Cyberpunk 2077: the limits of AAA game development and algorithmic governance
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I love cyberpunk fiction. And beyond the bugs and controversy, the major apparent drawback about Cyberpunk 2077 is that it seems to have a dearth of themes that are present in my most beloved cyberpunk fiction. While of course a genre with its own flaws, cyberpunk is a genre of fiction which is inherently concerned with the social effects of technology; how technological innovation is a double-edged sword which both promises inconceivable liberation while actually entrenching existing systems of control, surveillance and alienation.
Neuromancer, for example, is a treatise on the entrenchment of corporate power in 80s America. Cyberspace, while promising the psychedelic experiences of bodiless exultation, is an information highway dominated by corporate and military power. It is not just necessarily a physical representation of a proto-internet, but a metaphor on the outsourcing of governance to faceless, unshakeable cybernetics. The Tessier-Ashpools, a familial dynasty of uber-capitalists, have descended into incestuous offworld depravity, sequestered away on a gothic nightmare of a space-station, ruled by an inhuman patriarch who clones his own daughters to repeatedly sexually abuse and murder — just because there is nothing left in the universe which interests him.
The novel is highly reminiscent of noir-fiction, but also of gothic classics like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — our cyber-cowboy hero Case’s infiltration of the Tessier-Ashpool’s lunar spindle reflects a descent into madness, a glimpse of a world in which the warmness of humanity has been altogether abandoned in favour of the cold, artificial promise of endless power. It is a commentary on how value has become abstracted from the real world, how capital has run amok and is remaking the image of humanity into something altogether less recognisable and more alien. The sentient artificial intelligence that Case unwittingly creates at the climax of the novel is the ultimate metaphor for this; humanity has given birth to a new life form which is remaking our world in ways which we are unable to even begin to understand. It uses transhumanism and technology to make a point — that we had reached a recognisable jumping off point in history — capital had become untethered from material reality, a fundamental shift in the basis of social relations which has ushered in the era of postmodern technocapitalism. It examines the technology/human interface as a point of mutual socialisation, and the attendant consequences for power.
It also understands the liberatory promises of such technology — the bodiless, psychedelic exultation of cyberspace, contrasted with the vulnerable, smelly reality of meatspace.
Which leads me to my next point — is there anything, anything in Cyberpunk 2077 which even gets close to examining themes such as this? I have not personally played the game, but I have watched a lot of streams, reviews and VODs, and kept up with its coverage in the discourse, as a cultural product. I will play the game at some point. It doesn’t look bad. The art direction looks great and I’m sure it feels fun to play. But I only have a base PS4, which by all accounts is not a good experience, replete with technical issues.
This in itself almost seems like a meta-commentary on Cyberpunk 2077 and the downfalls of both its fiction and current AAA game development. Cyberpunk 2077 has been developed and released on these base consoles, but it doesn’t work well on them, despite numerous delays and the endless “deathmarch” of crunch at CDPR. This situation of a game being released unfinished, most likely at the behest of investors who want the boost of Christmas sales, is almost more ‘cyberpunk’ than the game itself; the potential of artistic creation subjugated to the whims of faceless capital. Watching hours and hours of play of this game just leaves me with one lasting impression: wasted potential. The game’s production and content are almost a meta-commentary on the warnings of cyberpunk and limits of big-budget game development. Risk averse game design that in many ways is analogous to the most monotonous aspects of contemporary life — endless checklists of ephemeral content to complete, with skill trees and levelling systems reflecting the constant exhortation of entrepreneurial self-improvement endemic to life in Western economies.
A few years ago, I remember seeing a meme which read “why play video games when I can be oppressed by algorithms in real life?” — and it’s increasingly, at least in relation to AAA games, a pertinent question. Why pay for the pleasure of being constrained and oppressed by the systems that play is meant to provide an escape from? This tension is inherent to video games as a medium, and some of the best explore this tension, but with current AAA games, it has reached a new level of poignancy. There is a severe dearth of creativity resulting in iterative releases of essentially the same game with minor variations over and over again. With Cyberpunk 2077, this is especially disappointing; don’t forget, the punk part of the term is meant to signify a lack of concern for convention, a willingness to break with the status quo and a DIY attitude to create new works of art. However, maybe I am being selective. Maybe Cyberpunk 2077 really is the logical reflection of the British punk movement’s nihilistic battle-cry, “NO FUTURE” — a game which promised to be a groundbreaking vision of the future but instead encapsulates the fall-of-Rome excesses of big-budget, major studio development. Its fiction contains a retrofuturist science-fiction which is less interesting, less shocking and less alienating than the real-life, daily navigation of the impersonal mysteries of online algorithmic governance, economic precarity, panoptic surveillance and indescribable concentration of wealth and power amongst the financial elite. Capitalism as it exists now present us as a monolith of completely unintelligible existential horror. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu has become embodied in the inconceivable, totalising vagaries by which technocapitalism is changing social relations we had assumed to be solid and immovable facts of life.
This is not simply a failure of Cyberpunk 2077. But it is particularly apparent given the lineage of science fiction it draws upon. Instead of addressing the fiction’s concerns in any meaningful way, it instead leans upon surface-level references and winks, using the veneer of futurism to sell a retrograde product produced in exploitative labour conditions. It seems to think that cyberpunk is metal arms and cybernetic eyes, rather than the vision of the future it envisioned in order to examine the present. All good science fiction is about now, and that is something its developers have clearly failed to understand, at least on a conscious level. But unconsciously, they have created a product which perfectly encapsulates the drawbacks and tensions endemic to life under the domination of capital. As a text, it is a meta-totem of the unfulfilled liberation endemic to life in 2020’s technocapitalist mishmash of utopia and dystopia.
