The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson’s lead-in to Neuromancer hooked me instantly; I read that book over and over; its cover is held on with cotton electric tape and the paper is browned and crumbly. It hasn’t held up well – neither the book, nor the idea of paper books has held up well. How many kids right now know what “the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel” looks like? [The echoes of the Big Bang] That was 1984. Blade Runner came out in 1982; my sweetheart – also named Rachel – and I saw it at the opening night in our local theater, where I had seen ALIEN 3 years before. The book and those movies established a dystopian aesthetic that has stuck with me ever since. There are people who see the future as the harmonious, clean, designs of Star Wars and there are people who see the future as wet and dimly-lit through fog, falling apart and kludged together. The opening scene of Blade Runner, coming in on hellscape Los Angeles, has always been the future I expected; I still do.
I’ve always felt that future noir dystopias are a counter-weight to optimism. “No,” they say, “there will not be a harmonious ‘United Federation of Planets’ in which there’s a Prime Directive.” Your prime directive is “I want more life, fucker.” I’ve always felt that the optimists were dangerously naive – and, I hate to say, global climate catastrophe seems to be coming down hard on the side of the pessimists. Not that it takes any ‘side’ other than “you’re screwed.” Or, as they said in Full Metal Jacket, we’re in a world of shit.
The big news in gaming right now is the (about time!) release of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, which I downloaded on thursday, like a million and a half other gamers. Anna and I made a bunch of delicious enchiladas and spent a couple happy hours joking around with the character creation system, then tweaked graphic options until it ran passably on my gaming computer, then experimented with driving around Night City and howling with laughter at the horribly janky controls and their consequences. I must note with some pride that my first official action in Night City was to park my car on a cop, then to elude the cop’s surviving friends in a display of terrible driving. I used to be justifiably pleased with the elegance and precision of my flying in Elite: Dangerous and it was physically painful how bad the control model is in Cyberpunk.
Why will people in the future insist on driving cars in crowded cities? The dystopian future is stupid. Back in the mid-00s I used to sometimes teach in New York city, and one time (I missed a bus) I drove my big-wheeled Suburban into downtown and then tried to find a place to legally park a 9 foot tall truck. As far as futuristic dystopias go, I don’t think Cyberpunk‘s world is as bad as reality. Not even close.
In Cyberpunk‘s Night City you’ll maybe get some shots fired at you by a cop, but it’s nothing personal and it’s not even close to what today’s NYPD will do to you, just for fun. So I got to thinking about dystopian futures and what “Cyber Punk” really is, and the whole thing collapsed on me, leaving me standing bereft in a puddle of stupid.
I should warn you: I was not highly impressed with “steam punk” either. I’ve got a system engineer’s perspective on things and it annoys me highly when someone adds gears to the side of a gun, and acts like that’s some kind of retro innovation. (Or calls a Barnett Commando crossbow a “laser bola” and has it shoot laser beams without requiring the prod to be cocked, WTF?) I know I sound like a crotchety old fart but I don’t think that there’s much that’s innovative, “cyber”, or punk about having terminal studs on your neck; wow, that’s … stupid.
I suppose that in the not-too-distant advanced technological future there will not be equipment manufacturers (Apple, I am looking at you!) that outdate their connector interfaces with incompatible versions every couple of years? It is not “punk” or cool or cost effective to walk around with adapter dongles shoved in your neck, and we all know that bandwidth specs will keep changing and software will keep bloating and the hacker of the future will walk around like the hacker of the present: towing a Pelican case full of wires, interface adapters, and dongles. There will never be a slick future in which all of this stuff just works great, because patch management will kill the whole thing – it’s “Double Dystopic” – a shittier reality than an imagined shitty future.
My wanderings were brief and I kept feeling that the whole game world was a stupid digital poseur. NPCs said “bad ass” things when you look at them too long, “HEY maaaan whatchu lookin’ at?” and then they’d say it over and over and over. We had a hispanic sidekick who talks like an updated Stepin Fetchitt and who appears to have a genetic predisposition for being a thug – was Donald Trump a cultural consultant on this piece of shit? The supposed “individuality” of the denizens of Night City, so far, reminds me a lot of the shopping mall goth kids who dressed off the racks at Hot Topic, showing their individuality by all looking uniquely the same. See my dystopian technicolor yawn?
Anna made a great point, when I complained that there appeared to be no non-violent, non-stereotyped response to some of the opening scenarios, “It’s a first person shooter. That means you gotta shoot stuff.” That’s hardly a dystopian future; that’s just “what humanity has been doing for a few thousand years” except the guns are unrealistic as hell. Seriously: if I could pack that much energy density into a gun, I’d throw the gun and call it “a bomb” [Lois McMaster Bujold, at least, gets this right in her Vorkosigan books] but for now I’m most dangerous behind the janky control-plane of my piece of shit car.
The key to happiness is low expectations [- Ray Wylie Hubbard] and I don’t expect anything that has to do with hacking, lockpicking, or pretty much anything technical to be well-represented in a computer game. At least Cyberpunk doesn’t have a lockpicking mini game where you have to position the torsion bar correctly to open a lock (hint: the torsion bar is hardly present and good lockpickers don’t need one) it appears that hacking in Cyberpunk is a matter of being able to mouse-click a bunch of patterns quickly using the janky game-pad controls. I now officially give up on the hope that some game about hacking will ever have a good cyberspace metaphor that encapsulates the challenge of exploiting a penetration into the unknown. So far the Cyberpunkest thing in the game is that people have facial piercings that don’t make sense, just like today and everyone’s clothes are ill-fitting and appear to be manufactured on the dirt cheap. That’s dystopian as hell in the Monty Python sense, “look! There goes the king!” – I’d expect someone rich and important to not look like they live in a gutter, but instead (so far) I got what I’m going to euphemistically call “broad cultural stereotypes” – a big fat black guy in a limo, wearing gold chains and talking like a badass is an important criminal? Oh, OK. Come on, guys, stretch your imagination and maybe treat us to a construct like in Ghost In The Shell that is dangerous in a way that is disconnected from its outward appearance. Just once, in one of these games, I want to see an apparent 9-year-old girl wipe out a squad of armored soldiers using a box of ramen noodles, a ganked Cisco wireless access point, and a pack of gum. That’s still a broad cultural stereotype but at least it’s not an offensively stupid one. I resolutely refuse to be intimidated by some NPC because they have a metal hand (I know a couple veterans with metal hands, so what?) and I don’t want to try to immerse myself in a world where the manicheanism can be summed up as “good guys wear black and bad guys are so badass they replace some of their natural body parts with carbon fiber.” As Harry Flashman said in Royal Flash [paraphrasing] “I’m not scared of that guy with the saber-scars on his face; I’m scared of the guy who gave him the scars.”
What I’m getting at is that if someone’s going to be intimidating in a game, they’ve got to work pretty hard to make that happen; just giving them some cool mods isn’t going to do it. If someone wants me to feel that I’m on a wild ride in a dystopian future, it can’t be a future that’s lagging behind the present, in terms of awfulness because then Night City is a substantial improvement on life in Sinaloa, Mexico right now.
I don’t hate this game enough to not play it, because eventually there will be a patch that smooths out the controls, and there will be sights to see and fun to be had. But I challenge the entire concept of “Cyber Punk”. It needs to be more than just “Common-Or-Garden Punk with funky facial tattoos” to support an interesting narrative. The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red’s previous game, also has the usual flaws in a role-playing adventure game, but because it existed in a shallow background of the broad cultural stereotypes of a “swords and sorcery” genre, it made sense. This, does not. So much for immersion, I’m just gonna blow some shit up because I guess that’s all that’s punk about this brave new world.
Look at me monologuing like a fool, and I’m still parked on this cop. This is a first person shooter, I’ve got stuff to shoot. Bye!
See what I mean about the steampunk aspects of the game? Why does my jacket have coolant channels that aren’t hooked up to anything? Where’s the radiator? Honestly, every damn thing in this game leaks or is partly broken, so why aren’t I leaking? Speaking of leaking, at one point last night I ran into a broad cultural stereotype of a woman who was pissing herself then trying to scoop the urine back up into a cup. Some art director thought that was a cool thing to have in the game, and told some programmer to make that happen, and that’s how that happened. That doesn’t say anything about Night City or its inhabitants, but it maybe says something about some art director. Maybe we need a new genre: “art directorpunk.”
Also: neon. Are you shitting me? That stuff would be crazy expensive. It’s already a domain of high art. Cyberpunk does not consist of resurrecting inefficient lighting marquees from the 1960s. I’d expect spam-storms that crash people’s brains from processor overload but … neon? This is hipsterpunk.
Two things about this amaze me:
1) I’ve been seeing headlines about a damned game release pop up on the front page of sites like the BBC. This would surprise me on the slowest of news days. Even for a general “broad topic” page that doesn’t seem to fit. Has the world stopped being on fire? No scientific breakthroughs? No uninteresting celebrity doing dull or scandalous things? No foot-mouthed politician kicking off another war or uprising through sheer incompetence? No tweets from either Donald Trump or Elon Musk? Just checking.
Tag this one as “massive overhype” – which I believe is confirmed by another headline I glimpsed about the developer’s stock crashing after releasing half-baked rubbish. That bring me to
2) Why do people buy games on release day? It’s become a fact of life that games (and SW in general), no matter how expensive and how long in development, will be broken on release. In the age of steam and constant easy patching that’s long been the norm. Games can take years to be patched into a healthy and playable state. Some of them aren’t but instead get their fixes via expensive DLCs and addons – or never. (Luckily from me I learnt this lesson by browsing reveiws and spotting a not-so-subtle pattern there. Plus I’m stingy which helps suppress any cravings)
“harmonious, clean, designs of Star Wars”
Trek, surely? Wars makes a point of looking lived in.
I guess it’s a product of it’s time. Admittedly, I kinda like the cyberpunk aesthetic/setting for fiction and games and such (haven’t played this one, but I’m not much for first-person-shooters), but it doesn’t really make sense. I feel like the most “realistic” dystopias feature a huge wealth/income inequality. If most of the people can undergo elective surgery to get functional cybernetic implants, the megacorps aren’t being very effective in hoarding all the money…
Also, if I were to end up in a fight with someone with wires and tubes and such sticking out, first chance I get, I’m probably grabbing hold of them, jerking/twisting as hard as I can, and then running the fuck away.
For more updated dystopias, I rather liked Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and The Water Knife
As Komarov said, wait a year. The game will work better and be one half the price, tops. Outside of certain Nintendo titles and The Sims, everything decreases in value on a dramatically short curve now. (IANAG)
One thing that they got right in the original Men In Black:
I think you’re missing the mark a bit with this genre criticism. Remember that “Cyberpunk” is “dystopian future according to the 1980’s”, which is of course going to be silly, with flying cars and neon lights and stupid plugholes in the neck. Cyberpunk 2077 is simply ” ‘dystopian future according to the 1980’s’, according to the 2020’s“, so slightly updated, with better looking computer parts and less of that really stupid VR internet, but still basically the same stuff. It’s like how The Witcher is “sword and sorcery, according to the 2010’s”, it’s Conan the Barbarian but with fewer helpless maidens and somewhat deeper baddies.
A thought on the neck ports: surely at some point connector technology will fully mature, and no further hardware innovations will be made; then these kind of implants make more sense. Think of electrical cables and plugs, they haven’t really changed much since the 1980’s, and are basically a finished technology. One day, the same will probably happen to USB’s and such as well.
So, how would you do it? :D
Seriously, though, how would you? Assuming it still has to work as a proper game mechanic, not requiring any technical computer background for people to play, and still “encapsulate the challenge”?
Not being a hacker or even that computer savvy, I’m not sure how you’d go about it. I’ve just tried to think about it a bit and I’m not getting anywhere.
“Think of electrical cables and plugs, they haven’t really changed much since the 1980’s”
I read somewhere recently that the standard audio jack plug dates back to the 1890s. Did I dream that?
I’m with Ketil- “cyberpunk” is a specific period genre. It got going in the 80s, but it really didn’t last that long – the good stuff was all over by…. I’m going to say 1995? “The Matrix” is probably the only reason we don’t think of it that way. Blade Runner has A LOT to answer for…
Re: Ketil Tveiten (#6):
“A thought on the neck ports: surely at some point connector technology will fully mature, and no further hardware innovations will be made; then these kind of implants make more sense. Think of electrical cables and plugs, they haven’t really changed much since the 1980’s, and are basically a finished technology. ”
Inevitable XKCD. Also: The “finished” technology. It might not be changing much but that hasn’t stopped people from not agreeing to a single universal standard. And that’s household power, something fairly straight-forward where the only decisions you really have to make is whether you’d like to have an extra grounding pin and how to arrange it all. Voltage and current are grid-level decisions that don’t really affect the connectors or the wiring in between. It’s much more complicated with data cables, where requirements depend on applications and the design is very much affected by what kind of signal you’re trying to pass on.
In any case, judging by todays wireless chargers neckpins would presumably also end up being wireless implants, the advantage being that you don’t have to have what amounts to neckpiercings, a nasty vulnerability in a violence-prone dystopia. Instead everyone gets to have some internal electrodes and a scarf, necktie or headwrapping of some sort as the external counterpart. Much more convenient and fashion-friendly. Wouldn’t solve the compatibility issues though: Again judging by today you’d probably have to pick your vendor of choice, whose products and electrodes won’t work with anybody else’s in order to lock you in*. Sorry, I meant to say, “because these are superior designs meant to meet even the highest expectations of the discerning customer.” Business as usual with emphasis on business.
*Assuming by then you still get to buy stuff instead of subscriptions, where failure to renew may lead to potentially dangerous spinal surgery as Vendor (R) recovers their no longer licensed property from your neck.
komarov@#9:
*Assuming by then you still get to buy stuff instead of subscriptions, where failure to renew may lead to potentially dangerous spinal surgery as Vendor (R) recovers their no longer licensed property from your neck.
Now you’re talking Cyber Punk to my ears: you could play a repo man for the Customer Care Department of some neural-ware tech company, “For your safety and quality assurance, this customer interaction may be recorded. Please be sure to leave a 5-star review on our service, or our Customer Interaction Management Team will automatically escalate your case. Thank you for choosing Badger Claw(r) neural interface components – ‘a decision you’ll never regret'(sm)”
I must be missing something. ALIEN 3 came out 10 years after Blade Runner.
( ALIEN ) ( three years before )
I have heard disturbing rumors that there were sequels after ALIENS but I think they’re “fake reviews”
komarov@#1:
2) Why do people buy games on release day? It’s become a fact of life that games (and SW in general), no matter how expensive and how long in development, will be broken on release.
I don’t think anyone expects a game to not be broken on release.
For me, sometimes, it’s a chance to experience the closest thing to magic that is available. It’s not always a broken, frustrating experience, either. For example, Ghost of Tsushima was kick-ass and beautiful right on the day it came out. Partly that was because I chose to run it on a platform that is pretty stable and has better quality control, but mostly it was because the publisher really tried to make it good, and succeeded. That, itself, was a pleasurable part of the game for me. I agree it’s pathetic that gamers are just happy a new game doesn’t completely crash and burn, but I suppose we take whatever we can get.
I rarely get excited about a movie enough that I want to see it when it first comes out, but there have been a few where I’ve stood in the line and caught opening night. There’s a ritual aspect to that. I suppose it’s meaningless to the world at large that I saw ALIEN and Blade Runner on opening night but I enjoy that memory.
Maybe it’s the thrill of not being disappointed?
Dangit. <italics>ALIEN</italics> 3. The 3 isn’t in italics. I see that now. I said I must have been missing something, didn’t I?
I said I must have been missing something, didn’t I?
When I wrote it I thought it might not be clear, and I was too lazy to re-structure my sentence. Sorry about that!
Besides, they stopped making ALIEN movies after ALIENS.
They never made a sequel to Highlander either….
Sometimes when a standard is long established someone decides to screw it up. MIDI, Musical Instrument Digital Interface, has been used by the music business since 1983 to do things like control one instrument with another. From the start it used a 5 pin DIN plug on the ends of its cables.(Except the defunct synthesizer maker Octave Plateau, which used XLR plugs for MIDI on their Voyetra 8, one of the first synths with MIDI.)
Zoom to the second decade of the 21st Century. Some companies started using 1/8 inch/3.5 mm jacks for MIDI, with a breakout cable to connect it to instruments with the traditional 5 pin DIN jack. But, surprise, the companies that did that didn’t consult with each other. So there are a couple of different versions floating around, so if you need to replace an adaptor you lost you might end up with one that doesn’t work. Apparently the MIDI Manufacturers Association has decided on one type, but that doesn’t help if you have an instrument made before that decision.
Elon Musk spent some time on Twitter trolling CD Projekt Red and players over this game. I don’t know how familiar you are with professional wrestling, but heel vs. heel matches are weird because there’s nobody to cheer for.
And speaking of the players, it turns out gamers are very bad about learning lessons when it comes to tempering their expectations of a game. Did Fable teach them nothing?
Hmmm. Design an actual high tech dystopian future.
Must have:
Wealthy elite in well serviced surroundings walled off from the peons. They have no intetest in making the world better for anyone else but themselves.
General slob is either in low paid service providing tech fixes, distributing food pellets or writing mind inject porn. Robots do all the manufacturing.
Cars (robotic) only exiist in the rich areas.
The internet plugs into brains. There are fire walls. There are problems with that.
Hacking involves brain hacks, hijacking nodes, or infiltrating core processors. Physical access is golden if you can do it.
Only police and the corporate enforcer teams are really agro.
Oh, and black market in high tech gear including survaillance and assassin drones. The police etc have those.