They can
i would argue that we are already there. if you think about it, everything but the augmentations is already here.
also this made me realize how cool it would be to have a cyberpunk genre game where you organize and lead a proletariat revolution as the main story, seriously i hate how stupid the politics are in games.
I actually had an idea for a cyberpunk game where you start off fighting off workers who were angry they were being replaced, especially as they’d sacrificed most of their limbs to remain competitive in a market where current gen robots couldn’t match them, but newer robots were being rolled that absolutely would. Your character would then find himself being replaced as job contracts are burning up as robots are replacing you too, and you’d be forced to give up portions of your character’s body to remain competitive in an ultimately losing battle. The option to fight the robots is always available but sours the companies that employed them against you.
And that’s it; there’s no way to beat the system in this uphill battle, and companies whose employed robots you destroy will never be happy that you’re harming their bottom line. Corporations are not your friends and you can’t win by ignoring them outsourcing your work to robots, and they won’t be happy when you try to protect your future by harming their bottom line.
Ending is either you accept a payout and retire, or you get hired to fight off others who had your job and are fighting off robots, or the corporations alter legislation to make your job illegal ‘because it’s a danger to you and in this age, there’s no reason to risk human life doing what robots can do’.
This could be debated but… sci fi dystopia is meant to highlight the horror we are in right now, not necessarily some prediction of the future. The use of an exaggerated fictional future is meant to shake off the intense normalization of existing in modernity.
I don’t think this holds entirely true for cyberpunk as a genre. Like take cyberpunk-esque augmentations, that’s just straight up a non-issue, even today. Right on the money as how that will go, if nothing else changes, but I don’t think that’s a horror applicable now. The underlying problem of how the system works, sure, but that’s more a cautionary tale as to how things play out, not how they currently are
Ironically cyberpunk is itself emblematic of a gross capitalist system.
Punishing crunch development period, released in a broken state, only high end machines can play the game, for some reason it gets an anime adaptation, G@mers “forgive” the company.
All just to be a GTA clone with RPG mechanics.
The thing is that Cyberpunk 2077 exaggerates the evils of capitalism so far into absurdity that it stops being a critique of capitalism. Instead of the true mundane horrors of capitalism we have today, where companies basically knowingly stuff everything with microplastics and get away with it by greenwashing, and where single billionaires can inspired coups in foreign nations, Cyberpunk 2077 is a world where corporations feed you literal slop made of 100% artificial substances using the most crude and disgusting advertisements.
What CDPR does is basically make the most over the top faux capitalism where people do obviously evil shit and then gesture at it to go “haha wow glad we don’t live like that, huh gamers?” There’s absolutely zero meat to their critique, it’s a capitalist strawman.
it also totally misses the mark in some aspects. in actual gameplay, you have the ability to work for the police and literally help them fight people around the city. there’s literally a whole copaganda mission glorifying some sexy detective. corps are evil, and capitalism has gone too far, but the police are your friends and you should help them shoot people on the street!
I wanted to like that section so bad too, because i’m a sucker for noir and bladerunner shit, but the glorification of the cops in this game was so gross, and immediately breaks immersion when the protag is continually shit talking them when they aren’t on screen.
the game even has some in-game cartoons that mock the police force in the game, animations put out by the NCPD that depict the police officers as buff cool dogs and civilians as stupid little dogs and do show the NCPD to be authoritarian and overly violent. so they put effort into making the NCPD seem that way, but in actual gameplay they are nothing but heroes just trying to protect the city from cyberpsychos and gangs, with the police fixer telling V to simply incapacitate cyberpsychos as if ACTUAL police wouldn’t be eager to slaughter someone (like capitalist police truly are like). this incongruence totally destroyed the message and immersion for me and made the actual game seem more pro-police.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a world where corporations feed you literal slop made of 100% artificial substances using the most crude and disgusting advertisements.
I agree with your overall point, but if news broke tomorrow that the Impossible Burger was 80% plastic by mass I would not be surprised at all. Given how evil irl corporations already are you really have to exaggerate to predict how evil they’ll get in 50 years. Otherwise you end up with shit like Quantum of Solace, where James Bond fought to prevent an evil corporation from privatizing all of Bolivia’s water… And raising prices less than an actual company did irl.
Even if it was 80% plastic, the advertising would still be positive advertising, trying to spin it as still a good thing.
Compared to Cyberpunk 2077 where their artificial slop is basically advertised as being the most disgusting slop ever, but people still accept that anyway
It’s also basically a post-apocalyptic setting. The rest of the world except for Canada, Sweden, and Japan is Fallout. Like despite all the evil capitalism, the main reason the world is a disaster is because there was a nuclear war, which for me really distracts from any sort of capitalist critique because I’d imagine any system dealing with those material conditions is gonna end up having horrors.
I didn’t remember anything about widespread nuclear war. The Arasaka-Militech Corporate war ended with both sides getting nationalized, not widespread nuclear devastation. The USSR still exists (though subsumed by Sov Oi), as does China (as evidenced by Kang Tao and you do a quest for someone implied to be a Chinese spy). Theres also lots of references to Europe being a haven for advanced Biotech (especially in the expansion) and there’s advertising for holiday packages in Somalia.
The Arasaka-Militech Corporate war ended with both sides getting nationalized
I thought it was supposed to be a dystopia
