Cyberpunk - Editorial

The video game industry has had a love affair with cyberpunk cultures even as far back as the 1988 release of the Neuromancer video game that was loosely based on William Gibson's book by the same name. While the cyberpunk genre is one of my absolute favorite genres for media, to me there seems to be something missing from the video game incarnations of the genre.

The latest cyberpunk blockbuster to come out, Deus Ex, was a great game and I loved every moment I spent in it. The game's aesthetics and the augmentations that translated into game mechanics worked beautifully. However, like most other cyberpunk games, one issue prevented me from feeling immersed in the environment; everything was just too neat and tidy.

One of the most important aspects of the cyberpunk genre and even subculture is taking risks and making things messy. In Deus Ex you were surrounded by these beautiful gleaming cities, and there was a bit of political unrest in the story, but you never saw the uglier, dirtier, or grittier side of the city first hand. Even the back alleys and sewers were open and tidy. Cyberpunk touches not only on the beauty of what humans can become when given the ability to be anything but also what reaches man would go to to unlock that freedom, the failed experiments, the drug use and the wires running to a hacked together prosthetic.

So many "heroes" in cyberpunk fiction are really anti-heroes, they're terrible role models. They smoke and drink and use narcotics but we embrace them because they are flawed, and the same goes for the settings. Chiba City from Gibson's Neuromancer wasn't a clean and glimmering tower of progress; it was a drenched and rainy slum where those who'd lost everything tried to scrape something back together.

I feel that if we as an industry are going to embrace this genre, we need to realize all of the facets of it and not just put a glossy paint on a modern setting. There are some fantastic stories to be told in a world where almost anything is possible and screw-ups can affect humanity as a whole. The shine and sparkle have their place, but so do the grit and the moral gray areas. The self-serving protagonist may be a hard pill to swallow at first, but the story of his/her change makes them more human, and we are able to better connect with them as they develop over the course of their tale.