Cyberpunk 2077 is doing cyberpunk so embarrassingly wrong (Patreon)

[Note: I actually wrote this piece a year ago in response to the interview linked below and the Twitter thread from Ryan Boyd (@ryandroyd), the latter of which I unfortunately can’t find. I decided to not post it, for reasons which are now hazy to me. But people are talking about the game on my timeline again, so I figured hey, I’m writing here more, I think the essay is pretty okay, why not post it a comically long time after what prompted it.

Hope you enjoy.]

I wanted Cyberpunk 2077 to not be like what it might turn out to be. I truly did.

The game—based on the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020—made one of the biggest splashes at the most recent E3, with a shiny trailer that got lots of buzz, a gameplay demo, and assorted other marketing and press pieces. The trailer itself is what I just said: shiny, flashy, very slick. It's also drenched in classic 1980s cyberpunk aesthetic cliché: tons of rain and neon, gangs and drugs and cops, and—of course—over-the-top badass cybernetic augmentations.

(Yeah, I'll admit it, the sword-arms are pretty sick.)

Cliché is fine so far as it goes, although William Gibson wasn't especially impressed. But to be honest, I wouldn't personally require a game like this to be a groundbreaking push forward for the genre. I'm completely okay with a cyberpunk game choked with cyberpunk clichés. The game’s title itself might indicate a big, goofy love letter to the genre, a kind of we-know-we’re-pure-silly-fan-service-and-that’s-exactly-what-we’re-trying-to-be deal, and I am so here for that.

Unfortunately, it looks like the developers—CD Projekt Red, a Polish studio which made a name for itself with the Witcher franchise—made the mistake of trying to be Deep. Or at least they're claiming to be Deep. And it's the way they're being Deep which is the problem.

In an interview, the developers said this about the role of nudity in the game:

Badowski said that in the final game, his team intends to have full nudity, not for shock value but because it supports one of the most important themes in the cyberpunk genre: transhumanism, the belief that humanity can transcend its current mental and physical form with the help of technology. Throughout Cyberpunk 2077, players will have to grapple with what it means for them personally to become transhuman, and one of the pieces of imagery the team plans to use is nudity.

There was one scene in particular from the E3 demo that Badowski pointed to as an example. It opened with a simple quest to retrieve a kidnapped woman, but turned into a bizarre and gruesome tableau. The kidnappers weren’t holding her for ransom; they were planning to chop her up for spare parts, harvesting the high-tech implants throughout her body for sale on the black market.

After players gun down the enemies in the compound, they find the kidnapped woman and another NPC lying naked in a bathtub filled with ice. With her eyes rolled back in her head and her body glistening with water, the player must carry her in their arms out into the light to the waiting paramedics.

“Nudity is important for us because of one reason,” Badowski said. “This is cyberpunk, so people augment their body. So the body is no longer sacrum [sacred]; it’s profanum [profane]. Because people modify everything, they are losing their connection to the body, to the meat. And that’s why we need to use the nudity in many situations.

“You see that there are bodies in the tub, and you need to take care of this woman. But at the same time she is augmented,” he continued, searching for the right words. “She is not clean. Maybe she is augmented too much. Maybe the humanity level is pretty low in her, so it’s an interesting topic. It’s one of the key themes in cyberpunk. The very first scenes in the original Ghost in the Shell anime show exactly the same aspect. Because where is sacrum and where is profanum in a world when you can simply modify yourself to such limits that it makes you a different kind of person? It’s one of the most important themes in cyberpunk, as a genre.”

There are... a number of issues with this, some of which should be pretty obvious. Using violence against a naked female body and requiring the player to protect and care for her is in line with some of the less savory traditions in the video game industry; it calls to mind the way female characters in games have been wounded, violated, tortured, raped, and killed in order to create pathos for a (usually male) player character and titilating shock value for the players themselves. Context for this kind of violence is indeed meaningful, and not every instance of it is equally harmful, but the developers don't do much here to assuage concerns, and in fact they even indicate that this is part of a larger pattern of objectification of the human body—precisely because in the context as they present it, a human body is literally being rendered a non-human object through cybernetic augmentation.

But here's where we need to talk about cyberpunk itself, and in particular the film Ghost in the Shell, which is… not using nudity remotely in the way they say it is.

One of the things that set this off for me was a Twitter thread by my friend Ryan Boyd. They point out—efficiently, passionately, and correctly—that far from featuring the theme that technological augmentation makes someone “less human”, cyberpunk as a literary genre in fact trades in the notion that The Body as a concept is up for grabs, that the binary of human and machine should be regarded with profound skepticism. Cyberpunk presents a future that draws heavily on a present in which technology—especially digital technology—is enmeshed with mundane everyday life and largely unremarkable. New forms of communication that enable new forms of connection are pervasive. Social arrangements evolve rapidly into different forms. Identity is fluid. Humanity is fluid.

Digital dualism is not cyberpunk. Small-c conservative squeamishness about technology embedded in the body is not cyberpunk.

That's not to say that cyberpunk as a genre doesn’t concern itself with the downsides of any of this. On the contrary, it asks some extremely deep questions about what parts of this are desirable, how we can identify one or the other, and what we can do to resist forces that use technology as a means of oppressive control. Cyberpunk (punk does actually mean something and it's not just aesthetic) is inherently suspicious of unrestrained capitalism; a cyberpunk trope so common as to be yet another cliché is a future in which massive multinational corporations essentially replace government institutions. Cyberpunk is indeed concerned with dehumanization.

But that dehumanization doesn't come from the idea that sticking tech into your body makes you less human.

Ghost in the Shell focuses to some degree on many of these questions. The main character Major Motoko Kusanagi is a synthetic cybernetic human, and she spends much of the film pondering the nature of her identity. But this is far less about whether her synthetic nature has dehumanized her in terms of her body and far more whether her consciousness—her “Ghost”—is necessarily tied to her physical body at all, or whether it can shed its body—the “Shell”—and roam free on the net as a fully actualized being in and of itself.

The Major spends a good bit of the film naked, yes. But that nudity isn't meant to call her humanity into question, nor is it meant to objectify her. Rather, it throws into sharp relief the liminal space the Major occupies. As a prime example, in the film’s gorgeous opening sequence we witness her “birth”, accompanied by composer Kenji Kawai’s haunting music, the lyrics of which are a wedding song and a prayer for the dispersal of evil spirits. She's naked because she's being created—and her creation takes place absent any human parents. As Susan Napier writes in “Doll Parts: Technology and the Body in Ghost in the Shell”: “[T]he birth scene shows Kusanagi as both organically and technologically constructed but totally free of human origins”.

In that sense it's directly in line with Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, which among other things suggests a future in which creation and reproduction take place free from traditional couplings. For Haraway, binaries are a false framework—there is no hard line between human and machine. The two are enmeshed and their relationship is constantly in flux. We change in our humanity. We evolve. Identity and association flow into alternate forms.

Whether the Major has been “augmented too much” has nothing to do with any of this. As far as the film is concerned, it's a complete non-issue. What matters in the story is whether we have souls in any true sense, and what the relationship our consciousness has to technology means for our future as human beings. That we will be human in one form or another is never really questioned.

The statement by the developers is also worryingly ableist—the disabled community has a rich and complex relationship with technological augmentation of the body and is hardly technophobic—and transphobic. This latter is especially concerning given one of the ads in the game itself, which fetishizes a trans woman’s body. The artist has pointed out that the poster is meant to be a critique of the objectifying nature of capitalism, but absent any context or any indication that there's some satire we’re meant to be in on, it’s simply a reproduction of the kind of image that gets trans people—and especially trans women—hurt and killed right now in 2019. We don't need to wait for 2077 for that. It's our lived reality.

This isn't cyberpunk either. A genre that presents the body as marvelously fluid and enmeshed with technology is intrinsically queer and affords a celebration of queerness, not the objectification of queer bodies. That's not to say that you necessarily have to include one to the total exclusion of the other, but to privilege objectification and neglect celebration is a huge missed opportunity. And again, it's an indication of a serious misreading of the genre that is literally in the name of their game.

Yes, I've seen the pushback against these points and the calls for us to calm down, and it is worth noting at this point that this is all fairly preliminary. But the general sense that CDPR gave at E3 is that what we saw is very close to the finished version of the game, the one that'll ship to players in April of next year. In any case, we have no reason to believe that what we get will be significantly different.

But even that isn't really the point. The point is what the developers themselves have said about the mindset behind how they've made this game, and that goes much deeper than an in-game ad. As I said, it indicates that CDPR is badly misunderstanding the genre they're working in and its larger context with regard to science fiction as a whole (growing out of the New Wave of the 1960s and 70s, a direct response to the science fiction of the Golden Age). Cyberpunk as a genre is far more than the surface aesthetic it’s often reduced to; it's a storytelling tradition with valuable and meaningful things to say about politics, technology, and identity. 

No, no one making a video game in that genre is required to engage with those issues. As I said, I would actually be pretty satisfied with a game that decided not to do so—if that decision was conscious and explicit. But I don't see any sign that CDPR is doing that here. At the very least, I see no sign that they understand what they're neglecting to engage with, nor that they know how hurtful they may end up being to the marginalized people who find power in cyberpunk. 

Nor, indeed, that they care.