Cyberpunk. Ruthless mega-corps. Designer drugs. Awesomely functional body enhancements. Frightening near-future urban dystopias. Jacking in to freakin’ cyberspace, where highly illegal security programs attempt to hunt you down and kill you.

The cyberpunk of old– one of my favorite genres– no longer feels relevant. Corporate encroachment onto governmental activities has taken second stage to the swift return of big brother. Everyone does drugs and nobody cares; cyborgs just seem dorky; would-be suburbanites are moving back into the cities in luxury lofts and mixed-use zones. The internet isn’t a perplexing assault of high-density information: it’s a carrier for MySpace. Video games were the first media to reflect this decline: there’s been little of note in the genre since Beneath a Steel Sky, System Shock, and Neuromancer.

Is there any relevance for cyberpunk now? Can or should any elements be updated?

My initial thoughts have centered on the nature of cyberspace today: the best thing to happen to surveillance since the credit card. There’s Echelon, surreptitiously sniffing data from internet backbones all over the country. There are logs of your activities, and internet-accessible records to fill in the blanks (credit card histories, cell phone logs, security camera footage, your latest vacation blog). J. Edgar Hoover could’ve worked half days.

One sticking point: what’s the imagery of cyberspace? What does a hack look like? Can today’s computer-comfortable audience be sold a Neuromancer- or Snowcrash-like electronic reality, in which individual users and processes take form and move about? Or does it have to be brought back in a bit closer to reality?

In The Matrix, the only view we get of data– aside from the real world lookalike– is a bunch of scrolling green characters. Introversion’s Uplink is a monochromatic view into a world of command-lines and progress bars: it’s a fun game, but a tough act to improve upon. TV shows and movies tend towards super slick programs that seem magically designed for exactly what the show needs them to do: “scanning footprint… plant matter detected… scanning plant database… location discovered… collecting infrared security logs… analysing heat signatures… suspect identified!”.

To cut to the chase: is there still a cyberpunk game out there? Is there a hacking game out there? Or is it time to retire the genre and move on?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 2:59 am and is filed under Game Dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.