# Cyberpunk and the By Necessity Checkboxes tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/cyberpunk ![[Cyber-Punk (one-page).jpg]] The Internet provides. Feeling uninspired for a bit? Need a kick in the ass? The universe'll give you the impetus to throw down some thoughts on a topic near and dear to you. The genre of cyberpunk is one that is near and dear to me. One could say even pivotal to my intellectual and social development, ironically. Taking the opportunity to talk about the tedious tropes found in modern cyberpunk – well, I'm going to grab that. ## The Thread > [!quote] [RazorFist @ Twitter](https://twitter.com/RAZ0RFIST/status/1767013695773950148) > > Going to check out a new Cyberpunk [anything at all]. > > Gosh, but I hope it features wildly original ideas. Like rich people living in tall buildings and poor people living in slums below. > > Or how about an evil corporation? And an ambiguously communist "resistance" of some kind? And rather than useful tools that came into being because they actually worked and made people's lives better, cybernetics causes them to go randomly crazy for no good reason – but also never require maintenance. Corporations are evil but nobody owns a grocery store, or even goes down to the corner bodega, and food is just never a part of anybody's life for reasons which remain mysterious. Nothing important ever happens outside of New York, LA, San Francisco, Detroit, or Chicago. Or a rough stand-in for one of those. (To be fair, this is media fiction in general.) The middle of the country doesn't exist. It's not even flyover country. There are no farms there – in fact, it may not be possible to even have a farm anymore. (See: grocery stores.) Except Chicago or Detroit, which somehow are *not* actually in the middle of the country just floating in hyperspace somewhere between New York and LA. Computers are mass-market and omnipresent but no one seems to actually use them to do a job *other than* criminals. No one plays video games unless they *only* play video games. When in doubt, computers and machines are evil, even though – maybe *especially* because – your entire society depends on them to function. In fact, anyone on whom society depends to function are inherently bad. Plumbers? Mechanics? Building construction? Evil. Totally absorbed by the Corporation™. The real irony of all of this is that the roots of the cyberpunk genre don't actually establish any of these things other than stories are generally about the lower classes of society and some evil corporations. **[Neuromancer](https://www.amazon.com/Neuromanacer-William-Gibson/dp/0441569595)**? **[Gravity's Rainbow](https://www.amazon.com/Gravitys-Rainbow-Classic-20th-Century-Penguin-ebook/dp/B005CRQ3MA/)**? Not there. Plenty of grim and grimy street-level garbage – but also clean orbital environments and people with holographic projectors who are world-level entertainers. Do we get to refer to Charles Stross's **[Accelerando](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074CGZ5HR?binding=kindle_edition)** as a classic of the genre now? It is one of *my* favorites and it subverts the fuck out of the genre. At some point the meaty interpretation of the cyberpunk milieu got lazy. Really, really lazy. They found five notes on the keyboard they could reliably hit and that's all they did. They took four chords and a message and turned it into four plucks and a choked chicken. As an aficionado of the genre, not just the literary reflection but how it filters into other expression, particularly tabletop role-playing games, it pains me deep inside. Cyberpunk – even the [[Cyberpunk (RPG)|Cyberpunk RPG]] – went from cool and interesting to almost anything but surprisingly quickly. Along the way it ran into various attempts to do something out of the ordinary but… It flirted with underage superhero biopunk for a while. That didn't go so well. (See: **[Cybergeneration](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/CyberGeneration)** It tried breaking out into some wider conflicts at a higher level but the audience was so conditioned by that point that ["corporate war"](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Fourth_Corporate_War) just didn't have the resonance it should have. It wasn't until **Cyberpunk** established the game-tropes that **[[ShadowRun]]** could come along and play off of them effectively, which it did… For about a year, I would say. Maybe two. Then the fact it was just a pile of tropes stacked on top of each other got obvious. I admit, I enjoyed quite a lot of those tropes stacked on top of one another. But it all lead back into effectively playing Cyberpunk with magic and not D&D with chrome, which would have been the more interesting option.[^sr] Sure, there are games outside of the handful that everyone thinks of that did some interesting things with the genre and the tropes thereof but they are far and in between. Anyway, there *are* good games that really break the tropes but they deserve a whole day of scrambling ink about them. Maybe tomorrow. ## Evolving Notes And, of course, now it is tomorrow. So let's see what's in the bag. ### Remember Tomorrow ![[Remember Tomorrow (cover).jpg]] 2010, ironically enough, saw the release of **[[Remember Tomorrow]]**, by one of my favorite game designers of the time, Gregor Hutton. I've talked about **[[Three-Sixteen - Carnage Among the Stars|3:16]]** elsewhere but here we have a tight game built on minimal mechanics, that does have everyday people caught up in the middle of very unusual circumstances but perhaps most importantly doesn't necessarily lean on being in A Major City™ by necessity – wherever the players are, their traveling from one place to another. A lot of the game happens in interstitial places; airports, lounges, cheap hotels in the middle of nowhere, car rental agencies… You get the idea. If you've ever been in a small airport in the middle of flyover country at 3 AM, you truly know what cyberpunk is. ### MSG™ ![[MSGtm (cover).jpg]] Of course I was going to talk about **[[MSG™]]**. It's always worth talking about **MSG** in the context of cyberpunk gaming because it subverts so many of the expectations about who and what and where and why you are that it makes the ideal case that the cyberpunk gaming genre doesn't have to be what it's been painted as or fall into the lazy traps it has. Check out [[Character Creation Challenge 2024 - Day 07 - MSGtm|my character creation for MSG™ if you would like to get considerably more in-depth,]] but the short version is that rather than being outsiders to the corporate environment, here you are literally the insiders, the movers and shakers (such as there are), the influencers and salary men who make the company – the Brand – work, and that work can be quite dirty. You don't have to be against doing the dirty work but you can also do your best to make the moral choices, the reasonable choices, the generous choices, as long as you couch them in language and presentation that plays to the Brand. Putting players in the shoes of *The Big Evil Corporation* always pleases me. Always. One day I'd like to do a more traditional cyberpunk-design RPG where you are the movers and shakers in a literal sense in a major corporation and actually have to deal with pressures which lead to compromises you're not necessarily comfortable with. Would it go over in today's market? Like a lead balloon. Full of lead. Is it conceivable? I can conceive of it. ### Covenant ![[Covenant (cover).jpg]] Speaking of games that I did [[Character Creation Challenge 2024 - Day 29 - Covenant|a Character Creation Challenge for,]] **[[Covenant]]** might not immediately spring to mind as a cyberpunk setting – and yet, it captures the spirit and style of the original seminal texts much more elegantly than a lot of modern-day cyberpunk media. It's a game about being out of place, out of time, with the world that you never prepared for all around you. You are not powerless, you are not helpless, your actions and choices can make a huge difference – but you may not believe that. Forces bigger than you, more powerful than you, are on the move, but that move might be crumbling, falling, or being twisted. You are part of an organization but that organization contains many organizations and they are now vying for control not just of each other but for what the future holds for them. It's incredibly cyberpunk. Maybe I don't have to write a game where you're on the inside trying to do the best you can in a hostile world which surrounds your corporation. Maybe this is it. I just need to write some cybernetics rules. ## Exunt It's actually quite surprising how few specifically cyberpunk games I own, considering how much I enjoy the genre. Perhaps one could lay it at the feet of actually enjoying the genre and the breath at which it can be tackled. In a real sense, cyberpunk is the noir depiction of futurism, and any game which encompasses futurism as a mode of expression can and often is doing a bit of cyberpunk as well. Punk and noir share some DNA, after all. Any sci-fi game can encompass core cyberpunk tropes. In **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]**, you can lean on them pretty heavily, in fact; you can use it almost as a filter to paint the details of the experience. Traveller definitely has strong elements of the cyberpunk integrated at various points in the experience (and one could reasonably argue that the core narrative loop, going from place to place, finding out what they need in a literal sense, moving people and things often under the radar, is inherently cyberpunk). Maybe that understanding is the real key. Cyberpunk *as a movement* and [as a series of broader tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Cyberpunk) has been integrated into science fiction in general, so the things which portray themselves as deliberately cyberpunk are really just parading around the exposed bones of the corpse with all the good meat picked off, leaving something unsatisfying. Luckily we have everything else. ## Post Scriptum [The TV Tropes website](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Cyberpunk), as it often does, has the perfect quote for this on their cyberpunk page, so I'll leave you with that: > [!quote] **Stephen Lea Sheppard of RPG.Net**, on the relation between transhumanism and cyberpunk note > > Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology **won't**. [^sr]: Don't look at me, I played an Insect Shaman named Presley Aaron. I refuse to be held accountable.