Tech Radar need to remember how to write

 Slow news week, huh guys?

Thank you all for coming in today, class. I know we all wanted to be done with freshman year and move onto more interesting and complex facets of narrative design, and trust me: I very much want that too, but unfortunately there's a little bit of house cleaning we need to do first. We can't, in good consciousness, move onto anything more complicated than the bare basics of writing until everyone has even the simplest understanding of how the craft works, and I'm not naming any names but... >sigh< what the hell- it's you, Tech Radar. You're the problem. How can you live around the same industry that the rest of your peers do, absorb the same media, experience the same stories and come away just as dense as a newborn babe? I'm going to be honest, maybe it's best you drop out of journalism altogether and stick to your lane of advertising for tech companies or whatever it is you used to do before everyone got too big for their britches?

That's right, I'm ruminating on the recent Tech Radar article about the upcoming expansion of Cyberpunk 2077 and the author's idea that "It needs to remember that Capitalism is bad". Now being within the industry space that I am, I'm pretty sure that a good chunk of people who saw that headline immediately cringed and placed their head in the hands at another clueless game's industry article that totally missed the point- but having read through the thing I can say that this isn't quite as bad as the worst our journalistic arm within this industry has to offer. I think that the author is smart enough to understand the basic premise of what they're talking about, but just lacks perhaps that wider understanding on the craft of actual storytelling to understand what it is that they're looking for. Also, maybe a little work on how to phrase oneself would be helpful, but given that she is a journalist I can only assume that tone and presentation was very intentional.

So to borrow and summarise, Tech Radar's writer is laying out what they believe to be a deficit within the narrative tapestry of Cyberpunk 2077 to stay staunchly and rigidly within the confines of it's genre and conform to the exact letter of the spirit of it's inspirations at all times. She does not, as the title might imply, believe that Cyberpunk 2077 totally forgets the very basic concept of capitalistic corruption in it's narrative or world design, she just seems woefully unexperienced with the concept of narrative subtlety and unspoken questions. In her view, the very fact that in order to survive and thrive in Cyberpunk the player will typically engage in contract-work for the NCPD for petty cash without questioning the immorality of it out loud for the player's cerebral benefit, is a failure of narrative intent. Yes... apparently she needs, or believes that the audience needs, to be held by the hand and led to water, only to then have their head dunked into the water and their mouth manipulated into sipping motions. So to really understand the issue here, I want to talk about trust.

As a writer, one of the most difficult concepts to struggle with is how to maintain trust in the audience to pick up on concepts and themes without making them core facets of the plot. The more trust you have, the more freedom the writer has to embark in any direction their inspiration takes them. Of course, it is a balancing act, because foundations need to be laid so that an audience has the chance of understanding what you're telling them to begin with. Maybe you'll be too subtle, or too obvious, or maybe you'll throw caution to the wind, do whatever you want to do and if nobody ever picks up on the story you were telling from between the lines- that's their bad luck! Cyberpunk doesn't really head into either extreme too much throughout the breadth of it's narrative, in keeping with a lot of stories in the AAA space it's narratively standard when it comes to subtext and irregularity. But for the benefit of all, let's go picking through the lines anyway...

The NCPD dispatch questline operates as a side-activity to the open world exploration, mini combat sections for players to engage in for petty cash. It's scattered with little snippets of lore but the main rub is this- the NCPD lack the resources, manpower and really the strength to handle these groups of gangsters or stick-up artists pumped up on their drugs and decked out in chrome strong enough to shake off a tank shell. The transhumanist arms race, powered by technological advancement imbued with rampant late-stage capitalism, has created an ecosystem where the NCPD, itself a corporate and profit-driven entity as mentioned throughout the game, see it more profitable to pay out independent contracts than risk their own personnel fixing crimes. I cannot possibly perceive of a more damning indictment of Capitalism, but one presented with world building and environmental game design rather than a basic side quest where a person tells you everything up front. This is one of the key differences of the interactive medium that sets it apart from movies and books- you don't have to tell the audience what to be thinking about, you can throw them into that situation so that it's consequences fall on you either way.

The writer also bemoaned the 'corpo ending' of Cyberpunk where V gives into the Arasaka machine in hopes that they'll help him/her out some day in return for services rendered, bizarrely thinking that this is some sort of 'glowing endorsement' of capitalism. It... really isn't. I've seen this misunderstanding before but it's usually from the media outside of gaming not really grasping the differing approach to storytelling that gaming provides, so I'm kind of surprised this is a point that needs to be refuted at all. First of, Cyberpunk is an RPG which has several approaches to how you want to explore the story and directions you can wish to veer off in- alternative routes can typically range in approach and morality with no direction being a static endorsement of the player's path. Less subtle RPGs handle this in a very blunt way, with games like 'Fable' naming their evil decisions as such and turning the player into a cartoonish image of 'bad guy' as punishment for committing. We've already established that Cyberpunk is more subtle in how they present story, and that's a little bit true in it's paths as well.  

In a complex and maturely written interactive narrative, you want to have paths that cover as many differing schools of thought as is representative in the story; and given how important 'corporate tyranny versus the human soul' is to the core conceit of the narrative, exploring those extremes makes some sense. But even then, being malleable with how you present each option, being mindful of subjectivity, allows for the player to believe in the path they've chosen no matter what that is, whilst devaluing 'bad choices', and punishing them for going against the grain, would weaken alternative options to the obvious 'right' path. Allowing players to surrender to the corporate machine completes the full picture of the theme of Cyberpunk not just as a game but as a genre; resisting against domination of the soulless machine is meaningless without the representation of capitulation as an ideal to strive against. And you're absolutely delusional if you don't see the subtext written into the corpo ending that hints how even in their 'good grace', V is forever a means to an end within Arasaka- one which they'll probably take advantage of in the future.

The coming DLC for Cyberpunk seems to be focusing on the New United States and might just place us in direct competition with the other warring corporations looking to seize control of the free-state of Night City; So I guess those looking for the more blatant 'capitalism is bad' message can expect to be catered to at some point within that narrative, but I wouldn't at all be surprised if there's some nuance there as well. (Remember, the NUSA funded one half of the Corporate Wars themselves.) Nuance and themes provide the rich tapestry which makes storytelling such an exciting field to play within, and in turn that provides an enriching meal for the consumer to gorge on. So I'm a little disheartened when someone turns around, for an exquisite buffet like the Cyberpunk 2077 story, and complains that the flavours weren't obvious enough. This is probably why I'm so into Japanese storytelling honestly, no one complains when they respect the intelligence of their audience.