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Cyberpunk 2077: Rockerboy Keanu Silverhand

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I was kind of hoping that the game wouldn't actually deal all that much with the WHAT IS HUMANITY theme all that much, instead just letting the robot stuff exist and focus more on down to earth issues like crime and corporatism and how fucked things are on a societal level and shit. Kind of a vain hope because of course they're going to go for the most boilerplate of thematics for a cyberpunk story in a game literally called cyberpunk.

It's just that the trans humanism vs anti-transhumanism split is one of those arguments that make me want to stuff both sides into a bag and throw them over the side of a bridge so they can fight it out downriver.

That was part of what I really loved about Shadowrun: Dragonfall. The focus wasn't on implications of robot arms, but on more salient human issues.
 
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Jace911 said:
So really what you object to is when someone chooses to get augmented, rather than having that choice forced on them by accident or trauma? What's the difference?
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Are you fucking blind or something? You literally quoted me as I said I was a transhumanist. I would get cybernetic augmentations.

But like, part of being a transhumanist is recognising its various faults and the possibilities of misuse. And one of the faults is that in order to become a cyborg, unless you are replacing something you've already lost, you actually have to give up something functional. As an entirely able-bodied person (I don't even wear glasses) I have to confront the reality that I would be discarding perfectly functional bones, muscles and nerves. That is not, in any way, the same as a disabled person gaining functionality that they either never had or lost due to accident or sickness.

Those things are different. I'm not objecting.

Reveen said:
I was kind of hoping that the game wouldn't actually deal all that much with the WHAT IS HUMANITY theme all that much, instead just letting the robot stuff exist and focus more on down to earth issues like crime and corporatism and how fucked things are on a societal level and shit. Kind of a vain hope because of course they're going to go for the most boilerplate of thematics for a cyberpunk story in a game literally called cyberpunk.
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It's a thing in the source material and is kind of inherent to the genre, so you can't totally ignore it. At the same time, we shouldn't have the impression that it's the whole of the game in the way that it was in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its sequel (which are more transhumanist works compared to classic cyberpunk). It's just something that got mentioned in the behind closed doors demo, I guess because CDPR has a well-earned reputation for a juvenile approach to sex which they've been trying to shake off. As it is, the topic doesn't even come up in the trailer, which emphasises a rags to riches feeling.
 
Ford Prefect said:
Are you fucking blind or something?
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No, I've been nearsighted since childhood.

You literally quoted me as I said I was a transhumanist. I would get cybernetic augmentations.
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That's why I was baffled, lol.

But like, part of being a transhumanist is recognising its various faults and the possibilities of misuse. And one of the faults is that in order to become a cyborg, unless you are replacing something you've already lost, you actually have to give up something functional. As an entirely able-bodied person (I don't even wear glasses) I have to confront the reality that I would be discarding perfectly functional bones, muscles and nerves. That is not, in any way, the same as a disabled person gaining functionality that they either never had or lost due to accident or sickness.

Those things are different. I'm not objecting.
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I guess I just cannot bridge the entirely reasonable idea that getting cybernetics gives you dismorphia with the developers calling a heavily augmented woman "unclean". One sounds interesting, the other gives me hives.
 
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I just wish it didn't look so 80s retrofuture. Like, it's 2018. We can be more creative than that.
 
Jace911 said:
I guess I just cannot bridge the entirely reasonable idea that getting cybernetics gives you dismorphia with the developers calling a heavily augmented woman "unclean".
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Lets not ignore the fact that CD Projekt Red is Polish so there is going to be some english as a second language issues going on with many of the developers. We shouldn't put to much weight on word choice in an interview in any direction. It still could go in a bad direction in the final project but as far as the demo no one has brought that up yet.
 
Well Pondsmith is there, and he seems to be super down with it. I'm sure the themes will be there and will be executed well unlike a certain other cyberpunk franchise.
 
Rook said:
I just wish it didn't look so 80s retrofuture. Like, it's 2018. We can be more creative than that.
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Well, sci-fi hasn't really had a new vision for 'what the future looks like' since maybe Mirror's Edge, and that was just extrapolating current trends. I'd argue that we haven't seen the sort of massive cultural shift in visual design since, well, Blade Runner. With that in mind, I'm hardly surprised we've been stuck in a bit of a rut since the 80s.
 
I should have linked these tweets, because they make an even more important point:





People tend to think of literature as the collective unconscious of humanity, but in truth it can be massively distorted by simple fact of who is actually allowed to pen said literature. Cyberpunk as a genre is no less vulnerable to this.

edit: to give credit to @Ford Prefect his admission reminded me of these tweets
 
Jace911 said:
I should have linked these tweets, because they make an even more important point:





People tend to think of literature as the collective unconscious of humanity, but in truth it can be massively distorted by simple fact of who is actually allowed to pen said literature. Cyberpunk as a genre is no less vulnerable to this.

edit: to give credit to @Ford Prefect his admission reminded me of these tweets
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I take issue with her implication that men are somehow inherently less vulnerable to rape, but otherwise she makes good points.

I mean, to be fair, I don't think rape of men happens nearly as often as rape of women, and that may be what she's trying to say there, as opposed to some sort of biological essentialist 'men can't be raped' bullshit. But it comes off as fairly questionable.

As in regards to the rest of what she's saying and the game in general, I do see that examining the issue of race within the schema of transhumanism is often overlooked. I mean, off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of different ideas based around race relations crossed with transhumanism that could be explored.
 
Jace911 said:
I guess I just cannot bridge the entirely reasonable idea that getting cybernetics gives you dismorphia with the developers calling a heavily augmented woman "unclean". One sounds interesting, the other gives me hives.
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It's not exactly the world's greatest choice of words. However, we should be cautious about reading a moral condemnation into what amounted to a developer mentioning that the proliferation of cybernetic augmentation has changed the way people think of and look at bodies. I realise it's tempting to do so because of the use of the words sacrum and profanum, but the guy who said it isn't actually a priest at a pulpit, but someone making a video game where you play a character who can put swords in their arms to kill people. Just sayin'

Rook said:
I just wish it didn't look so 80s retrofuture. Like, it's 2018. We can be more creative than that.
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*drops armful of tapes everywhere*
 
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Rook said:
I just wish it didn't look so 80s retrofuture. Like, it's 2018. We can be more creative than that.
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I feel like we have recently been oversaturated with versions of the future that are just extrapolations of things today, which is a bit boring. You might then say we should then go for weirder and more radically different futures, but I think retro futures like this one or in the Fallout series have a certain charm and can be "weird" in their own way: the way other time periods saw the future is nonsensical today but it can still make for a great aesthetic.
Hykal94 said:
I'm sure the themes will be there and will be executed well unlike a certain other cyberpunk franchise.
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Watch_Dogs!?! :V
 
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Ford Prefect said:
It's not exactly the world's greatest choice of words. However, we should be cautious about reading a moral condemnation into what amounted to a developer mentioning that the proliferation of cybernetic augmentation has changed the way people think of and look at bodies. I realise it's tempting to do so because of the use of the words sacrum and profanum, but the guy who said it isn't actually a priest at a pulpit, some someone making a video game where you play a character who can put swords in their arms to kill people. Just sayin'
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I do hope the game examines the dissonance between modification as actualization of one's identity and modification as a way of improving and selling your body as a tool under capitalism—I am just very Not Here for any kind of discussion about some inherent "sanctity" of the human body, especially when using a naked woman as imagery.

I really hope it ends up being nothing because god damn that trailer got me hot. But I worry.
 
Heh. Someone else caught in the argument I was in on SB over this.

Yes, it's really stupid - the game costs humanity points for stupid shit like a toe, or a medical implant.

On the one hand, REALLY stupid game balance from back before Transhumanity was a thing - to keep players from going full borg.


On the other hand, they do have a point that Cyberpunk is the side of future where people don't use technology to make things better. So *shrugs* Mod it out when the game launches? I still might.
 
Jace911 said:
I read that as "(straight) men don't spend nearly as much time being afraid of rape as women do" which seems fairly inoffensive to me.
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One of the things I saw said in the wake of the tragic murder of Eurydice Dixon was a teacher relating how she asked both the boys and the girls in her class what they do to avoid rape and sexual assault. While the girls produced a whole list of tactics, the boys just had blank looks. Speaking as a straight man, I have basically never worried about sexual assault in my life. While it's not impossible for grown men to be victims of sexual assault, and I think the case of Terry Crews really highlights that, it's not something which forms the background radiation of our lives.

However, I think we should be cautious about ascribing any sort of hesitance towards cybernetics to men. While I haven't exactly conducted a study on this, when it comes to transhumanism men are pretty significantly overrepresented. Anecdotally, in discussions among my friend the people most cautious about cybernetic augmentation were women.

Jace911 said:
I do hope the game examines the dissonance between modification as actualization of one's identity and modification as a way of improving and selling your body as a tool under capitalism—I am just very Not Here for any kind of discussion about some inherent "sanctity" of the human body, especially when using a naked woman as imagery.
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I expect some part or parts of the game will dig deep into this. Whether it turns out good or bad remains to be seen, but I'd not worry too much about a dev justifying why you'll be able to see your street samurai's cyber dick.
 
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Regarding CP2020 (the original source material) and what it thinks about cybernetic augmentation, quoting directly from Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads, the GM book for Cyberpunk 2020:

Mike Pondsmith said:
Cyberpunk is about the Man-Machine Fusion


It's about the line between Man and his tools blurring so much that you can't tell the difference. You can create artificial eyes, hips, ears, hands, legs, hearts. You can replace body parts with metal ones that do the job even better than meat; potential immortality through better industrialism. It's about transcending limits. Why drive a car? Why not become a car? Have part of your body take on those machine functions. These are only the most immediate possibilities; we can't even imagine the outer envelope. How we use the man-machine interface is going to be more important than how we achieve it; because the result will determine whether human evolution follows the organic path or the inorganic.

Do we lose something in becoming our tools? Do we gain something? If you take a child crippled at birth and slam his brain into an Alpha class full-body cyborg, is he still a human being? Will people be willing to mutilate themselves to strap on a mechanical extra, even if it is a better body part than the one it replaced? Will this amazing ability be trivialized in the name of fashion? Cyberpunk asks us to consider these questions, and to make up our own answers.
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I read this as 'cautiously optimistic about the potential and much more cynical about how it actually ends up being used,' which I think is pretty workable for cyberpunk.
 
In regards to this, the very original trailer emphasised MAXTAC or whatever it's called in a way that the more recent material does not. I very vaguely recall some very vague intimations that you would be playing a cop that specialised in taking care of people who have gone crazy due to their cybernetic augmentations. There's a fairly clear difference in approach now.
 
Incidentally, I'm wondering if this is technically a sequel to CP2020 or a reboot.

The statements about guys using guided bullets could be either-CP2020's sequel, Cybergeneration, had 'Genius Guns' as the next generation of smartgun, which were basically Titanfall-style smart pistols (you had to lock onto targets before you could use them, and they made user skill irrelevant).

I'd prefer the latter-I think Shadowrun gets a little silly what with the fact that you have the Matrix get revised like, several times solely because they're no longer in the 80s and need to rework how the internet works in their setting-but I'm willing to accept either.

Cybergeneration in and of itself is also a statement regarding 'humanity costs' because here you have these kids with radical, significant changes in their bodies compared to normal people, and the total humanity cost of that is a big flat 0. I think that in the concept of 'cybernetics as metaphor for what society forces us to do' the statement that the next generation considers what we consider weird and new and scary to be the new normal is... interesting, especially since Cybergeneration comes with the expectation that these kids revitalize their parents' sense of rebellion and optimism that the corporate-dominated future can be changed, and you will murder the CEOs and topple their thrones.
 
Jace911 said:
I should have linked these tweets, because they make an even more important point:





People tend to think of literature as the collective unconscious of humanity, but in truth it can be massively distorted by simple fact of who is actually allowed to pen said literature. Cyberpunk as a genre is no less vulnerable to this.

edit: to give credit to @Ford Prefect his admission reminded me of these tweets
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Again this seems to be an issue in the dev not explaining their point real well. This issue isn't "the human body is pure and should not be profaned" it's "at what point does a human body stop being a human body?" The idea is that it's an extension of the uncanny valley concept. She's not unclean due to being augmented, she's unclean because she's unrecognizable as a person.
 
Wasn't familiar with the source material and how it handled augmentation: Am now somewhat less hyped for this game.
 
MJ12 Commando said:
Incidentally, I'm wondering if this is technically a sequel to CP2020 or a reboot.

The statements about guys using guided bullets could be either-CP2020's sequel, Cybergeneration, had 'Genius Guns' as the next generation of smartgun, which were basically Titanfall-style smart pistols (you had to lock onto targets before you could use them, and they made user skill irrelevant).

I'd prefer the latter-I think Shadowrun gets a little silly what with the fact that you have the Matrix get revised like, several times solely because they're no longer in the 80s and need to rework how the internet works in their setting-but I'm willing to accept either.

Cybergeneration in and of itself is also a statement regarding 'humanity costs' because here you have these kids with radical, significant changes in their bodies compared to normal people, and the total humanity cost of that is a big flat 0. I think that in the concept of 'cybernetics as metaphor for what society forces us to do' the statement that the next generation considers what we consider weird and new and scary to be the new normal is... interesting, especially since Cybergeneration comes with the expectation that these kids revitalize their parents' sense of rebellion and optimism that the corporate-dominated future can be changed, and you will murder the CEOs and topple their thrones.
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Cybergeneration had a ton of great stuff from what I remember, though I also vaguely remember it being mechanically wonky and incomplete in some ways, at least for things outside the main book. Still, even if things like EcoFront were incomplete, there was a bunch of good stuff, like the super-green movement kids who were deep into genengineering to build their own advanced habitats and other such thing.

If 2077 draws on that I'll be really happy. Still, I suspect it will be more a reboot then anything else. Otherwise you're getting a situation where tech has been stable for, what... fifty two years?
 
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