Technical and Crude: A Cyberpunk Primer
Christian Haines, Managing Editor
William Gibson’s 1982 short story “Johnny Mnemonic” captures the cyberpunk ethos in its opening lines: “I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible.” The paradox of cyberpunk is that it’s always been both crude and technical. It’s always riding the wave of cutting edge technology, while striking body blows to the flesh it promises to transcend. Cyberpunk is the shotgun and the computer. You see this in the way that novels like Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), Lewis Shiner’s Frontera (1984), and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) turn what could have been meditative reflections on artificial intelligence, cybernetic body mods, or the Internet into rip-roaring slug fests for control over digital and economic frontiers. It’s technical. It’s crude.
Cover of first edition hardcover of William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
Cyberpunk’s never been pure, neither in its political intentions, nor in its philosophical aspirations. It’s always been mercenary, as well as punk. It’s always had its hands dirty, reveling in corporate intrigue even as it claims to be criticizing late capitalism. I’m not even sure if cyberpunk was ever punk, to be honest. Punk music and subculture had resistance and revolt at their core, with more than a dash of nihilism, summed up in the infamous slogan: “No Future.” Cyberpunk, in contrast, derived its punkness from the hacker ethos of working systems from the inside, sometimes in the name of resistance, but just as often because it was fun, because you could. The original hackers weren’t cracking corporate security, they were sneaking into university computer labs at night to program and then play Spacewar! They were enthusiasts exploring the possibilities created by computers. They were pioneers on a digital frontier – a frontier already being carved into territories by corporations and governments.
All of which is to say that cyberpunk thrives in the blurry zone between revolt and complicity. John Shirley, an early cyberpunk writer, acknowledges this paradox in a 1989 interview in the hacker zine Mondo 2000. Cyberpunk, he explains, “is both a protest and a celebration.” He adds: “It’s as if we found such intense pleasure in the exquisite part of civilization that we would accept, or screen out, the brutalities that we’re being subjected to at the same time. It’s like a wire is stuck into the pleasure center of your brain while someone is vivisecting you; you just chuckle and reel them out a length of your intestines.” The critical edge of cyberpunk comes less from what it imagines digital systems can do than in the way it calls attention to the fact that underlying all the 1s and 0s, there are still vulnerable bodies.
But what about the games? William Gibson may have written Neuromancer on a typewriter, but he was thinking about digital games when he came up with cyberspace. In an interview, he explains that he was a sci-fi writer looking for a substitute for outer space: “I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. … Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them – it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.” Gibson obviously finds the experience of playing video games fascinating – a “brave new world” – but he also finds it disturbing. What will happen to the material world, if it gets left behind for the delights of digital daydreams?
Although the relationship between cyberpunk and video games begins on the written page, digital games quickly adapted cyberpunk’s techno-thriller tone and hacker ethos for their own purposes. Many of the first cyberpunk games were point-and-click and text-based adventure games, including adaptations of Neuromancer and the manga series Akira. Video games also made use of tabletop roleplaying games as source material. One of the most notable examples is the series of Shadowrun RPGs, which stretch back to the 16-bit era (see John Ferrari’s excellent essay on Shadowrun for the Sega Genesis) and continue into the present on PC. Dating back to 1989, the table-top version of Shadowrun combines fantasy tropes like orcs, wizards, and elves with hacking, automatic weapons, and gritty urban environments. Despite their discrepant game mechanics, these games share in common an atmosphere of urban grit, economic despair, opportunism (instead of moralism), and technological overload.
One of the most overlooked aspects of cyberpunk video games is the way they’ve managed to subvert the exoticism of the literary genre. Much of the cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s and 90s obsessed over Japan, and Asia more generally, as a site of futurity. Some of this had to do with the economic rise of Japan, South Korea, and China as electronic manufacturers: they were making technologies that would shape the future. It also had to do with the increasing amount of Japanese capital investment in North America (especially the US and Canada). Cyberpunk novels by Gibson, Stephenson, and others, not to mention films like Blade Runner, are littered with Orientalist tropes: characters and settings that envision the Far East as an exotic site of pleasure and danger. As numerous scholars – most famously, Edward Said – have explained, this desire for the exotic Other relies on a racist imagination of the world as divided into advanced and backwards peoples. The historical irony of cyberpunk is that it in imagining the future as “Asian,” it’s also expressing a reactionary fear that “the West” (North America, Europe) might lose its economic and political superiority.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Cyberpunk video games coming out of Japan have adopted but also subverted the genre’s Orientalism. JRPGs are a well-known habitat for cyberpunk tropes. Games like Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII incorporate tropes such as cybernetic modification, futuristic cities, and evil megacorporations, though they tend to fold them into classical fantasy plots featuring a heroic protagonist. (In contrast, cyberpunk fiction tends to prefer down-and-out antiheroes and morally ambiguous endings.) One of Hideo Kojima’s first games, Snatcher (1988), is an obvious homage to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), featuring humanoid robots (the titular “snatchers”) killing human beings and then assuming their identity. Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series reimagines the Cold War and the US War on Terror with nanomachines, sophisticated AI, and cyborgs. The series builds on cyberpunk’s critique of the close ties between technology and militarism, not only because it rewards non-lethal methods of carrying out missions (stealth runs) but also because of how it highlights the dangers of war to human life (by the end of the series, so many of the central characters have lost their lives, or their limbs). Given the way the Metal Gear Solid series so often subverts video game conventions, we might also interpret this critique of militarism as applying to video games themselves. After all, in many respects, modern gaming systems are a legacy of military research and design, and they have a bad habit of uncritically reproducing fantasies of military dominance.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Some of the most explicitly cyberpunk games, however, have emerged from North America and Europe. At the heart of these games lies the hacker ethos, in which a game’s systems encourage players to treat the environment as a puzzle to crack and not just a shooting gallery. Of particular note is the “immersive sim,” a genre cobbled together from early computer RPGs (especially the Ultima series), first-person shooters, and puzzle games. The System Shock and Deus Ex series perfectly embody the dual quality of cyberpunk, the way it’s both crude and technical. They allow players not only to take out enemies with a variety of weapons but also to bypass enemies, circumventing encounters through hacking, crawling through ducts, and other clever tactics. System Shock even casts the player as a hacker whose antagonist is an advanced artificial intelligence (SHODAN) on a mission to become a god.
Not all immersive sims are cyberpunk. The Dishonored series hews more closely to steampunk conventions, while a recent example of the genre, Arkane Studios’ Prey (2017), blends the body horror of Ridley Scott’s Alien with the campiness of 1950s space operas. All the same, even when they eschew the technofuturism of cyberpunk for magic and steam engines or space stations and aliens, immersive sims still exhibit punk attitude, offering mechanics (like Dishonored’s Blink) and environments (Prey’s Talos 1) that dare players to break the game. As Roger Whitson explains in our steampunk primer, the “punk” in steampunk and cyberpunk is all about digging into the guts of the literal, political, and economic machines governing our lives. Instead of “no future,” the motto of these games might be “no predictable future.”
VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action
There are far too many cyberpunk video games to describe, but it’s impossible to ignore the sea of excellent indie cyberpunk games. These range from narrative-driven games such as VA-11 Hall-A, The Red Strings Club, and Andromeda Six to complex tactics games such as the Frozen Synapse series and Invisible, Inc. Narrative games offer an interactive forum for reflecting on the philosophical topics of cyberpunk fiction: What, if anything, distinguishes human beings from machines? What are the social effects of artificial intelligence? How do cyborgs and cybernetic body modification imagine more social and cultural diversity? How do they also speak to the power of corporations and militaries over biological life? One of the most interesting developments in cyberpunk indies has been the transformation of hacking from one skill among others into a core gameplay mechanic. Games like Quadrilateral Cowboy, Hacknet, and Else Heart.Break() swap the shooting and sneaking of the immersive sim for typing code on a command line. They blur the line between playing a game and coding one, and in doing so, they combine the critical edge of cyberpunk with the creative capacity to transform virtual worlds. There are even indie games, like Umurangi Generation, that redefine cyberpunk’s sense of the future by bringing into focus the disastrous legacies of colonialism and climate change. (We’re currently running a series on indie cyberpunk games, which you can check out, here.)
Quadrilateral Cowboy
Of course, the oversized militarized cyborg elephant in the room is CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. I’ve written elsewhere about the labor politics surrounding the development of the game, but it bears repeating that the hype surrounding blockbuster games does more than simply blot out the diverse array of excellent indie games caught in its shadow. It also operates as an alibi for crunch, or forced overtime, and for the more pernicious political aspects of the game (in this case, transphobia and racism). It would be a mistake, however, to frame the problems with Cyberpunk 2077 as a betrayal of the genre. To the contrary, the political messiness of CD Projekt Red’s efforts might be the most cyberpunk thing about the game. As the greatest theorist of cyberpunk – feminist scholar Donna Haraway – explains, our present is defined by the blurring of the lines between nature and culture, the human and the machine, science and the military, capitalism and utopianism, emancipation and servitude. We pin our hopes on technology for liberation only to find ourselves entangled in new forms of bondage.
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”
Racism, transphobia, misogyny, ableism, entrepreneurial ideology, and vapid libertarianism have been elements of cyberpunk since its inception. They’ve coexisted with the genre’s subversive impulses, unsurprising historical remnants of the neoliberal moment in which it was born. The mistake has always been confusing the thrilling energies of the genre with liberation. The dream of disappearing into the machine has more often than not screened off the stubborn persistence of structural violence and systematic inequality. At its best, though, the messiness of cyberpunk lends itself to complex meditations on the complicities between corporate power and militarism, digital systems and capitalist exploitation, the historical wreckage of neoliberalism and the continuing desire for social revolution. It asks readers and players to think about the friction between our digital dreams and the vulnerability of our flesh.
