How does the game invite the player to care about the world through its narrative and/or formal elements?
The game I’ve been playing and want to talk about is Cyberpunk 2077 by CD Projekt Red. Cyberpunk, which gets it’s namesake from the associated literary genre defined by corporate tech dystopia, is a game with deep narrative that thrusts you into a sci-fi futuristic city as someone whose body has been affected by a secret militaristic project gone wrong. Your entire livelihood is on the line as you navigate this dog-eat-dog world.
Before playing, I read some of the classic Cyberpunk novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. This genre is also highly associated with movies such as Blade Runner and other sci-fi. And most directly, Cyberpunk was originally a tabletop RPG game by Mike Pondsmith. CDPR was able to adapt both the realities of these worlds (immersive virtual worlds, body digitalization, rogue artificial intelligence) and the aesthetics (worlds rife with neon, static, violence, corporate exploitation) into an interactive game experience, but much of the worldbuilding had strong influence from these other works. Like the ones before it, you are often put in the shoes of an ordinary person with grievance against certain entities and/or the system as a whole, and through their shoes you experience life at the edge of massive corporate espionage, warfare, and no social safety net. These gripping narrative elements really drive your purpose as a player and character in this world, and it begs you to do something about the state of the world, for both your own health and for the safety of those you(r character) cares about in the world.
To also touch on some of what I thought were the most compelling formal elements in the game, I wanted to first reflect on the ethical topic surrounding the presentation of characters’ bodies in the game. In Cyberpunk 2077, you have a fully fledged modular character customization menu, where you can choose to present in a very broad range of ways. Similar to the cyberpunk literature that comes before it, it does a lot of deconstruction of traditional social customs in their depiction of a human. For one, your choice of sex organs doesn’t need to correlate with your choice of gender, which does affect character interactions. Your own power-ups in the game are a reflection of how many modifications/enhancements you have made to your muscles and senses. Formally, these are resources that you can accrue by undergoing various dangerous procedures that, in universe, are normally paid for by corporations and for the express purpose of enhancing one’s labor. This commodification of the human body is an important critique within cyberpunk literature because it represents the inhumane reality in the way modern militaristic corporations and states treat the citizens of the world. Another narrative/formal element that really captivates the audience of Cyberpunk is the conflict and dilemmas present in the plot. There are multiple branching storylines that happen, and your choices have a deep impact in the way the story unfolds.
These are just some of my preliminary game designer thoughts on what makes this game special, and I’m excited to finally finish the main story once the macOS port comes out later this year.
