Gaagaagiins Living my life in perpetual response to The Haters seems like a pretty horrifying, exhausting codependency to me honestly. Like, have you seen that Dolan Trump guy?
For the rest… eh. The internet is noise, digital ones and zeros snaking their way into our analog social networks, no separating good info from bad. The sicknesses of the digital world echo the sicknesses of the analog even as they reform and perpetuate them (see also: Trump vs. the internet vs. the last half-century of US politics). If you’re lucky, you can have a talk with a person one-on-one or a small discussion group and you can express, through your performance of yourself through the text box or mic or camera lens, something genuine about yourself and have your good faith in others’ genuineness be rewarded in turn. If you’re unlucky, you get catfished.
idk that catfishing someone ostensibly to demonstrate just how easy it is, man would be a constructive use of one’s time and energy in the year 2021, or that it would really say more about the culture we live in than the individual doing it. Personally I don’t need to be reminded that “you can’t trust everything you see on a screen, folks!” or that the influencer economy of semi-professionally performing oneself for social and monetary capital entails a sickness-unto-death intermingling of authenticity and manipulative bullshit. I know! I played Metal Gear Solid 2, just like you all.
…
Anyway. I didn’t watch the explicit Cyberpunk review segments because I haven’t played the game and would want to form my own opinions when I do, but like a lot of people, a cyberpunk open-world action RPG is something that on paper I’ve wanted for a very long time: for me, ever since high school debates over what kind of genre would work best for a Ghost in the Shell or Akira game that truly captures the essence of the source material. The sprawling urban settings and capacity for endlessly tweaking and upgrading your “hardware” just seem like such an obvious fit! The genre also lends itself pretty obviously to a format that combines violence with information-gathering and social (NPC) interaction mechanics, something I’ve always felt lacked any meaningful depth in GTA (a series whose open worlds evolved from semi-emergent action levels whose producers simply asked, “what if you were inside the level all the time?” and mechanical vocabulary is still informed thusly). Based on my limited impressions of Cyberpunk even prior to release, it seems like something that delivers on this promise superficially, but lacks the depth and thoughtful consideration - the, dare we say it, authorial vision - which would really make its concept resonate like the works it’s inspired by. I never do trust a video game whose title is an entire genre of fiction.
Tangential: I didn’t watch the Tokimeki review (another game I’d rather play for myself first… someday) and maybe this is addressed there, but Tim’s hyperfocus on that game’s social sim mechanics as the solution to nonviolent game design seems like taking just a small slice of the entire sim genre that flourished in the US and Japan in the early-to-mid 90s. Sim mechanics are all about gamifying abstract real-world dynamics - if you can apply it to anything from urban planning to high school romance manga to the life of an ant, it seems fair to conclude you can apply it to just about anything! What I want is not simply more sims, but more sophisticated sim mechanics wedded to other schools of game design. Kojima is pretty cool about this (and I say that as someone who did not enjoy Death Stranding)!
In short: I don’t expect video games to be any and all things, and I don’t at all mind a substantial focus on combat in a game with a premise like Cyberpunk (though I would’ve liked Last of Us so very, very much better if it had, like, just two or three exceedingly brutal combat encounters in the entire game). But yeah, I sure do wish more games would invest in adding substantive mechanical depth to non-combat actions, whether traversal or social interaction or anything else. And that’s pretty much exactly the problem with open-world games as that ossified genre has become (beyond just being Ubisofty quantity-over-quality Content Farms) and why BotW and Death Stranding were regarded as startling breaths of fresh air when actually their attention to non-combat interactions should be the genre standard. For open world games, I like when combat is a thing you do in the game; not the thing you do in the game!
