Cyberpunk: Some Cyber, No Punk (Patreon)

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: motherboards on fire from running too hot; genitals clipping through clothes in the inventory screen; cars suplexing NPCs; Sony refunding opened copies of a Triple-A release. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Cyberpunk 2077: Some Cyber, No Punk
This video is about why CD Projekt Red’s new game, Cyberpunk 2077, is pretty bad. And I’m not going to talk about the bugs until much much later in the essay.
Introduction (The World)
Alright let’s actually get down to some game analysis.
Umurangi Generation is a photography game about dispossessed Maori teens in a future Tauranga, Aotearoa (that’s New Zealand for us Pakeha) under UN martial law due to an alien invasion. The game diverts from the overly common combat and collection mechanics of modern games by instead getting you to photograph things for a newspaper, while punishing you for photographing “the wrong things”, and in this way makes the player acutely aware of their own lens.
Ghostrunner is a frenetic, demanding, wall-running, shooter-platformer that forces you to redo rooms over and over until you execute the exact sequences, sometimes with only frames of lenience, turning combat into both a test of sheer mechanical reflexes and simultaneously a strategic puzzle in the most rewarding way. The cyberpunk setting is stunning, the level design is near-flawless, the voice acting is great, and the game’s plot is reminiscent of Bioshock if Bioshock ended in a glorious workers’ revolution.
Observer is a creepy, atmospheric cyberpunk detective game starring the late great Rutger Hauer as he searches for his son, who may have killed someone, or may be tangled up in something altogether darker and more complex. It manages to foreground the mystery and the detective story while building a rich and intelligently constructed world - the politics of the cyberpunk setting are important enough for you to come across them as part of the mystery, interesting enough to make you want to learn more, but included casually enough that it never feels intrusive or exposition-y.
Cloudpunk is a masterpiece of intersectional anti-capitalist storytelling, focusing on the everyday precarity of someone driving delivery as itself a vehicle to literally and figuratively take the player on a homeric tour through apoptocractic capitalism. It demonstrates the atomisation and alienation of neoliberal capitalism as well as the radical and truly revolutionary nature of community, both in comic asides and in very serious plot moments. Plus, you get to drive a flying car.
Disco Elysium can comfortably be called the best RPG yet made. We now live in a post-Disco Elysium world. Disco Elysium casually assumes communist politics in such a way that even playing as a police officer doesn’t dilute its radical messaging. It calls the player out personally, as tackled in several analyses including my own and Noah Caldwell Gervais’ videos - as Gervais puts it “you wish there was a disco option” but real world revolutionary struggle simply isn’t that easy. At the same time, I have several friends who all talked about this game without overlapping with my video or one another’s videos at all, such is the incredibly rich and complex story, world, character drama and politics of Disco Elysium.
I bring up all these games not just to recommend that you go play them instead (because you hogs never click on my videos about smaller indie games) but also to set up some important comparisons. If I wanted to examine Cyberpunk 2077’s ancestry I would talk about Fallout: New Vegas, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Beneath A Steel Sky, and of course the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk and I will bring up some of its influences but what I wanted here is to build up a set of comparisons between 2077 and its contemporaries. I am going to get into the guts of what’s wrong with this game, and I believe it has a right to be tried by a jury of its peers.
None of these games are what Cyberpunk 2077 aimed to be in its totality but 2077 messed up so much that frankly in this array of games there should be something for everyone no matter what they felt was most missing from 2077, so go play one of these instead, or all of them.
I want to explore some things about dominant cultural narratives here, because there’s a lot about this game that is a failure artistically, thematically and ideologically, and it all comes from very mainstream places, and is therefore both hard to see and complexly interwoven in such a way that my criticisms need to build across a few sections. There’s also of course, the bugs, the crunch - we’ll get to that - and that has a lot to do with wider cultural issues too. The story of this game is in two parts, and first we need to talk about, as it were, the “play within a play”. We need to analyse the game itself.
Orientalism (The Empress)
Cyberpunk 2077 is a very ambitious and very broad piece, more about the society it is set in than the individual narrative of what happens to the core characters. A lot of the marketing backs this up, focusing much more on Night City as a place than on characters or plot. The way it accomplishes this is by having very minimal plot points that can be accomplished a bunch of different ways.
Part 1: Whatever background you pick for V, you wind up working with Jackie Welles, a latino professional gang crook with a heart of gold. You and Jackie do a big heist to get a nonspecific technological “relic” of high value from the apartment of Yorinobu Arasaka. Yorinobu is the heir to the Arasaka Corporation, a multinational capitalist empire, and while you’re hiding in his apartment you witness him murdering his father Saburo, thereby becoming the head of the corporation. You narrowly escape, Jackie dies, you put the relic in your head-hole to keep it safe but when you are subsequently shot in the head the relic malfunctions, releasing Johnny Silverhand, an anarchist punk-rocker and terrorist who was trapped in the relic unbeknownst to almost everyone.
Part 2: Johnny is taking over your body, so you either work with him or don’t with the help of friendly factions or not to take down Yorinobu or not and then let Johnny take over your body or not and stay in Night City or don’t.
That’s how minimal the core plot is. There’s a fair amount of setup, but after that the next concrete plot point is essentially the ending where you raid Arasaka, with a variety of options for how you get there and what the outcome is. The vast majority of the game exists in its side-quests and choices, which isn’t uncommon for open world RPGs at all, but is reflective of the style of storytelling they were going for.
This is why orientalism is a really good place to start with analysing this game. In his 1978 book Orientalism, Edward Said said “What is commonly circulated by a culture is not truth but representations” and that’s what 2077 is from the ground up - representations of ideas, cultures, popular tropes within the genre, allusions to iconic cyberpunk media and science fiction more generally.
Orientalism, as described by Said, is the practice by which a culture is studied, represented, and viewed as other by the scholar or author representing it. During the height of european colonialism, orientalism as a formal field of study was a thriving and popular area of academic research, but its legacy stretches far, far beyond that. As Said himself puts it, "My contention is that without examining orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which european culture was able to manage, and even produce the orient politically, sociologically, militarily, scientifically, ideologically and with great imagination."
And even to this day, orientalism continues to have a huge impact in the real world, such as american foreign policy in the middle east, informed by the ramblings of Henry Kissinger on “the arab mind”, or the continued tensions around China and concerns that chinese supremacy will soon overtake american supremacy on the global stage, always couched in an orientalist fear of the other and inscrutable chinese culture and psychology.
From the post-war period on, hitting a peak in the 80s and 90s, a tonne of western media began to fear-monger about japanese global capitalist supremacy. This was of course, always nonsense, with Japanese post-war rebuilding being funded by american money in the first place, but nonetheless, western media took the idea and ran with it. Japanese megacorporations became the focal point for populist anti-capitalism, with stories based on stories based on stories talking about how these megacorporations were going to own and control everything.
It’s important to understand the specific historical moment that gave us the obsession with Japan, because it’s not actually the megacorporations at the heart of the cultural conflict. In the 80s white people became dangerously obsessed with the ideology of “the free market”, a pernicious breed of brain worm that still thrives today, and Japan had propped up its impressive post-war rebuilding in part by protecting its most vital industries from the market, an uncomplicatedly good decision that nobody with any brain cells whatsoever should have a problem with, so naturally Ronald Reagan had a huge problem with it, since a national industry that’s protected for the good of human beings that actually live in that nation is an industry America can’t make money from. America tried to force Japan to open those industries to the market, using the money they had lent Japan as leverage - this is a very common trick in American foreign policy, take a drink every time America uses debt to control foreign nations and you’ll die of liver damage before the oceans boil.
To study a parallel example, today fear mongering about a chinese global takeover is as prominent as it was then about Japan. Why is this? Well, China has a state-capitalist economy, which means that although it engages with global capitalism, its economy is planned by the CCP and the major players in the chinese economy are State Owned Enterprises. So while China does have clear imperialist plans, the fear of chinese global takeover is deliberately stoked by America the same way that America deliberately stoked fears of a Japanese global takeover. The megacorporations were never the issue - look at Amazon - the issue was that they weren’t American.
We’ll talk about the anti-capitalist politics of Cyberpunk in a later section, but for now it’s enough to understand that in the 80s and 90s there were a lot of popular tropes suggesting that Japan was soon going to rule the world.
So we come round to Cyberpunk and science-fiction more broadly, which kept showing us projections of the future in which Japan had gained a global cultural and industrial hegemony. The Weyland-Yutani corporation in Alien, the east-west fusion of Bladerunner, these things fed into a cultural idea that Japan would soon take over the world, and that fed into the specific appropriation of japanese style, design, culture and religious iconography in Cyberpunk.
Classically, white academics returning from asia wrote orientalist texts about the east which became the only sources that were really allowed to be cited, so people from those countries and cultures, or even white people who had been to asia themselves couldn’t contradict these sources. In a practice akin to biblical literalism these sources were self-evidently good and should never be challenged because of their inherent goodness, so instead all following orientalism could only build off what they said. We can see something really similar happening with Cyberpunk 2077, where the fact that the game builds off of the Japan obsession of 80s cyberpunk means that it thoughtlessly replicates this fear mongering.
An important point here is that these representations of Japanese culture were largely not overtly malicious in character. They played off and spurred on this fear of Japanese economic dominance but also represented excitement and interest in Japanese culture and multiculturalism. It sold the exotic and mystical east as a commodity in much the same way that colonial orientalism did. Society and culture is not a monolith but instead is made up of the infinitesimal actions and choices of individuals, many of them in their individual context, positive. It would be the people who were excited for a multicultural and diverse future who would eagerly buy into the future being sold by cyberpunk.
This is a thing that happens a bunch in cyberpunk. We’ll talk about it more in the next section, but in storytelling often despite the negative connotations that are heaped onto something, the audience and, to be realistic about this, the author still engage with the thing on a largely superficial level. That’s why something can continue to carry those negative connotations despite being reproduced in an overtly positive way. Samurais and robots and top-knots and koi-carp become at once, signifiers of a mythical Japan and also signifiers of capitalist global dominance.
This is a pretty typical issue in storytelling, and it’s why you might look at modernist skyscrapers and high-speed commuter trains that you recognise from stories about the crushing ennui of late-stage capitalism and go “ooh wow I live in the future!” and to be clear, all this would be discussion that would make no sense if we were having it in 1985 or if Cyberpunk 2077 chose to use China in place of Japan, because everyone would see it as totally normal or even topical canny politics. It’s only so striking because the orientalism in 2077 is so dated.
Okay that’s enough context and discussion of the aesthetics, so let’s focus in a bit more on the details of the world.
The Arasaka Corporation might not be the most powerful force in the world of Cyberpunk, at least in the extended lore, but they are the most powerful thing in sight - they are the most powerful party in the world of the game itself, the arrival of Saburo paints him as a quasi-emperor and Adam Smasher, the most powerful NPC in the game, is Yorinobu’s bodyguard. Also, one of the backgrounds for your character - Corpo - lets you see inside their corporate offices and business structure, which is an otherwise inaccessible map. These offices are drenched in modern corporate wealth, built like a pharoah’s palace, and the only other maps that compare are the endgame levels which are also Arasaka offices and also inaccessible the rest of the game. This segmenting off deliberately makes the power of Arasaka unfathomable and incomprehensible. Another corporation who recently fought a bloody war with Arasaka - Militech - are in the game too, but none of this emphasis is put on them. The game really clearly wants you to get: Arasaka is the big cheese.
This is just really classic and worn-out depictions of life under Japanese occupation. The world revolves around the Arasaka family, the new imperial dynasty of the whole world. By comparison, so many cyberpunk games don’t rely on tired old orientalist tropes. Umurangi Generation comes from an indigenous perspective and shows forces that we whiteys usually consider uncomplicatedly benevolent, like the United Nations, as the settler-colonialist world police that they are. It’s world is neon and very 90s and very very cyberpunk and it doesn’t need to use japanese culture or fear or japan to do any of it. Cloudpunk makes a 3D cityscape that is vibrant and futuristic and also dark, and dominated by huge corporations, rampant inequality, and societal tensions and it doesn’t use fear of some orientalised other to do any of it.
Moreover though, what other games do that Cyberpunk doesn’t is be original. There is a very important conversation to have here about racism, and about the legacy of colonialism, but going forward the biggest difference between Cyberpunk and other games is that Cyberpunk simply absorbs the ideas, stories and tropes of the rest of the genre and recombines them. Orientalism is, yes, a practice of othering - of making a culture, place and people deliberately foreign to dehumanise them - but it’s perpetuated by the uncritical recitation of stories told by people about that other.
In their article, The cyberpunk genre has been Orientalist for decades — but it doesn’t have to be, Kazuma Hashimoto makes these comparisons as well, and also recommends alternative cyberpunk titles that don’t fall into the same traps as 2077, including Umurangi Generation as well. They talk through the history, political context and media tropes from their own Japanese-American perspective, and Kazzy concludes the article:
“Cyberpunk stories can be told effectively without supplanting the fear of the “other” while simultaneously aping culture for the sake of aesthetics. We can have stories about fighting back against ultra-capitalist corporations and authoritarian dictatorships that step away from the tropes that have continued to drag the genre down. It’s what we deserve, and what stories about our future — as bleak as it may be — should be about.”
Body Modding (The Tower)
So here we’re going to need to discuss some missed opportunities. If the big message of the last section was about Cyberpunk repeating old ideas then what we need to consider about Cyberpunk’s transhumanism is what it didn’t do. Usually this wouldn’t be a criticism in and of itself “I think they cut content here that would have made it better” isn’t meaningful analysis, however there are places, as I’ll demonstrate, where what they didn’t do is incredibly glaring. I didn’t want to talk about how the game was made until later, but we’re reaching some places where it’s unavoidable.
It’s typical on large projects for different developers, writers, and artists or different teams to work on different parts of a game, different questlines, characters and so on. For example, I know that on Jurassic World: Evolution each developer was assigned their own dinosaur. However if one thing was made clear by the reports coming out of CD Projekt Red when 2077 was under development it was that communication in the company was not good. Everyone can work on their own dinosaur, but if one person decides their dinosaur can speak English, that probably has some implications that the rest of the studio should know about.
Let’s look at two prominent side quests.
The Delamain Cab Company is experiencing an issue with its self driving cars that have become self aware and for various reasons don’t want to work any more, and you can choose to help the company reintegrate them and put them back to work or help the cars escape and live free. I like this quest a lot, I ran a story very similar to this when I was playing the TTRPG (except in my story the cars all unionised and threatened to [redacted] if their demands weren’t met). It’s a good story with a lot of compassion in it, and classic fun sci-fi genre Big Questions and it doesn’t really both-sides it too much.
The other quest is called “Psycho Killer” and it’s about a condition referred to in the world as “cyberpsychosis”, a mysterious illness linked with cybernetic augmentation. The arc here is that you’re going to investigate each case and every time realise that material conditions caused a psychological breakdown and that cyberpsychosis is not caused by overdependence on implants. This is somewhat of a genre staple and something that goes back to the tabletop game, and fundamentally there’s a good story in there: the problem with these people has nothing to do with cybernetics, the problem is societal, systemic, economic, et cetera - so it has really strong potential as a questline.
The issue is that these “cyberpsychos” take the form of video game minibosses, tough enemies for you to defeat, so that they no longer present a danger to everyone else. The quest-giver instructs you to detain them without killing them, which you do by getting their health down to zero and then not attacking them any more. Yeah.
The main gameplay loop for this quest is that you find people having a mental breakdown and then you shoot them. They can’t be reasoned with, they can’t be talked to at all, they’re called “psychos” by the game and the only way to stop them is by fighting them. Apropos of nothing: Half of people murdered by American police have some kind of disability.
Yup, this one’s gonna be a yikes.
Deviation from the status quo has been historically pathologised many times over. Hysteria, the idea that agitated wombs made women become emotional and irrational, and stockholm syndrome, the idea that hostages fall in love with hostage-takers are two of the most famous examples, but today American police use a term “excited delirium”, previously “Bell’s mania” to explain why people who they are arresting or have in custody sometimes get violent, have sudden rushes of strength, exhibit high body temperature or become extremely emotional, rather than the obvious explanation that getting arrested makes people afraid and can trigger an adrenaline rush.
In Superior: The Return of Race Science, Angela Saini writes that slave-era American doctors used a term drapetomania (literally runaway slave madness) to explain the mental illness that would sometimes cause slaves to run away.
This framing, in which the player works for the police and approaches quests with the perspective of a cop, means you deal with neurodivergent, and psychologically upset people the way a cop does. Cyber psychosis is runaway slave madness. This itself isn’t inherently bad for a story, of course - Bladerunner has the protagonist in the same position, and in that film John Bladerunner grows and changes as a character. The arc of the movie exposes the fundamental contradiction in policing, that police, as an external group imposing state law on a society, have to view the people they police as inherently different, but they aren’t. John Bladerunner can’t reconcile working for the police any more once he sees that he and the androids are the same.
V is literally the same as the people they are policing. The cyberpsychos are people suffering with a feeling that they no longer have control of the world around them or even their own bodies because a system that demands they make money to stay alive coerced them into implanting technology into themselves, leading to a total meltdown. V is a person suffering with a feeling that they no longer have control of the world around them or even their own body because a system that demands they make money to stay alive coerced tham into implanting technology into themself, leading toward a total meltdown. V, the police, and the people they are policing are fundamentally the same, and policing requires a pretense that they are not. Here would be a perfect time for Johnny to pop in for a hard-hitting conversation about the nature of the work V does, but instead, nothing. You can’t approach any of the people differently depending on any information you are given or discover, the only option is to attack them.
And all of that would ultimately just be an underwhelming quest if it were in a game that didn’t also have a quest where you help neurodivergent characters rebelling against a system that oppresses them, but the Delamain sidequest is right there, and it even has Johnny appear at the climactic moment to influence V’s decision by arguing for the agency of the AI cars. The Delamain quest requires you to learn about the needs of each individual and help them calm down and get back safely, for instance one of the cars has become overwhelmed with anxiety and wants to be driven back slowly and carefully to HQ.
This game gives less consideration and compassion to the mentally ill than it does to cars.
By contrast, Disco Elysium makes police work all about detective work and mystery-solving, and everywhere that the game comes into contact with the nature of the actual police they’re framed as invasive, harmful and problematic. Disco Elysium repeatedly gives the player encounters with people suffering from poor mental health, and it’s not some big reveal that society has let them down, it’s just true. But Disco Elysium is very action-shy and story-focused, so what about an action game? Ghostrunner is another cyberpunk action game like 2077, but it divorces the plot from the gameplay in a way that makes the plot meaningful and doesn’t diminish its own messaging with the gameplay. To put it another way, the action and the enemies you fight are only very loosely related to what the game is trying to say and do. Cyberpunk 2077 gets right in the middle of everything and utterly shits the bed, and it might have benefitted from an approach more like Ghostrunner, an army of faceless drones working for an irredeemable bad-guy instead of individual mentally ill people who you are tasked with executing.
There’s a bit more history in the genre to dig into here.
Cyborgs in Cyberpunk stories are often used to represent the failure of individualism in those who just want to climb the class ladder, or to represent the coercive way that capitalism makes people change themselves. Johnny Mnemonic, one of the biggest influences on 2077 shows the main character as a petit-bourgeois upwardly mobile entrepreneur, a data-courier carrying the unimaginably huge amount of data of… 320 Gigabytes. Oh, the 90s. Anyway, the movie consistently represents Johnny’s and other’s willingness to integrate technology into his body as a character flaw.
You can criticise the ableist undertones of this theme in the genre, especially with things like robot prosthetic arms being celebrated by able-bodied society while 44% of upper-body amputees end up being dissatisfied and rejecting prosthetics. Disabled people face a lot of stigma for using disability aids that make their lives easier because able-bodied people feel uncomfortable around visible disability. The disabled people who are actually most directly exposed to such technology are overlooked and ignored and meanwhile media like this conjures the image of prosthetics as something inherently coercive and dehumanising. It’s pretty unhelpful.
However, the coercive modification of the body by capitalism is really more about how people are made to present themselves - it’s less literally about prosthetics and more analogously about how the system demands things of people, like wearing a suit for a zoom call even though you’re in your 10 square foot bedroom in a flat share. It can however, be used for both, or neither, or everything in between, and that’s part of why cyberpunk, as a genre full of transhumanist ideas, has been historically popular in the trans community.
You’d think that “changing your body makes you less human” was a message that trans people would balk at, but as discussed before, on the superficial level, a cigar is just a cigar. If a genre is packed full of stories of people being able to pop a pill and instantly become a boy, or a girl, or a specific mix of characteristics they want, or let’s be real here - a 7 foot vampire catgirl with huge breasts and knives for hands - it’s going to be a hit with us transedgenders.
But if we’re to really dig into the nitty gritty of subtext and theme, 2077 synthesises the ultimate version of this message and gives us “being trans is a kind of disability, and therefore morally wrong.”
This one will take some explaining.
The textual exploration of transness is minimal in 2077. Barely there. Fleeting. And then where it is there it’s really prominent. It’s another place where it seems like teams simply weren’t in communication with one another.
The character creator at the start of the game lets you make characters with whatever genitals you like, regardless of body. This is unreservedly cool as hell. In the words of a transfem friend of mine, “if the game ended at the character creator: 10 out of 10, great game, no complaints.” and I honestly agree. The simple act of letting the player create a man with a vagina or a woman with a penis is actually radical and will do a lot for getting people to consider trans bodies differently in the mainstream. That owns. I loved running around Night City as a woman with a dick, and I rarely made V wear clothes because I was so excited about it.
But right away, as in right away, as in as soon as the character creator comes into contact with the rest of the game we run into problems. To set the pronouns that V is referred to by, the player doesn’t get to tick a box, but rather the pronouns are tied to which voice the player chose for V. This was something that had been reported on and so I knew about it going in and was keeping my ears pricked up for lines that reference V in the third person, and… there are barely any. They could have made every line say “they” or deliberately work around gendering V in those lines and it wouldn’t need to be an issue. In fact, that’s a super normal approach for this kind of RPG, because it saves money on recording voice lines.
One place where I thought V’s gender was relevant was when Johnny says to her “you remind me of me, but without the impressive cock” and… no Johnny, actually I have a great big, thi-- but actually he also says this to male V anyway. I thought this was tied to V being a woman and they hadn’t acknowledged the genital selection that Johnny should know about, being in your body, but actually he’s just being dickhead, it’s very in-character. It does beg the question again though - what lines really needed for V to be gendered?
The whole thing just feels like a total failure of communication within CDPR because it’s a little baffling why this choice needed making at all, and it runs counter to the philosophy of whoever decided that you could make your character have whatever junk they want. Seems like they were making the character creator and someone told them V’s pronouns need to be tied to something.
So okay, let’s talk about the missed opportunity of the transness in 2077.
When you get to talk to Johnny about how he feels about being in V’s body, he talks about the lag between V doing things and him experiencing them, and how annoying it is that V doesn’t smoke. He also makes a cryptic passing comment about “your hormones being a mess”, and vitally here, he says the same exact thing no matter what body gender or genitals you’ve selected. Johnny apparently has no particular feelings about the body he finds himself in, except that’s not fucking true, because in the ending where Johnny takes over V’s (female) body, when he tries to tell someone he’s Johnny Silverhand they say “you’re a girl” and he says “not for much longer”, because Johnny is going to trans his gender to make his body match his authentic self. But it’s a throwaway line, like “meh, not for much longer” and when we had a sit-down proper conversation with him earlier, he just didn’t give a fuck. This little throwaway line is a solution to a problem - what if Johnny gets your body at the end and you’re a girl? It has no consideration at all for a trans perspective, and when, earlier in the game, we had an opportunity to discuss it, it didn’t come up.
We will talk about this more later, but the game references The Matrix a lot. There are ads around Night City making visual references, you take red pills or blue pills to either slow down or speed up Johnny’s takeover of V’s body, and well, this is kind of a subtle one not many people noticed, but Keanu Reeves the star of The Matrix actually plays Johnny.
I’ve spent the last six months working on a video about the Matrix Trilogy (patreon dot com slash curiovids two dollars or more than two dollars) and maybe I’m a little close to the subject matter, but the fact that this game references The Matrix this much without even a whiff of gender is actually itself a glaring, gaping hole in the fabric of this piece. Maybe that’s just me.
But look at the play experience of someone who makes their character a trans woman. There is a man in your head, a violent, angry man who doesn’t care about you and wants to drive you to kill yourself or take over your body and make it his. Sometimes when you look in the mirror you see this man, and the game portrays this as scary and bad. You can take pills that will suppress this man and make you see yourself instead, or you can take suicide pills and do a suicide. Johnny’s role, as a literal manifestation of dysphoria, a monkey on your back, a gender demon akin to Agent Smith is so glaringly obvious, but that conversation never got had. The conversation just never got had.
You take pills that are a reference to the red pill in the movie The Matrix which was made by two trans women in which the red pill is a reference to estrogen which was red at the time, and you take these pills to control how much of Johnny you see, and it means nothing for your experience of gender, because that conversation never got had.
In fact, you take the red pill in the game to make Johnny take over your body faster. In this story, the red pill, the radical option is suicide. The red pill, a reference to The Matrix in which the red pill -- okay, I’m just gonna go round in circles here. If I haven’t communicated at this point that they didn’t consider the trans perspective that was right there it’s never gonna happen.
Queerness is splashed all over Night City as an advertising aesthetic recuperated by capitalism. If you want to trans your gender you can just pop a pill or drink a magic elixir or go see a ripper doc. We don’t know the specifics, we just know it’s a trivial thing, no matter, inconsequential. And so transness becomes just another form of the soulless dehumanising body-modification the genre has rallied against the whole time. Being trans is a bit like a disability, and therefore morally wrong.
Anticapitalism, 20XX setting, politics (The Devil)
Oooooh baybee, let’s get to it now.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a 20XX setting - meaning it is based on our real world up to a point where its history diverges and it is set in the future year of 20XX. This subgenre of cyberpunk stories has not unfixable but very common issues. For example, historical holdovers:
The USSR still exists in the world of 2077, but the geopolitical implications of this are simply too far reaching and enormous to really imagine, and so it becomes like trying to write a realistic story in a world where 2 add 2 equals 5, so instead, 2077 just mostly ignores that. What does it mean for the USSR to still exist? We don’t know, we can’t think about it, there isn’t time, don’t worry.
The zaibatsu problem. This is retreading some of our discussion of orientalism, but Japanese zaibatsu were the unique kind of megacorporation that sprung up in Japan in the wake of WWII. These corporations were vertically integrated with a ruling family at the top who owned a bank which financed the many construction, shipping and manufacturing interests the corporation held. This type of megacorporation was antithetical to the values that free-market America claimed to love, and so was a big focus of a lot of the panic about Japan taking over the business world, but while it was always nonsensical and fueled by racism, in our modern day where global giants like Amazon buy up entire production chains to be able to offer services like next day delivery, the inherent contradiction is laid bare: the focus on the threat of japanese big business isn’t anti-capitalist, it’s just anti-japanese.
Another issue of the 20XX setting is the Corporate Wars. The corporate wars are the peak of the 20XX prediction that corporations will gain an immense amount of power effectively surplanting nation-states with corporation-states, under which nobody has clear government because the nation still exists in a figurehead role but corporations have the biggest say in the day-to-day lives of citizens. This is a place where popularity works against good storytelling, where there is a tension between writers telling one kind of story and writers telling another, because the lore of the Cyberpunk 20XX world has been developed by many authors over multiple decades.
Some authors, for example, are trying to tell a story about the lives of people who work for a company that also owns their housing and provides their food and healthcare and maybe even education - a frightening look at the growing power of corporations. Other authors, for example, use the setting to be explicitly anti-capitalist, embroiling the characters and plot in the politics of the world. Other authors still are trying to recreate the material conditions of their own period in history in a futuristic setting to get people to understand the political forces at play in their own lives.
One author zigs, another zags, another still does something else entirely. This is the eternal dance of culture and storytelling that builds a genre, and it is wonderful, but it leaves something quite messy behind. The common overlap between all these stories is good for any of them but only okay for all of them and nothing on its own.
What do I mean by that?
The private management of public infrastructure and industries typically controlled and managed by the government is a crucial feature of neoliberalism, but it doesn’t mean that the state is shrinking or that corporations will replace nations. Neoliberalism and American Imperialism are near-as words for the same thing. The American empire is run through multinational corporations just as the British Empire was run through companies like the East India Trading Company. Imperial powers delegate responsibility to undemocratic profit-driven corporations in order to grow faster.
So no, corporations aren’t going to replace nations, and if a corporation were to replace a nation it would basically become the nation, unless of course the corporation was acting on behalf of another imperialist country. So the megacorporations are either more of the old anti-japanese xenophobia or just kind of nonsense, and the thing is, that’s fine. It is totally okay for a tabletop game to have lore that doesn’t really work on its own, but allows lots of different stories to be told, because the actual stories are told by the GM and the players collectively. Tabletop players could use this lore to tell all sorts of different stories, but Cyberpunk 2077 just takes the mess in between all those stories and crystallises it.
By comparison Observer is set in a 20XX setting too, but after it’s nuclear apocalypse, Poland is the centre of a new empire, and Chiron, a megacorporation do actually run the state, but not in this libertarian wet-dream sense where people just fend for themselves under the brutal feudalism of companies. Instead, exactly as I said, the corporation has to act as the state and in tandem with the state. A scene depicting propagandistic brainwashing tells the player “Poland is your mother. Chiron is your father” and that’s pretty good. They’ve clearly thought a lot about the politics of the world they’re portraying in Observer. And it’s set in Poland without any weird orientalism. And cybernetics are portrayed as disability aids that are imperfect solutions to people’s problems. And it stars Rutger Hauer! It’s a good game, go play it, just dear God don’t go in the doll room.
At times 2077’s insistence on referencing other, better cyberpunk media gets incredibly tiring like “Yes, I too have seen The Matrix. Yes, I too have seen Ghost in the Shell. Yes, I too have seen The Matrix. Yes, I too have seen Akira. Yes. I too have seen The Matrix.”
But when it references other, better RPGs based on TTRPGs it dips into the territory of that old MST3K catchphrase “don’t remind me of a better movie I could be watching instead”. The reference to the USSR still existing comes in a small dock-yard side-mission which is tonally very reminiscent of the freight ship mission from Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines and even ends with you finding this coffin-like car, but all it does for me is remind me that I could be playing a game right now that actually has a coherent understanding of class politics, and.. Y’know… fun quests.
But other media isn’t all that 2077 references, it also sneaks some easter eggs for big time communism-heads like me. Oh look.. 24 hr Market X… Mark...X Marx geddit? Gramsci Burger.
Okay, this right here - this is pretty interesting.
Antonio Gramsci was an OG marxist who wrote a bunch of his philosophy from prison and a big focus for him was how popular culture obfuscates and distracts people away from the struggle between the ruling class and the working class. Yeah, Gramsci Burger is pretty ironic. But it gets more interesting than that, ideologically *sniff*. The way the game shows this overwhelming bombardment of pop culture and style over substance is very gramscian, but its main revolutionary radical character, Johnny, is such a perfect emblem of the poser radical, he’s either a revolutionary hero or a naive utopian depending on what you want to see. Nothing in the game is actually grounded in economic reality and poverty, working class struggle, and leftist ideas all become simply aesthetic.
Like the email on V’s computer saying they’re about to be evicted, even while you do merc jobs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, or the texts from the Bartmoss Collective that sound leftist but are just total gibberish. “Every time money changes hands under capitalism your true self is the victim” what? That’s not anything. Shut the fuck up. Join a union.
Because of this superficiality, the anticapitalism of 2077 becomes just another pop culture aesthetic, it becomes just another discourse. Mayor! Light the Foucault signal!
Michel Foucault was a poststructuralist who saw all of culture as shaped by discursive communities (people talking about things) and rather than a structuralist perspective - one where culture is shaped by things like economics - Foucault took the perspective that even Marxism was just another discourse, just another idea looking to find cultural supremacy.
But next we need to understand a neo marxist understanding of Foucault.
We did it everyone! We went neo-marxist and post-modernist! Finally Professor Peterson can awaken from his beef-slumber!
Post-Modernism, Foucault’s style of thought, is what Mark Fisher calls Capitalist Realism, because this kind of poststructuralist thought brings even marxist ideas into a frame within capitalism.
Fisher writes “What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.”
In the words of the great philosopher Benjamin Siegel: “Truth is, the game was rigged from the start”
Gramsci (y’know the guy from Gramsci Burger) was saying that popular culture exists to obfuscate away from class struggle, but then Foucault, the Joker of Political Philosophy, comes along and puts Gramsci’s marxism inside his postmodernist framework, but then Mark Fisher, the real clown prince of crime comes along and pulls an Uno Reverse Card on Foucault and puts his postmodernism inside a neo-marxist framework.
Capitalist Realism is a genuinely very important concept to grasp for the understanding of 2077, so what is it? As Slavoj Zizek put it “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. Capitalist realism is a kind of thought people engage in where they can acknowledge some of the things horribly wrong with capitalism while also refusing to believe there could be any alternative. It’s edgy liberalism, it’s shallow anticapitalism, and it’s the exact politics on display in Cyberpunk 2077.
Take for example the Bartmoss Collective - the leftist hackers sending you those edgy text messages? Well the game offers you a quest to go track them down, and for as much as the things they’re saying are gibberish barnum statements with “capitalism” thrown in sometimes, it feels like maybe this will be a place where you can actually link up with real hardcore radicals. Maybe the game is going to unlock a hidden option for you and instead of just attacking Arasaka to get revenge for you personally, you’re going to engage in a campaign of [redacted] against all the bourgeois scum who will soon [redacted] and then the proletariat will rise up and [redacted] but where the quest actually takes you is to saddest punchline of the game. The texts, instantly recognisable to anyone with a passing familiarity with leftist theory as nonsense, turn out to be… nonsense. Someone hacked a fortune teller bot to talk about politics and then pinged its anticapitalist horoscopes through a series of VPNs to pretend to be some kind of radical direct action group.
The apologetic reaction here is that this is a critique of moralising jargonistic theoretical leftism, and that would be, I’ll say outright pretty fucking baller - if, and only if, the game also showed you examples of people getting out and making a real difference, but on its own the resounding, stomach churning, disillusioning punchline to this setup is: there is no alternative. Nothing can be done.
For all this game loves to reference The Matrix, this quest is the equivalent of Neo meeting Trinity and seeking out Morpheus and asking the big question “what is the Matrix” and finally getting to take the red pill, and then… nothing happens. You were stupid for thinking anything would happen. Fuck you.
When they show you evil corporations whose moral bankruptcy knows no bounds, who they literally equate with the actual literal devil Satan Lucifer, whose vileness is so extreme that your protagonists are engaging in anticapitalist terrorism against them, it’s pretty clear that they understand capitalism is thoroughly evil, but… is there no alternative?
In Cloudpunk, by contrast, the robot streetgang BlockFourOh are engaging in guerilla gardening because they know urban reclamation will really truly stick it to the man. In Disco Elysium, you are privy to the internal machinations of union politics and revolutionary action and how a strong workers union could establish independence from big business. Other games do this, and they do it well, Cyberpunk’s lack of alternatives to capitalism don’t come from a lack of options, they come from a lack of imagination - because it’s easier to imagine the end of the world.
The futility of revolutions is a common theme of 2077 as well, between Johnny’s constant proclamations that he died for nothing and nothing changed, to your ultimate inability to really harm Arasaka in any way, to the side quest where you help sex workers overthrow their bosses. This quest seems the closest to actually advocating any way that people can change anything, and hey, it’s about sex workers! That’s honestly pretty cool, especially compared to how horribly the rest of the game treats sex workers, and y’know how the rest of games treat sex workers. The quest is about taking on the corrupt and dangerous management of Clouds, an algorithm-run brothel where sex workers’ actions are dictated by a psychological scan of the client which will allow them to fulfil your deepest subconscious needs - hey look it’s that theme about systems selling a fake reality to people again huh - and by working together the employees hatch a plan to overthrow their managers and become independent.
To take on the security they use the same implants they use at work to download martial arts into their brains okay jesus we get it you watched The Matrix and then V and Maiko go in to confront the current manager and his bosses from the Tiger Claws gang, and here is where this whole thing goes to shit.
Maiko wants to work for the Tiger Claws, she wants to replace the current boss and keep things the same. From here you can scrap the plan, let her do it, or kill her and establish independence, but the Tiger Claws gang will retaliate off screen and kill your friends. There is no good ending to this quest. There is no alternative.
Johnny himself rants about a “people’s war” and a fight against “entropy” and a “system that got out of our control” as if capitalism was ever under the control of ordinary people. It sounds like the ranting of a billionaire who thinks he can identify as a socialist because he knows that capitalism is bad. I’ve seen people say it should be called Neonliberal. I’ve seen people say, it’s dad rock, not punk, and they’re right. Anything subversive or radical in this game is either a projection of the player or directly contradicted by something else in the game.
For as much as Johnny talks with disdain about the Bartmoss Collective; for as much as he is vindicated because they’re just a leftist horoscope bot, he doesn’t advocate anything better. Point of fact, he doesn’t really advocate anything. He talks a big game about some generic kind of direct action, he died doing a terrorism, fair enough he wants to do the big spectacular showboaty thing, but he doesn’t want to put the work in. Whatever Johnny’s ideology is, it’s worth dying for, but it isn’t worth living for.
So I’ve applied several lenses of analysis to this game now. Let’s look straightforwardly at what its central, most core theme is about.
Death, Grief, Acceptance (Death)
Let’s return to Clouds, the sex club where an algorithm promises to fulfil your deepest desires via psychological scan. When V gets scanned and goes through to see the sex workers at Clouds, they are selected two possible ideal partners by the system. Justified easily by V containing two psyches but really just an opportunity for the player to pick whether they want to see a male or female sex worker.
Either way, because the algorithm dictates the actions of the sex worker based on the scan, you get the same thing acted out. What V gets is a meaningful chat about death and acceptance. V is afraid, because V is going to die. It’s worth saying that this is extremely cool and unique. So-called Triple A games don’t typically engage so unflinchingly with such a meaningful topic. I’ve played quite a few games about loss, but none where the protagonist has an inescapable death sentence. In fact Adios, one of the best games I’ve played this year, is the only other example I can think of. Adios is better, play Adios.
When you really get down to it, Cyberpunk 2077 is about your own inevitable mortality, and on the personal side a lot of that discussion is genuinely good and I won’t demean it. However, Cyberpunk 2077 is eschatological - it always relates back to death, and it isn’t just about the personal, it’s also about the political.
Johnny has been freed from the chip in your head and is slowly taking over your body. Misty gives you two bottles of pills, one blue and one red. One will suppress Johnny Silverhand, letting you maintain control of yourself for a little while longer, but the other will accelerate your deterioration, giving your body over to Johnny.
The red pill is suicide.
There’s no way around this, a story that references The Matrix this much is portraying whatever its red pill does as the radical option - the path to progress. It’s not saying it’s good necessarily, the game certainly spends some time with you to acknowledge that dying isn’t easy, but it presents dying and giving way to Johnny as progress.
V is going to die no matter what, so the game frames the ultimate choice as between “the quiet life” and “a blaze of glory”. In what we could call V’s Good Ending, you work with the Aldecado nomad band to take on Arasaka and then sneak across the border and out of Night City. In other words, you leave it all behind. This isn’t presented as a bad ending, at least not compared to V’s other potential endings, but it’s certainly a pensive one: leaving Night City behind with all it’s unsolved problems that will never be fixed. In Johnny’s Ending, a newly empowered and back-from-the-dead Johnny Silverhand sets out to resurrect real rock ‘n roll and empower the people to fight their war against entropy. In Johnny’s Ending, V went out in a blaze of glory and has empowered Johnny to literally live on, implying that Johnny is more of an idea than a person - something bigger than just yourself. This is characterised by Johnny’s final song, catchphrase and motto, “Never Fade Away”. By contributing to eternal firework that is Johnny Silverhand V gets to be part of something bigger than themself, and never fade away.
The end is what you make it, both in the choices that lead to which story ending you get and in your interpretation. A long running side quest throughout the game that Misty tasks you with is to find graffiti all over the city that represents the major arcana of a tarot deck. The meaning, ironically is clear: that you need to discern your own meaning. Johnny could be a cynical manipulative creep, or a poser radical who believes he’s doing something despite his own ultimate futility, or the genuine article, the man to ignite the revolution that will bring down the system, maaaaaan. Like each card of a tarot deck, Johnny has multiple suggested meanings but is also open to interpretation, and so is the game, the game is suggesting to you.
The game is shrugging and saying “life is what you make it” and hoping that you don’t feel cheated out of any kind of concrete stance on anything.
Vic, the ripperdoc who patches you up at the start and diagnoses your terminal case of Johnny, is always watching boxing when you go to see him, and right before the final decisions of the game are made, you have a very telling interaction with him. V asks about the fight, and Vic reveals that it’s a pre-recorded match, that he’s been watching every time you saw him, which he watches over and over, rooting always for the loser. Vic passionately cheers for his guy to get up, knowing that he won’t. The point is to try, the point is to give ‘em a good fight, the point is to find your own meaning, the point is to never fade away, even when there’s no way of winning.
2077 is eschatological - it always relates to death - but in politics eschatological doesn’t just mean relating to death, when it’s about a whole ideology, it’s about the end of the world, because that’s easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.
You thought I was done with Mark Fisher? Fuck you. This is Cyberpunk, it doesn’t get to just be about personal philosophy, it doesn’t get to just shrug at politics. This is about anarchism, about building a better future. This depressing morbid guff doesn’t have any place in the political world of anti-capitalism. You are going to be alive tomorrow, you aren’t going out in a blaze of glory, people are suffering get your fucking shit together.
This cynical ideology of edgy liberals, this capitalist realism, this belief that capitalism has won and nothing can be done except tidy your room and follow your bliss or go out with a bang is the most blackpill, mindnumbing depressing empty bullshit you could possibly say. This is the ideology of a manager who doesn’t understand why their class interests are fundamentally opposed to the people who are actually most harmed by capitalism. The harm of capitalism is exploitation, inequality, erasure, censorship, alienation, it isn’t “fading away, boohoo so much entropy I never got to be famous waaaa”. This is so hilariously out of touch.
It’s dad rock, not punk. It’s completely toothless because past a certain point the question has to stop being “why are they saying this?” and start being about what they aren’t saying - if the simplest thing they could have told you is to unionise, can you seriously imagine CD Projekt Red making a game that tells people to join a union?
Hmm, maybe there are some more things we need to talk about first.
Okay, I’ve been critical so far through various lenses of media analysis, but I’ve been deliberately talking about the ideal version of this game. I’ve been giving it a lot of space, and I’ve been talking about what they wanted to release.
It’s time to talk about what they actually published.
Bugs & The Video Games Industry (The Fool)
As Cyberpunk 2077’s release date drew closer, and then had to be postponed multiple times, reports started coming out of the company that the developers were working extreme long hours round the clock to try to get the game out, an industry practice referred to as “crunch”. The version that was released on day one was, well, a mess. After installing the 70 GB game, the day-one patch was itself over 50 GB. The following series of patches over the days and weeks after release were never smaller than 30GB, now adding up to more storage than Johnny Mnemonic would have been able to carry.
The bugs are… well… a lot.
I installed the game on a base PS4 out of morbid curiosity, and though hardcore defenders of CD Projekt Red have tried to insist that this is simply not the intended way for the game to be played, nothing excuses the game being as broken as it is. They shouldn’t have been selling it on any platform it is fundamentally unplayable on. Besides, I know of at least three people whose gaming PCs were literally bricked by running 2077, so it really isn’t simply an issue of platform.
You’ll see some clips here where the bugs aren’t self-evident without narration. For example, the world was so poorly optimised that the lights frequently take up to a minute to fully catch up with a medium speed car travelling through the world.
The control to shift from first person to third person driving simply doesn’t work, so I had to develop a workaround where I would open the radio afterwards, freezing the world around me and also straining to even open that menu, but even this was an unreliable fix. It didn’t and still doesn’t work every time but it’s the only way I’ve found I can change perspective while driving.
Other clips show something wrong but it’s fun to explain exactly what especially as I took some time trying to figure it out myself through trial and error. For example the fact that all vehicles weighed exactly the same as a motorbike, evidenced here by me bouncing a truck across the road like a nickel.
Many clips show a lot going wrong at once, and can’t even be categorised as just one thing which brings me to an important point: After the release of the game, bug compilations flooded YouTube and other social media sites, documenting many many bugs from many different people’s play, but the impression this can give a viewer overall is that while the game is undeniably very buggy, people are crowdsourcing the absolute best from hours and hours and hours of playtime, so what I’m deliberately showing here is a compilation of just some of the bugs in the release version of the game, almost entirely from my first 4 hours of playing the game.
I can’t include the frequent crashes like when the game couldn’t handle me walking forwards while opening a menu, and I’ve cut a lot of footage that repeated the same bugs over, and this compilation is still astronomically long. Anyway here’s V climbing inside of a woman.
What I show here will be the visually fun bugs rather than the ones that actually disrupted the ability to play the game the most. For example, the release version of the game had a bug that locked me out of the quest with Panam, and without that quest you can’t get to V’s Good Ending where they can escape the city. For another example, an early tutorial mission requires you to follow a character called Dumdum, but when the smoke cleared Dumdum had clipped inside a shipping crate making him not technically dead but unable to move, so unable to open the door that would let me out of the building. My argument is that this makes the game, as it was released, unplayable.
Then there’s the nudity. In the inventory screen you can see V’s genitals, but in the world they are wearing black underwear, and this is due to a strange arbitrary distinction made by ESRB that would rate the game Adult-Only if it weren’t compliant with this same distinction. The reasoning has to do with genitals in the space that the player interacts with, and I find the ESRB distinction problematic, but the fact that the game glitches showing V’s genitals outside the inventory screen might make the release of the game under an M rating fraudulent. I’m not a lawyer, I’m just speculating that it might.
Okay this one is kind of fascinating - Misty is involved in two quests at once, so when I went to see her in her shop, the game teleported me across town and loaded in only half of the conversation, not playing Misty’s audio files or showing her subtitles because Misty hadn’t loaded into the scene yet, but it also wouldn’t let me get up or move because in the scene it had loaded me into, V is supposed to be sitting on the curb with Misty. When it did load Misty in, it loaded her in the wrong position, which is why you can see her butt hovering slightly off the ground, as if she’s sitting on something that isn’t there.
This is a consistent issue, with some characters having two conversations with you at once and others just dropping their lines altogether. Here you can see one of the cars from the Delamain quest - she’s doing a whole GLaDOS from Portal thing, but I didn’t find that out until my second playthrough because her lines simply didn’t load.
One notorious issue with the game at release was that although the game contains flashing lights that could cause a seizure in people with photosensitive epilepsy, the only warning about this was buried deep in an EULA which itself began with a flippant joke about how nobody ever reads EULAs. After a journalist with photosensitive epilepsy did have an actual seizure because of this, defenders of the game and fans of the studio responded to her on twitter by calling her a liar, and sending her videos of flashing lights with the intention of causing more seizures, something that A) doesn’t defend your favourite capitalists from criticism, B) could literally kill someone with photosensitive epilepsy and C) legally qualifies as assault.
I’d like to add to this that the flashing lights in the game are based on the technology doctors use to deliberately induce seizures in patients, and furthermore that the mechanic in the game that the lights precede is copied almost entirely from Observer a better cyberpunk game from a smaller Polish studio which, yup, does start with an epilepsy warning.
And the bug compilation is still going.
After the release of the game drew the warranted ire of video game fans, co-CEO Marcin Iwiński released a statement saying that the senior management fully owned up to the responsibility of how bad the game had become, but went on to say that the QA department had not caught any of the bugs before release - a patently absurd statement that makes no sense and also contradicts the idea that he was taking responsibility. I have worked in software development in companies like this with large teams with poor communication and every step of this is kind of sickening to me.
In response to people pointing out that Iwiński had thrown the QA department under the bus, Łukasz Babiel, the head of the QA department came out saying that nobody blamed the QA department and denying claims that they were underpaid and overworked and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3hTwsvJV_A
No Łukasz, he said with the words from his mouth that the QA department was the reason the game was like that. Also, if I were concerned about the conditions that the workers at CDPR have to endure, I would like to hear reassurances from, y’know, a worker, not a manager.
Employee bonuses from the sales of the game were apparently tied to the number of sales, but around the time that Sony officially announced they would refund opened copies of the game, a totally unprecedented and previously unthinkable move, CDPR changed this policy, with employees receiving roughly $5000, senior staff getting $20,000 bonuses, creative lead Adam Badowski getting $4.2 million and co-CEOs Adam Kiciński & Marcin Iwiński getting $6.8 million dollars each.
And the bug compilation is still going.
If it seems like I have been harsh up until this point let me say that this is where I’m going to get actually angry. The workers at CDPR whose hard work and talent actually created the game that actually sold to people and actually made, you know, the money, get treated like dogshit, overworked for weeks and months on end, and ultimately go home with less than a thousandth of what the management and board take.
This is so stomach churning to me in particular because having worked in this kind of environment I know way too well the moment when, after multiple extensions and a total breakdown of communication, the developers would have looked at the incomplete, broken garbage in front of them that wasn’t yet finished, had lots of people’s hard work cut out of it already, had no time to work through notes from QA if it had seen QA at all, and realised holy shit this is what they’re going to ship.
It’s also not even a surprise deadline - the deadline would have been known all along, but developers would be working under the assumption that sooner or later management would pull their heads out of their asses and announce another extension. It’s the moment of realising that that extension isn’t coming, that’s when the bottom of your stomach falls out.
And the bug compilation is still going.
This is revolting, it’s disgusting, it's parasitic. This behaviour is morally indefensible and it’s completely normal in the games industry. Capitalism requires you to constantly expand your business making as much money while spending as little as possible. In the case of games, this means promising as ambitious a project as you can, to guarantee sales, while paying your workers as little as possible and getting them to work overtime, sometimes inhuman or downright dangerous hours that could seriously harm their health. A lot of the people working on large projects like this will be freelancers who won’t get a bonus and won’t be rewarded by career advancement for sticking with this project, only punished with harm to their industry reputation if they quit out on a job half way through.
Capitalism incentivises you to deliver on the minimum version of the promises you made that still gets people to buy the game, and let’s be as clear as possible about this: when you see the next company release a huge game like this that’s even more broken than this one is, understand that they were watching the release of this game, and seeing how low it set the bar, so that they could set the bar even lower, because gamers flagrantly don’t care if a game is bigoted, incomprehensible or lazy, apparently don’t give the slightest fuck how the people who actually made the game are treated, and increasingly have absolutely no standards for what they expect of a game they pay money for.
Understand when this happens next time that the price goes up and the quality goes down because that’s how capitalism is intended to function. The treatment of the workers gets worse, and the bonuses the executives take home get bigger because that’s how capitalism is meant to work. Look at all of this and repeat after me: this isn’t a bug. This is a feature.
Conclusion (The World, Requiem)
I wanted to spend a good amount of time with the bugs there, because I want everyone to remember. Our current mode of examining what’s going on in the games industry is really weak, because we all get worked up over the current dumpster fire mess, write about how it’s problematic, how it’s buggy, how there’s crunch going on, and by process of highlighting the specific game and the specific studio, we make an example, but only an example, and what we need to do is remember.
People need to hold these greedy fucks’ feet to fire continually and get people to constantly remember and join the dots and see that there is a systemic problem going on here. I guess what I’m saying here is: thank God for James Stephanie Sterling.
So Cyberpunk 2077: Not conceptually good, not good in its execution, not good. But is it the worst? Well, no. That’s my point. I don’t want to call this game the worst, I just want to remember it, because I know that the investors will.
It doesn’t get to be acknowledged as the most broken, the most outrageous, the biggest scam - even if it is all those things, it will be easily forgotten in the vast, sweeping wave of outrageous broken scams that we call the games industry, because of what capitalism inevitably does to art. It isn’t the most racist, the most transphobic, the most ableist, the most sexist, and even if it were, all that we would get out of awarding it that title are more thinkpieces perpetuating moral discourse about the individual crimes of each individual game, feeding the hot-take industrial complex of culture war media analysis. No. The only prize I can award this embarrassing, parasitic, exploitative failure is that it is the most ironic, because it’s Cyberpunk.