Cloudpunk - Has God Already Decided (Patreon)

Alright now enbies, ladies, gentlemen, let’s get right to it. You’re here to watch me talk about video games, so let’s talk about video games.

In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy - come on, you knew this was coming - the author begins the story thus “In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost.” It isn’t until much later on that we find out that what he may well have meant by this is that he was considering killing himself. It isn’t until much later on we will find out that Dante has been on the losing side of a factionalist political struggle in Florence, and that when the fictional Dante in the poem returns to Earth he will be exiled from Florence, never to see his wife or children again. In short - Dante is in Hell.

Likewise in Cloudpunk we find our protagonist in media res, and we don’t learn about how much she’s lost, or far she has to go until later. Rania has nothing, she’s had to sell everything to Debt Corps and move to the big city and take a job as a delivery driver for an underground company called Cloudpunk. She’s in the lower class, in the lower tiers of the city, at the low point of her life’s journey. Everything about her situation is low - Rania is in hell.

Today I want to talk about Cloudpunk, one of the most refreshing and interesting RPGs that I have played, and the reason I want to compare it to Dante’s epic poem is that I hope I can convince you Cloudpunk deserves to be a modern classic. And along the way we can talk about several french philosophers, a dog who is a car, transgender robots and yeah baby - communism.

Cloudpunk - Has God Already Decided

By Eric Sophia McAllister

Cloudpunk is really fucking good. It gets my GOTY, it gets my GOAT, it gets my Gold-star-special-Green-Grinchy-Goodness-Games-Award-for-gifts-that-will-save-christmas. This game is stunning, and it only got more stunning and mesmerising recently when the developer added a cockpit view so you can crash your -- sorry, so you can drive your HOVA in first-person mode. But it’s also really clever. This game is more than just a fantastic 3D driving mechanic in a fun lego man city - it’s got the brains to match.

The first thing Rania does after starting the job is boot up her onboard AI, which speaks in a blank text-to-speech voice and refuses to gender you anything but male unless you pay hundreds of dollars right away to change it. She pays the fee to replace the AI with an automata program that she has downloaded - the mind of her robot dog from back home. Camus the dog, truly the most delightful and joyous character in the game, is such a simple but wonderful idea for a character, and when he explains to another character “I am a dog.. Or.. I am a car? I am a dog car!” it’s pretty hard not to fall in love with him.

Camus’ personality is an embodiment of the philosophy of the man he is named after - Albert Camus. Camus was a french absurdist who coined the aphorism “one must imagine sisyphus happy”. He juxtaposed the self-evidently meaningless and indifferent nature of the universe to the fundamental need that people feel to imbue life with meaning, comparing this to the myth of Sisyphus, in which Sisyphus has to push a boulder up a hill, only to have it fall down again, repeatedly for all eternity. In Rania’s situation things are simply and undeniably bleak, and any strategy or answer or idea you create to change the situation is surely ultimately futile, so what could be better for her than a companion who is always happy to see her, eager to help, and delighted by everything. One can only imagine Camus happy.

Rania’s first delivery - naturally the tonesetter for the rest of the game - is reminiscent of the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last in which a man who is always torn away from his beloved books by the trivial toil of life is left alone by nuclear apocalypse, just him and his books, except that his glasses break, leaving him unable to read a word. In Cloudpunk the first delivery is to Erwin Karva, who is certain that his parents who just died have left him a fortune, which he will use to fix his failing eyesight and change his circumstances. Instead, the package is just old toys and a note from his parents explaining that they invested all their money in some shady scheme. Like the Twilight Zone episode the tone for the rest of the game is set to this kind of overwhelming tragedy almost to the point of comedy - what an awful turn of bad luck - but unlike Twilight Zone this starts to sow the seeds of something more systemic.

Theologians will tell you that Dante’s epic poem La Comedia Divina is primarily about how cool Jesus is, and what the christian afterlife looks like. He takes a tour through the ironic and fitting punishments that various sinners experience: for those who wouldn’t take responsibility in life, being hurled around like leaves in a hurricane; fortune tellers have their heads put on backwards so they can’t see what’s in front of them; people who bought and sold holy offices in the church are stuck in a pit filled with shit with their feet sticking out so they can be burned by fire - okay it’s a reference to a thing that happens in the bible, it made sense to Dante.

But here’s the thing - I think theologians have been defeated by that foul and treacherous beast, Basic Media Literacy - I don’t think The Divine Comedy is about loving Jesus at all. You can call this my agnostic interpretation of the text, but I personally think The Divine Comedy is about how God’s kingdom, as a metaphor for the politics that Dante opposed - is an arbitrary and nonsensical farce.

There’s this character in it called Dante Alighieri, and obviously he is a fictionalised version of the author, but I think there’s a sort of second fictional Dante too. It seems like you’re supposed to imagine this Dante who was defeated in politics and exiled so he said yeah well politics is boring anyway politics sucks you know what’s really sick is Jesus yeah fuck yeah Jesus is the best you’re all going to hell because of loving politics and not loving Jesus like me. This Dante is like someone who had a bad take on twitter and responded to criticism by doubling and then tripling down and just making an unconscionably long reply thread because they’re really sure that more posting is the solution to this situation.

When we take a closer look though, we can see that Dante has put a lot of people from his own political party in Hell, and some of his enemies in Heaven too. He isn’t simply saying that politics is bad, he’s saying that factionalism is bad, because Dante was an idealist who believed that world peace was possible through empire. He even puts Brutus and Cassius alongside Judas Escariot in the deepest, lowest part of hell - being chewed eternally in Satan’s three mouths. You should read The Divine Comedy by the way it’s kind of metal as fuck.

But there’s evidence that not everything is just in the afterlife either. Dante’s poetic idol and hero, the Roman poet Virgil is in limbo, and will never be allowed into the kingdom of heaven, simply because he was born before Christ and so never had a chance to be a Christian. That’s something that will go unresolved almost right to the end of the poem.

Stories set in a cyberpunk world, as Cloudpunk is, tend to have a pretty bleak baseline for the state of the world, which is part of what’s so nice about Cloudpunk which, by contrast, presents a bleak future but doesn’t abandon all hope. There are shitty entitled rich people and there is exploitation of course, but there’s also things like the dangerous street gang BlockFourOh who do the most vile, criminal, disruptive thing they can to stick it to the system - they build green spaces and playgrounds and otherwise reclaim the city for the people living in it. This is the kind of beautiful humour that really belongs in a cyberpunk story, but takes an anti-capitalist writer who really gets the genre to write it.

So much cyberpunk media now engages in the recuperated aesthetics of anti-capitalism, but isn’t being made by communists, or even leftists in general. Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t out at the time of writing this, but from everything released so far it really feels like CD Projekt Red are falling into that trap. I’ll write about it when it comes out, but from the outside the way it strikes me is as something that sells anti-capitalism back to us, but only as cynicism, only as Capitalist Realism.

As Slavoj Zizek put it, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” and the thing about cyberpunk stories is that they’re apocalyptic fiction, but the apocalypse is usually that things carried on as they already are. The apocalypse is business as usual. Cyberpunk 2077 is being made by a huge triple-A studio that is run by billionaires, which means it can show you things that are wrong with capitalism easily, but it’s much harder for it to show you good alternatives. Selling you an anti-ideology like anti-capitalism isn’t any more threatening to capitalism than the existence of satanists is to christianity. It fits their narrative quite nicely.

To get specific, it is clear that Cyberpunk 2077 shows players the recuperation of queerness into corporate media - the mishandling of this has caused a lot of upset in the real-world queer community. This recuperation is the cynical way that companies market to you by letting you feel like you’re doing something brave and rebellious by consuming their product. This video, for example, will help a lot of leftists feel like they’re engaging in anti-capitalist praxis, whereas at best they’re just learning some theory. Feeling called out? That’s because my essay is just so edgy and smart hehehe

The point is, showing you companies using dickgirls to sell soda points out something bad about capitalism, but because of capitalist realism, that isn’t as threatening as it appears. Showing you urban reclamation as an act of radical defiance is actually giving you dangerous ideas. What do you say comrades? Who’s up for a little gardening?

So the thing I’ve been saying on stream while I’ve been playing Cloudpunk is that if you love the cyberpunk world but you feel sick to your stomach at how CDPR have been abusing their workers in a display of everything that cyberpunk is supposed to be against, buy Cloudpunk instead. I’ll write about Cyberpunk 2077 when it’s out but at this point nothing is going to excuse the way that it was produced, or the way they’ve deliberately stoked their most reactionary fans, so support this indie developer instead and have, in my humble opinion a better time too. Or get Disco Elysium, I’m writing about that next month.

The point is, Cloudpunk delivers the most revolutionary thing - hope - and delivers it in spades, simply by avoiding the edgelord irony-poisoned pitfalls of the genre and of gaming in general. Even when Camus learns how hyperbole works and says “I hate exaggerating. It is the worst thing in the whole world” it’s hard not to feel a little better about life.

The Divine Comedy is a classic pilgrimage story. The protagonist, to differentiate from the real life man is often referred to as “the pilgrim”. There is an incredibly pervasive sense of direction and travel in the poem. Dante has to travel right down to the bottom of hell and then climb up Satan’s actual physical body to get out of Hell, and then climb Mount Purgatory, the first place in the story that you can see the stars, and from there Heaven is in outer space. Dante even details each sphere of the cosmos that he passes through on the way to meet God.

Moreover though, the poem takes the form that most pilgrimage stories take. It’s the protagonist’s job to hear the stories of loads of different people and our job to see if these stories fit together to say anything about the world. Dante meets all these people in hell who are stuck in their precise, fitting, poetic punishment forever, with no hope to appeal or change their situation. He sees all these people cleansing themselves of their flaws in purgatory so they can get into heaven. He travels up through the Garden of Eden, where you get to go if you’ve completely cleansed your sins but aren’t especially holy, and he goes on up and up and so on, but he has to leave Virgil behind, because Virgil wasn’t born at the right time.

Rania has to travel deep into the bowels of Nivalis, which is the first place she comes into contact with CORA. CORA is the infrastructure AI that runs the city. Not designed by some malicious upper class but organically developed out of the program that disposes of trash, CORA describes herself as “patches on upgrades, systems on systems. Mechanical, computer and human.” She is as close to a God as Cloudpunk gets, and it’s only natural that the endgame is all about her, because Cloudpunk is the modern pilgrimage story.

Rania meets all these people who are suffering, trapped, stuck in bad situations, that to a capitalist mind, are fitting punishments that these people have brought on themselves because of their sins. These people are slothful, envious of others - in the case of androids and automata they were simply born wrong. She meets people who are moving up in the world, and she meets the rich and powerful living eternally blessed lives above the clouds and smog.

In fact Control, your dispatch coordinator, and Rania, have a conversation about seeing the sky, after Rania collects one package for delivery - it’s all someone’s belongings, since he’s going to take an escalator ride up to the spire, just to see the sky one time, before… reaching the end of the ride. Rania is horrified by this situation, but Control puts it to her that she has plentiful memories from outside Nivalis, but someone who had only seen the sky once, a long long time ago, might give anything to see it again. It’s a poignant and tragic idea and also contributes to that Catch-22-esque feeling that characterises the world of Cloudpunk.

And then, half way through the game, we see the sky for the first time.

On every level of Nivalis there’s this thick purple smog rippling overhead the whole time. It’s beautiful but it’s also so incredibly claustrophobic, and so desperately unnatural not being able to see the sky. And then Rania is called to make a delivery to a CEO on the upper levels, and without commenting on it or drawing out the moment, the sky is just there. The stars are just there. I think this is an incredible moment, even if it were nobody’s conscious decision, because all this focus on how desperate people feel to see the sky is quietly and sadly reflected in this moment where Rania comes up to this level she’s not welcome on - and to deliver what? It turns out this CEO paid through-the-nose to hire her illegal delivery service to bring him a pizza. He’s been getting pineapple pizza because of an AI error and this was important enough to him, and money was inconsequential enough to him, that he paid you to bring him the pizza he wanted.

The game gives you one of its best choices after this, I think. It’s completely inconsequential - it’s so petty - but it’s fucking great. The game lets you take serious decisions throughout that have more or less hypothetical consequences - it doesn’t usually amount to plot agency for the player, but it presents you with funny little moral thought experiments. Which people should you save with limited space in your car, deliver this dangerous package or throw it away, this sort of thing. This choice is whether you want to vandalise the sign outside the CEO’s building so it reads “please send pineapples”. He’s probably not going to get sent pineapples, but exercising this little bit of agency certainly made me feel better.

It’s the choices that go nowhere that make Cloudpunk feel so real, so human, honestly. It goes perfectly with the meaningless coloured lights you can buy for your car or the empty, pointless upgrades you can buy for your flat. You can buy a picture frame, and I’ve played dozens of hours of this game and I still don’t know what’s meant to go in it - is it just meant to remain empty?? Just mocking me for my stupid purchase? Why did I buy this frame if I don’t even have a picture to put in it?? The flavour text for these purchases are amazing too - like when you contemplate putting up a hologram of your HOVA but then it says “it would just remind me of work”.

I’m not the first to point this out but under neoliberal capitalism, especially under neoliberal capitalism increasingly run by open fascists, especially under neoliberal capitalism increasingly run by open fascists and a global pandemic, characters who have lots of agency don’t necessarily feel more relatable to me. Rania, whose majority of choices are superficial and meaningless and simply exists alongside more powerful parties with more agency than her - she feels relatable.

Honestly the quest where you choose which 3 people to save was the worst part of the game to me, because it’s so absurdly surreal to have that much power over people. I still enjoyed the thought experiment of it though, and it’s pretty easy I just let all the richest people die.

In Dante Alighieri’s time the only game in town was Catholicism, and funnily enough free will is kind of a big deal with Christians as well. It’s really important in Christian teachings that God gave us free will so that we could do sins if we wanted, but also, we should not do sins. It’s because of God that you can go where you like, do what you want, say what you feel like saying. God made it so you could say “butts” or “kablowie” or “illustrations by mothcub” or “patreon dot com slash curiovids”, but not all of those things are things you should say. Some of them are sins.

Put simply, free will is a big deal to Christians.

And it’s a big deal in Cloudpunk too, because it’s a big deal in capitalism. Just like how God gave you free will, so you should be grateful by choosing not to sin, capitalism supposedly give you Choices™ - pink tracer lights or blue tracer lights, or for the mysterious third gender, perhaps you’d like an emoji of a person wearing a turquoise top with one ear pierced?

Cloudpunk, just like many cyberpunk stories, touches repeatedly on the notion of simulacra - reproductions that have either lost meaning or never originally had one. For example, all the useless junk you can buy for your apartment, or the artificial falcon that the falconer insists is a mythical creature that never existed. Jean Baudrillard, who wrote about simulacra in his seminal work Simulacra and Simulation, said

"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true."

In other words the wide variety of choice between meaningless products is an illusion of choice, because it creates its own reality. Rather than choosing between one thing you'd like and another, you're choosing between these options presented to you just because they're there. Products are made because production must keep going in order to make more products, and in order to keep this going you have to consume the products.

Cloudpunk doesn't only reference dense philosophical books to get across this idea of Simulacra and simulation though - it also references dense philosophical movies! The Matrix by the Wachowksi sisters was largely based on the works of Baudrillard and begins with Neo - corporate employee Thomas Anderson - being alerted to the illusory and futile nature of his existence. His whole world is a simulation run by machines to keep humans occupied and docile. Neo's awakening begins with him receiving a package through which Morpheus tells him that he needs to escape and later educates him about the real world outside of what he can experience.

Well there's a mission in Cloudpunk that gets a little on the nose in referencing The Matrix - Rania brings a package to Anderson financial, which turns out to be a company entirely comprising androids called either Mr. Anderson or Mrs. Anderson, who are working tirelessly to perpetuate the business even though their human founder (the original Mr. Anderson) is long dead and none of the androids do anything but work all the time. None of them are earning a living and if they were none of them have any free time to enjoy it, all they do is work. Anderson Financial is a simulation and the androids are Simulacra.

The package you're delivering is a tape from an Anderson android who accidentally discovered that there is a world outside of their company and wants to let the others know so they can free themselves. The message is met with mixed success. The androids want to be free but can't conceive of how to free themselves. So you can either choose to reset all the androids so they remain blissfully ignorant or leave them aware of their situation in the hopes that things might change. You get it? It's like in that movie, get it, with the capitalism and the one coloured pill and the other coloured pill - Wolf of Wall Street.

Cloudpunk actually takes after The Matrix in other ways too! The androids are absolutely an exaggerated look at workers under capitalism, but they're also allegorical to those of us in society who are transed of gender. The Matrix was in part originally a trans allegory, with the "red pill" that wakes you up from the simulation being a reference to estrogen, which at the time came in red pills. There's even a wink to this in the Matrix-Mission with Rania pointing out how rigid and limited the binary gender of the androids is, but the more explicit stuff is elsewhere in the game. Mrs. Octavia Butler, an unbearable bougie snob you have to help move house brags about how her android husband is human-passing, while insisting that of course she doesn't even care (she does).

There's also an android whose human appearance is deteriorating so he needs you to buy him a drug to fix it - see it's illegal for the kind of person who needs this drug to buy it but not for other people to buy it, and he can't go buy it because when he goes out in public people demean and attack him and suggest he's a child predator. What could this all possibly mean?

The androids aren't all trans allegory though, there are just nods to it along those same lines of reproduction and fitting in with normative society, where its a pretty natural comparison to reach for.

There are other androids like William - who is so excited to be moving up in the world and leaving behind the “little people” like Rania, but it turns out he’s going to be fitted to a vacuum cleaner to work as a roomba in a huge office tower. To be clear, he loves this, it’s exactly what he was hoping for, don’t feel bad for William.

There’s also Huxley, an android private investigator who according to himself “played a character too well” - he narrates everything he does like a pulp detective novel. The best of this is when he tries to lie to Rania: “I didn’t tell her about the girl”

Much like Camus, Huxley is a pretty simple character conceit but endlessly charming and instantly endearing. Huxley’s name is probably a reference to Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World but although I could start down a path about Fordism and eugenics and how it relates to Cloudpunk at some point you have to stop being wikipedia and just talk about the game you're trying to discuss.

I think Huxley is where we should finish looking at this game’s brains and instead look at it’s heart. Huxley solicits Rania’s help to find and save a girl - Pashta. It’s a convoluted situation right out of the pulp detective stories Huxley talks like and I won’t get into it too much here, you’ll just have to play the game and see for yourself.

But Huxley’s story ends with Rania taking care of Pashta, and bringing her to live with her. As much of an imposition and a burden as this is, there’s no question about it - you’re not just going to abandon this kid. I think that’s somewhere this game really shines. Even though it’s an open world game, and it gives you little checkpoint choices like so many RPGs, it’s the places where you don’t have a choice that feel incredibly human, because in society we owe things to one another, and if the game were all about chasing the abstract notion of choice, like so many RPGs are now, it wouldn’t feel very human at all.

My favourite bit in the game really resonates with this same idea. This scene makes me tear up every time honestly. Rania just goes to get some street food - I picked the ramen - and it’s simple and comforting. She talks to Camus about how alone she feels and how much she misses home, and how even though it’s junk food it is really nice. I think this scene gets to me so much because it feels excruciatingly real. I’ve done this - when everything feels terrible and crushing living in the big city, feeling homesick and lonely, it can feel like the best, worst, most included, most excluded thing in the world eating something trashy but tasty, alone in public. I know I’m not the only person who couldn’t sleep after they first moved away from home, I’ve talked to friends about this exact experience before.

I think this game ties the systemic and the personal together beautifully. The God of the world of Cloudpunk, CORA, is this messy organic construction that has evolved out of our ill-considered iterative attempts to meet our needs, which is why she’s such a good allegory for capitalism. She isn’t a malevolently designed simulation perfectly designed to pacify us, she just maintains the crumbling system increasingly poorly.
We’re all trapped in our loneliness, suffering the exact same thing as everyone else but isolated from them at the same time. That’s why, just like the BlockFourOh urban reclamation, the most radical, powerful, challenging we can do is reach out to one another. Rania starts the game alone, and at the very least at the end she has Pashta - and Camus gets a new dog-body!

The later parts of The Divine Comedy, that people don’t usually read, because Hell is the sexy bit, are really where Dante’s afterlife starts to fall apart. People are in Heaven who shouldn’t be, nothing makes sense, Dante can’t even perceive the things that he’s seeing because they’re not comprehensible to the human mind.

When Dante wants to understand why Virgil come with him into Heaven, he is told probably the most annoying possible answer - things don’t have to make sense to you, trust in God’s plan, there’s a plan, you just can’t see it because you’re not God. To which Dante says the line that to me, defines the entire Divine Comedy “Do I have any will in all this, or has God already decided?”

Towards the end of Cloudpunk CORA pops up to ask Rania a question. CORA has been observing Nivalis for a long time, and given all the data at hand she can see that things are deeply wrong, but the important thing she can’t tell is whether this is normal. She asks Rania “Is Nivalis a city overrun by monsters?”

CORA needs to know if Nivalis is a normal city or not, because she’s having a baby. CORA, the old God, patches on upgrades, systems on systems, has produced a new AI: her daughter. Rania’s final mission of the night is to take the drive containing CORA’s daughter up to the spire, to either transmit her away, so both she and CORA can survive, but doom everyone in the city to CORA’s failing, crumbling systems, or eradicate CORA to replace her with her daughter. Control can’t come with you. By this point you will have found out the truth about him - he’s an automata who used to be a living man. When he died in debt he was resurrected as an AI so he could work to pay off his debt, and once you go to the spire he is finally freed, allowed to pass on. His final words to Rania before he says goodbye are “Shame you gave up the flute Kid. This world needs more music.”

And so Rania is left alone in the big city, with Pashta and Camus to take care of. Cloudpunk is a game that gives us a God just to show us that we’re all there really is. Everything is up to us.

The afterlife is as much a metaphor for the future as a cyberpunk dystopia is. What these stories always boil down to, in giving you simple, often binaristic choices, is asking you whether you accept the future being the way things are now, or want change. Do you accept the future or reject it. Red pill or blue pill. Do I have any will in all this, or has God already decided?

I once heard a fable, that was a simple idea of heaven and hell. Much simpler than Dante’s - no rings, no kings, no pits in the ground full of shit with your feet sticking so fire can burn them to punish you for the sin of simony. No. Instead in hell everyone is hungry and in front of them is the most delicious exquisite banquet they can possibly imagine, but here’s the catch - you can only eat it with these giant long forks much longer than your arms. And so everyone starves forever with this wonderful food just out of reach because they can’t get the food to their mouths. And heaven is exactly the same, only they feed each other.