth, and this is perhaps the defining characteristic of late-stage capitalism.

Lawlessness has absolutely been the result, as people slowly realize the way in which traditional power structures have been co-opted to operate to service the elite. Our cousins in the good ole US of Americuh are one month into nation-wide protests against the perceived failings of their police and judicial system. Just before that, gun-armed protesters were storming state capitals to demand a lifting of restrictions on economic activity. There is an increasing sense that systems don’t work, and it’s up to people to take matters into their own hands.

And I think that’s why we still have cyberpunk. The core unease, the sense that Joe, Jane and Gennefer average has lost control of the technology we use, and by extension of the societies we live in, has not gone away. It’s here, and it’s stronger than ever. And so is cyberpunk.

This post is full of spoilers!

On an online discussion forum, someone recently asked about Joe Abercrombie’s “Last Wish” series (I reviewed the first two books here and here), to which I replied they were an inversion of common fantasy tropes. Right? Right. Pretty basic stuff.

 

Oh, but no. That’s a spoiler, you see.

 

Not five minutes later I had two users passive-aggressively bitching at me for spoiling the series. Yes, I know, boo-hoo, woe is me. I’ll live, I’ll survive. But for fuck’s sake, can we knock this shit off?

 

(The girl in The Crying Game is transgender.)

 

The spoiler crusade probably grew out of a sympathetic impulse—to prevent online assholes (“trolls,” sorry) from deliberately trying to ruin books and movies for other people—and like all our good impulses it was immediately taken up and wielded by the worst sort of literal-minded, unimaginative, killjoy people on the planet to stifle virtually any media discussion that doesn’t cater to their fragile paleo-diet sensitivities. Spoiler warnings are the emotional support dogs of Internet Karens constantly screaming for forum managers. They are the “Do Not Iron While Wearing Shirt” product warning labels of people too stupid to take care of themselves.

 

(Kylo Ren kills Han Solo.)

 

If you haven’t guessed, I’m not too keen on spoiler warnings.

 

(Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze.)

 

Partly, I think the structure of a lot of modern media is to blame, and partly it’s part of an online outrage culture that rewards vigilantism over actual discussion and thought.

 

(Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.)

 

Now there are some stories in which the big reveal at the ending is the point. The mystery genre is an obvious example—the whole story revolves around unraveling whodunit. Revealing the end in that case would, of course, lessen your enjoyment of the story. No question there.

 

(Jesus comes back from the dead.)

 

The problem is, with the popularity of shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica,” the rise of the “mystery box” and “subverting expectations” approaches to storytelling have exported these techniques to genres where the whodunit isn’t, or rather shouldn’t be the point at all. In the bid to ensure every property is must-see “appointment television” that you have to watch as soon as it is released or miss out on the zeitgeist forever, more and more entertainment is being drained of repeat value, turned into a pump-and-dump one night stand that’s forgotten the next morning.

 

(Oedipus kills his dad and marries his mom.)

 

Take the Star Wars franchise: “The Force Awakens” is a prime example of mystery box storytelling, but for fucks' sake why? Star Wars is space opera, not Agatha Christie. Sure, the movies have always had surprises … just, that was never the point of the movies. The twist that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father is a surprise, but your enjoyment of the franchise doesn’t hinge on not knowing this fact. Hell, the entire prequel trilogy depends on you knowing this fact, otherwise its relationship to the original three movies would be utterly baffling.

 

(Oldboy is her dad.)

 

Another example would be Game of Thrones, which did a lot to popularize the use of shocking twists: Ned's execution or the murder of the Starks at the Red Wedding are also surprising, but let me tell you I and thousands of other book readers knew exactly what was coming and loved every minute of it.

 

(Beowulf kills Grendel.)

 

Those aren’t spoilers, you see, they’re just plot points. Those are things that happen in the course of the story, not the central point of the story itself. If you call those spoilers, then literally every fact about the book or movie, the names of the characters, the genre, the gist of the plot, they’re all spoilers. Every trailer, poster, announcement or review is a spoiler. "I liked it," is a spoiler. If you want to wander in into a movie theater and plump your whining arse down completely unspoiled, you’d have to be blindfolded and led inside without even knowing the title.

 

(Soylent green is people.)

 

Even overlooking that point, any narrative that is only enjoyable once and never again because now you know the details is shit. Worthless. Insulting, condescending entertainment that has nothing of value to offer and nothing to say other than “Fooled you!” It’s an admission that there is nothing but plot—no characters, no setting, no mood, no drama, no tension. Just plot. And that’s a shallow, shallow way to approach entertainment.

 

(Tyler Durden doesn’t exist.)

 

For an example of the opposite approach, let’s look at Chris Nolan’s movie, “Memento.” There’s a fairly complicated plot. Like almost all Nolan movies, it screws around with time, this time by putting you into the amnesiac main character’s head by having events play out in reverse chronological order, so you don’t know what’s happening, either. At the end, turns out the amnesiac is responsible for his own wife’s death and keeps cynically hunting for people to get revenge on as a way of giving himself a reason to live. Now you can go back and watch the movie, and see how that all gets set up. THERE IS MORE THAN JUST PLOT. You can still enjoy every single moment of it. Because the point is the nature and malleability of memory, not whether or not this loony bastard has killed anyone or not.

 

Journey, not the destination, people.

 

(Macbeth did it.)

 

The other aspect of this narrative nannying is that it plays into social media’s tendency to reward grandstanding and style over substance. People are upvoted for reposting a funny picture, not for making one. They are praised for making posts like “Can we all appreciate X…” rather than, you know, everyone actually appreciating the person directly. Spoiler-whinging is part of this, too. The finger-wagging for mentioning spoilers means, of course, that the finger-wagger has already consumed the media in question and is thus being outraged on some theoretical other’s behalf.

 

(Achilles dies at the end.)

 

It’s white-knighting, only for the supposed lambs wandering innocently into movie or book discussions blissfully unaware that a movie or book discussion might contain details of the movie or book in question. They aren’t actually defending or protecting anyone, they’re just performatively demonstrating how pure and noble they are, in return for watching a small digit on their screen display a slightly larger number.

Listen: I saw an online book discussion in which the plot of the Iliad was deemed a spoiler. The Iliad. A three thousand year old poem. A tale in the oral tradition whose impact relies on the audience being familiar with the plot.

Listen: People want to spoiler tag the plot of Dune. A 60 year-old novel that has already been adapted to the screen twice, and (as of this writing) is scheduled for a third trip to the silver screen. 

 

(This isn’t a spoiler. Aha, made you look.)

 

Arguing or attempting to publicly shame someone online is designed to draw more attention to the point in question, to get more people to see the spoiler, not less (Otherwise, how else will everyone see how brave the spoiler defender is being).

 

In this sense, it’s part of the same trend towards worshipping lore over story, the desire for exclusive control over how media is consumed and enjoyed. Just as lord nerds insist that fictional facts fit their stores of hoarded trivia, so spoiler queens insist that experiences with fiction fit their ideals. Everyone must watch or read in the spoiler purist’s approved way—no others are allowed.

 

(This post ends after the next paragraph.)

 

So what perhaps once began as a genuine attempt to improve everyone’s online experience has now been cynically twisted into a self-serving attempt to show what a great guy you are. It isn’t for anyone’s benefit but the complainer. It’s petty, it’s childish, and it’s time for this shit to stop.

Breath of the Wild

Yes, we’re here today to review a game that came out in 2017 because that’s the kind of timely, breaking, up-to-the-decade content our reader (Hi, Tom) has come to expect from this blog.

We got a Switch, for the exercise games really, but it gave me the excuse to buy a game for myself. I picked up this one, and three weeks later emerged, pastel-shaded but happier, thoroughly happy with my purchase.

After a string of gritty, bloody open-world games like “Skyrim” and “Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt” it was nice to play something almost innocent like Breath of the Wild for a change.

I say it’s innocent, and overall it is, though the setup is a little dark. You see, the backstory is an ancient evil returned to the world (they way they inevitably do, as foretold by the prophecy) and … the good guys lost. Your four closest friends were all killed, the princess you swore to protect is now locked in an eternal, stalemated battle with the ancient evil, and you were so badly injured you had to spend 100 years in a bacta tank recovering. The five races of the kingdom were brutally slaughtered by an army of relentless, soulless, pitiless robots. Also, you can get your inventory space increased by a fat green fairy who plays the maracas. The whimsy sometimes jives oddly with the post-apocalyptic setting, is all I’m saying.

As Link, the princess’s champion, your task is to visit the four non-human races and free their “Divine Beasts”—giant animal-shaped war machines—before the final confrontation with the Big Bad, called “Calamity Ganon.” In parallel, you can also try to restore Link’s memories by visiting 12 places of special importance to him. It being an open world you can, of course, just piss about the whole time or attempt to kill the big bad while still completely amnesiac and armed only with a pointed stick. It’s really up to you.

The four races are the birdlike Rito, the boulder-shaped Goron, a bunch of fish with heads shaped like porpoises, and a desert-dwelling tribe of redheaded Amazons with washboard abs and ski jump noses. The four thus neatly map onto the four ancient elements, namely wind, earth, water and gingers. 

Getting them onto your side requires you board one of the Divine Beasts (a bird, a salamander, an elephant and a camel) and solve a series of puzzles before fighting a mini-boss. These were fun to figure out, but by the time you get to the fourth one, the near carbon-copy nature gets a little wearying.

The RPG mechanics are fairly limited. You only have two stats: health and stamina. Instead of being raised through experience, you need to collect tokens from a series of hidden shrines, each of which requires you to solve a puzzle. These puzzles generally hit the sweet spot of being engaging without being frustrating—fairly straightforward, but you still feel like a bloody genius when you figure them out. The only thing that was a little annoying was that each shrine involved about three identical cutscenes every single time you entered one.

Combat I found a lot less satisfactory. On the plus side you have complete freedom to approach any encounter the way you want. The game gives you a set of potentially useful abilities, including remote-detonated bombs, a magnet, an ice-maker and the ability to freeze time, and these allow some creative solutions like knocking enemies off cliffs with levitating metal boxes or firing boulders at them. You can also find melee weapons—one handed, two-handed and spears—as well as bows, but melee combat in particular was dependent on split-second timing which, at 45, I can do about once in every five attempts.

Your conversation choices are about as limited as the RPG elements. The people encounter along the way are mostly bland NPCs there only to give out quests, mixed with some very idiosyncratic personalities, such as a scientist who has regressed to childhood and another who (in the Japanese version of the game) speaks English, but the English of a Japanese person who doesn’t speak English very well. These NPCs offer you dozens of side quests you can take or leave, but frankly I left most of them, as they tended to be rather long and involved, frustratingly hard to understand what you were supposed to be doing, and rewarded you with little more than a pat on the head. Balance wasn’t quite so well done there.

The other major task you'll find yourself doing is finding and activating a series of Towers, each of which reveals a portion of the map of the world to you. All the towers look almost identical and you go through an identical cutscene to activate them and after the Divine Beasts and the shrines I think you can probably guess what I'm going to complain about at the end of this review.

But let's talk about the good stuff first. The area where the game really shines is the art design and the world itself. Breath of the Wild has a wonderfully stylized sort of comic-book look to it, neither too childish nor too realistic, that is unique, distinctive, and genuinely lovely to look at. The map covers a range of terrain, from rolling grasslands to a lava-spewing volcano, from blistering desert to snow-capped mountains. Traveling about them is sped up by giving you access to horses and a kind of parachute/hang glider that lets you swoop down from cliffs or mountains. At the beginning, at least, there’s a lot of fun to be had just peacefully wandering about and looking at things. There’s a lot of empty space, but that serves to space out the action and gives you the chance to appreciate this world.

Of course, even that can wear thin after a bit, so it’s time to face that nasty old Calamity Ganon and give him a jolly good thrashing.

The final climactic showdown is a little bizarre, in that there are two phases. Phase One is a floaty spider thing which combines elements from the four Divine Beast mini-bosses. Sure, you think, okay, builds up nicely. Once you beat that, Phase Two begins. In Phase Two, the big bad transforms into a giant pig that. Um. Kind of stands there. You shoot it full of arrows and win! Yay!

You are then reunited with Princess Zelda in a very sweet yet chaste scene (c’mon, she’s 17 guys—well, 117 I suppose, which is also kind of weird). Fade to black.

It’s a glorious, gorgeous, light-hearted game, that suffers only in some of the samey locations and the repetitive nature of the four main quests. Still, after so much grim darkness, it’s a breath of fresh air. Ha!

Anthem

Picked up BioWare's Anthem for $20 and just finished the main campaign. This game gets a ton of bad press, but if you just play it as Mass Effect in battle armor, it's fine. Not great, but fine.

It definitely feels like a BioWare game awkwardly grafted onto social loot shooter mechanics.

For example, it's got the mission, talk to people at base, mission cycle from ME, but none of the people you talk to go on your adventures or impact the game or campaign in any way, so you wonder why you're bothering.

Dialogues give you a kind of Renegade/Paragon reply option, but again, they don't seem to make any difference (your choices are essentially things like 'agree pleasantly' or 'agree sarcastically'), so again, why bother?

There a some good things. The suits are fun, flying is cool, environment designs are nice.

Combat is okay, if nothing special. Guns are kind of dull, just shotgun, AR, sniper etc archetypes, which makes the loot (ostensibly the motivator in loot shooters) a bit pointless, but at least the special abilities are fun to play with. Combos are a thing, as they were in ME3, so you can play around with freezing, burning and shocking your opponents.

Anyway I suspect the guns all actually perform the same regardless of displayed stats, to allow high and low level players to do missions together. The only thing that seems to matter is the cooldown on your abilities.

Enemies are seriously bland. Missions either defend the point or kill the VIP style, which gets a bit repetitive, but then I suppose the grinding in any social shooter is part of the territory. With the loot being so drab, though, there isn't really much motivation to stick with it.
 
Some of the basic things are pretty bad though. The UI for menus in particular is pretty crap and unintuitive. Inventory is straight out of ME1.  

In general, the game does a very bad job of explaining the mechanics. Like if I level up my "Arcanist" ranking I get access to "blueprints" but I've no idea which ones. Or at a high level you get to use "consumables" but it never tells you what they do or how to access them.

But overall I feel like I got my money's worth. I don't need a game that demands I play forever to keep up. Okay story, kind of fun combat, and I'm satisfied.