This week, I played deeply and analyzed Cyberpunk 2077. This mixed work deserves our deep study. My concern is not the gameplay, but the creator’s exposition of the theme of cyber punk. Let’s talk about the general conclusion first: I think this is a landmark game work (regardless of gameplay and bugs)
Looking at cyberpunk, a sub-type of science fiction, it has developed into three attention directions:
- Thinking about the relationship
- Thinking about the definition
- Thinking about development
Many cyberpunk works explore themes and create styles in these three directions. Cyberpunk is a world that can ask and discuss questions, but can’t give correct answers. This complexity is the goal of shaping.
These problems converge into some general issues or motifs. The spire of the Tower of Babel is hidden in its agenda. In order to make the issue an effective one, it is necessary to express, guide and think carefully. So I have a way to touch the spire: find the issues raised in the game, put them in the cultural characteristics of cyberpunk, and examine the way the game presents these issues.
When World War II broke out, human beings felt that they were not ready for modernization at all. When the global economic integration pushes the world towards an economic miracle, or when the Internet just started to make the earth smaller, people think that mankind is heading for a common future, and history has entered the eternal track. Until 2020, when a dog stumbles and eats shit, you will sigh that the dream is broken so unexpectedly.
In fact, cyberpunk had already foreseen this fall. “Cyberpunk 2077” was released at the end of 2020, which led people to continue to move towards a dreamy future full of contradictions.
In the game, choose different identities of V (homeless, street kids, company employees) to start, and you will see different night cities. The four art styles in the game, namely entropy-increasing, novelty-carving, new military power and novelty-carving, divide different night cities from different perspectives. Just as the game integrates these four art styles into one without being blunt, the game also shows the contradictory world of multiple coexistence and fragmentation.
People and machines, creatures and machines are becoming more and more difficult to distinguish. Righteousness and implants make people self-extend, and many people go crazy when they extend. In the TV debate, it is argued whether the copy of consciousness is human consciousness. The winner of Nobel Prize for Literature is an artificial intelligence, which is also a best-selling author. If you find the first chapter of “The Nobel Prize Works” “Under the Tree of Apple” in the game, you will find that this artificial intelligence is approaching the unique side of human being which has been gradually abandoned.
The value of freedom exists in the ridicule of traditional religious people by the spokesmen of fetishism in the new era, in the holding and killing of a musical by different media, in satisfying any desire with money, and in the disorderly growth of neoliberal commerce. A person’s personality is characterized by hanging (implanting) commodities on himself.
The second kind of problem:
Can human beings build a good system (ideal world)?
“Cyberpunk 2077” has created a bad future, which is the basic task of Cyberpunk theme. At the same time, some characters in the game try to ask questions and reform about this bad future.
Cyberpunk originated from doubts about the universal value of capitalism. Night City originated from Richard knight, an idealist who wanted to break the status quo. He was pessimistic, optimistic and realistic, and was murdered when he started to create a utopian city. The city inherited his name and became a dystopian nightmare. This has also become the keynote of the fable of the night city.
Facing a society with deep consumerism, the upper designers choose to continue to use capital logic to solve social problems.
Security work was contracted to private companies, and the most noble medical care was also handed over to private companies, which formed monopolies in their respective fields. The trauma team has great power, and its mission will be fulfilled. It can be saved without being a hardcore. I’m sorry if there is no money. The exorbitant membership fee has led to the first prize of a lottery ticket being a platinum member of trauma group. In the rescue mission related to trauma group, a note accuses society of treating human life as a commodity, which leads to the death of the author’s mother. A treatise pointed out that the trauma team regarded the insured as a potential product to be traded, and they could make money regardless of life or death. The victim in this mission was stolen by a lower-level gang and re-entered the commodity circulation.
Higher security technologies are created, greater security differences are created, and the demand for purchasing security is created out of thin air. It’s obviously useless to add fuel to the fire, and it will become a conspiracy. The consequence of using the market to solve public problems is that those public powers that civilians can’t afford become service providers of the elite. NCPD can only ensure the safety of the municipal center and North Oak District (rich area), and Taiping Island and suburbs are not in the “service area”. When entering the game reading file, there will always be a glib host jumping out and unveiling a new day in the night city with the number of “dead lottery”.
Another kind of reform originated from opposition forces. The campaign financing propaganda against giant companies on the street claimed that everyone should have equal opportunities to receive education, but the specific campaign promises were naive and speechless. On the one hand, it is a relief, at least not like a liar; On the other hand, it makes people feel sad that the candidates are the victims of educational inequality, or that this is a designed fate. In the news, the terrorists claiming to be trade unions tried to organize a strike, which has been pulled out.
Game world outlook reveals that other systems in the world can’t solve problems, and human beings are only involved in consumer society in different ways. In reality, the world economic integration of global allocation of resources has swept all cultures and countries, which is the source of this pessimistic view in cyberpunk.
According to historical records, the fourth company war was ignored at first, and developed rapidly beyond everyone’s expectation. Human beings once cut technology to protect the environment, but failed, and the climate disaster was irreversible and unpredictable. Human beings who think they have become information magicians have always been as amateur as kindergartens in predicting the future. How can such human beings challenge the new gods they created?
Perhaps the only thing that can be done is to patch the existing system. In order to cope with the aging society, the sunset red system developed allows the elderly to immerse themselves in the past of youth. The safety education film of the police station is in the form of cartoon animation. One episode says that if you are attacked in a shopping mall, you can get discounts or vouchers (if you are not killed by the police). This desperate “system patch” makes people think of the budding law enforcement robot in the animation Psychological Measurer and the second-generation budding host in the movie Big Escape, but it constitutes the most thoughtful place. Similar to Psychological Measurer, there is also a note that records a person’s crazy words, and thinks that the members of the violent mobile team used to be cyber mental patients, and they only intensified the violence of cyber mental patients and killed them.
Others choose to escape from the system and create new ones. The house price of the “safe” colony developed on Crimson Star is 100 million euros, which is “a little expensive”. The only thing that leaves a little hope is a historical record. The European Space Station exploited workers (18 hours× 7 days), which caused workers to rebel. The two space stations became the first countries established outside the earth.
For the dark future in cyberpunk, almost the only way out that the designers of capitalist society can think of is to develop a new career that relies on human creativity, which AI can’t replace. However, the achievement and understanding of AI in literature and art in games completely sealed this way out.
There is a history of the “Latin American War”, which fictionalizes the reasons for the collapse of the United States: “If it were not for the huge internal foundation of American imperialism, it would be impossible for any external conflict to defeat it.”
Now these words can’t distinguish reality from fiction. The most frightening future always points to reality.
Perhaps this is the charm of cyberpunk. We are not just a subject of entertainment. But something that has already happened in reality. Combined with the huge social contradictions in China at present. Cyberpunk may not be an assumption. There may be no charming neon lights in reality, but the relationship between people and society has become more cyberpunk than sbpk.