How can we modify the shadowrun/cyberpunk genre to grow away from it's 1990's roots & common tropes into something new?

You don't. You wait for a new genre to blow up and render the cyberpunk tropes obsolete.

It'll be a long wait, mind. Everybody these days seems to be wandering around lost in Transhumanism, the Singularity, and Post-Scarcity, like they've been for the last decade or so.

I like how Infinity does it.

There's a bunch of different "hyperpowers" each spanning a planet or more. These each have major differences in ideology and the way they approach technology.

The Nomads are the most classic cyberpunk. Lots of body modifications, drugs, hookers, and catgirls.

Yu Jing has the neon, the power armoured government enforcers, and the cyborg ninjas.

Pan-Oceania has televised bloodsports, power armored templars, and an AI controlling most of the functions of society.

It's possible to emigrate from one hyperpower to another, and there's overlap (in technology, in AI control, in regenedation technology). There's also some smaller powers like Haqqislam, which is a mostly religious society that's really big on medical tech.

Shouldn't you worry about that when we've actually caught up in RL to that level of rampant technology?

Tried to do one back in the day but it's virtually impossible to capture the feel of the show in a tabletop. These days you'd just get shat on for the sin of 'magical realmism' by people who never even knew the show existed.

>90s roots
>cyberpunk
Kill yourself

You're getting upset with that and not the fact that he gave shadowrun top billing (or billing at all)?

I don't get it. I recently listened to a podcast where they claimed that Shadowrun is where cyberpunk conventions come from. I just don't get it.

Not him, but I assume the rage at the faggot OP was due to the fact that cyberpunk's roots are pure 1980. 1981-2 for start of the movement and Blade Runner, 1984 for the release of Neuromancer.

I know that the time period was the point of that rage, and valid, I just meant that there was another equally valid reason, even if it's because it's still ignoring the roots.

Also, how can Bladerunner be the forerunner if it's based off a work by Philip K Dick from more than a decade before the movie was released? I've never read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep so I don't know how different it is, that might be a dumb question.

I remember William Gibson complaining in an interview that Blade Runner was basically the visual style he tried to evoke in Neuromancer. Except Ridley Scott had done it before Neuromancer was finished.

Aesthetics are a major part of cyberpunk.

>Aesthetics are a major part of cyberpunk.
I don't know man. I saw a lot of different aesthetics when reading Mirrorshades.

Retired rocker moping about. Alternate history where time travelers raping the land, as man who'd rather have porn than racism, and then I'll admit I've forgotten some of the stories. I need to reread that some time.

He never complained about it at all, William Gibson said that Ridley Scott came up with the same thing he had in mind independently of himself. You're way off.

>I've never read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep so I don't know how different it is

It has almost nothing to do with Blade Runner. It's got the same character names and a vaguely similar plot but beyond that it's nothing like it. Doesn't even take place in the same city.

Dick sets his book in a bombed out San Francisco that basically looks pretty similar to present day, except there are a few flying cars. The holographic billboards projected onto building sides, the constant rain, the omnipresent Japanese cultural influences, and all the other cyberpunk-y elements are totally absent.

Characters are also much different. For starters, Rachel is is the exact same model of android as Priss and there fore identical, and opts not to accompany Deckard to kill off the rest of the androids because of this. Roy Batty is also nowhere near as memorable in the book; he's just a fat Mongolian dude who Deckard handles pretty easily.

The book also focuses on this weird religion Dick came up with. It's a sort of spiritual philosophy built around empathy for living things, rooted in the idea a nuclear war before the plot killed off most non-human life on earth. This ties in with this bond everyone has with a sort of Christ-figure named Mercer, who is eternally climbing a hill while people pelt him with rocks. People use an empathy-engine device at home to "tune in" to Mercer's trek. The finer philosophical points of all this are totally lost on me, but the basic idea is Mercer holds animal life sacred and people empathize with that. Androids can't feel empathy, so the Voight-Kampf test is there to see if they feel bad at the idea of dying animals. If they don't, then the officer interrogating them has legal permission to ice them right there.

No to prequels, yes to the original. The themes of the original Deus Ex were basically "we're teetering on the brink of the apocalypse" which is a wildly different feeling to most cyberpunk settings which are either post apocalypse (Bladerunner) or dystopian (Neuromancer).

The prequels shift back into a generic dystopian world so they wind up being the same as the rest of cyberpunk.

That's already in there.

>that soldier tripping balls

Is there a lore thing to this?

Nothing in this show ever made any sense, even in context

I'm guessing it's just a visual metaphor for him going into shock as he dies

That's a very cool metaphor.

cyberpunk is a product of its times. if it got away from the 80's aesthetics and random japanese bullshit then it wouldn't be cyberpunk anymore. it'd be more like scifi at that point

Cyberpunk pretty much implies a dystopian world dominated by corporate and/or governmental entities (ex. US military-industrial complex). Cyberpunk is about "rebels" fighting or using the system to their advantage. Cyberpunk is about high-tech, low-life and the strong contrast between rich and poor. If you take away cyberpunk's roots and tropes, then it's just common sci-fi.

The Japanese influence, the neons, the mohawks are just visuals. They can easily be replace. You could make for example a cyberpunk setting where WWIII destroyed the USA, the EU, China and Russia, and India has become the new super power.

You still don't get it.

More like the new super pooer.

>How can we modify the shadowrun/cyberpunk genre to grow away from it's 1990's roots & common tropes into something new?

>something new

But I fucking hate change, Cyberpunk should be eternally 80s.

A big problem with most cyberpunk RPG's is that they are targeted towards an audience of 13 to 15yo kids. In my opinion, they are much closer to Big Jim and GI Joe than to real cyberpunk. The whole depraved and hopeless part is mostly missing while it is a good portion of the "punk" part, and instead it got replaced by over the top and ridicule action.

Cyberpunk needs more drugs, more teenage junkies, more cyberdicks, more amputated beggars, more hopeless refugees, more prostitutes who use hormone to look like teenagers, more brutal psycho-killers, more kids gangs, more PTSD, more perverse human traffickers, more violent pimps, more pushers, more corrupt cops. Slums should be darker and should stink more...

In that it looks like Blade Runner? Because the height of its popularity was definitely the 90s.

but don't we live in cyberpunk's antechamber? google is already a megacorporation with more power than some of the lesser countries, it's just a first (or most visible) one, and it ain't evil yet (or is a good actor)

nobody's ever playing games about modern times, there's no point.

We shouldn't.

But, if we could... Well, Post-Cyberpunk is a thing.

Something I'd recommend checking out is Prez, or Transmetropolitan. They're not necessarily post-cyberpunk, but in my opinion they're a good way of showing the fundamental pillar of cyberpunk: High Tech, Low Life.

Some people are also saying Cyberpunk is irrelevant as a fiction genre, because the world IS cyberpunk now.

You have shadowy, billion-dollar megacorps that own our personal identities, influencing politics, twisting the narratives. You have billionaires funding populist revolt movements (BLM and Soros). You have global news companies running hit-pieces against fucking internet memes.

All the while, we have VR, data leaks that have gotten so numerous there's a website entirely dedicated to figuring out if your email or user has been leaked, a trial against a presidential candidate that just got some gas due to a fucking reddit post...

And here we are, talking about all of this on an anonymous image board, descended from a japanese image board, where freaks, geeks, neo-nazis, weirdos, furries, and other new-internet rejects populate because they have a voice here.

Fuck, man. We ARE Cyberpunk

Yes dude, when people are dying sometimes the brain hallucinates.

Dont tell me you've never seen something similar to that soldiers imagination sometime.

Aeon Flux is realistic as fuck

I think Elysium managed to update the aesthetic pretty well. I think it's worth watching for that reason alone.

I wish I could get my hands on a pdf copy of the art book.

>Transhumanism, the Singularity, and Post-Scarcity,
All that shit will look about as quaint (culturally-speaking, not technologically) 30 years from now as ray guns and silver space suits do to us now. It will say more about a certain time period and it's conceits than about the future.

>protip: there won't be any singularity or transhumanism in the future

>Opinions the post

Where the fuck do you think you are?
Veeky Forums is Opinions the Website, dummy.
And nobody in the world has anything but opinions about the future, as there are no facts.

You don't get it. Big Bro isn't spying on you. Why would he when society made it fashionable not only for us to spy on each other, but to make all the information you normally need to spy on people to get easily accessible?

>no duh my statements I make as though they are fact are actually opinions
>everyone else who makes statements as though they are facts are actually saying opinions

How does the Android (ie Netrunner) setting stack up in everyone's eyes? It's got a firm focus on labour rights and people being replaced by non-humans (both bioroids and clones) as well as loss of privacy as a consequence of everything being online and big companies harvesting data.

Elysium is set quite further in the future than the average cyberpunk game, but I agree, the visuals are very cyberpunk. The whole slum part, is exactly how I imagine the slums of future L.A. or Dallas. The gangs have also a much better style than the 1980's theme-park cyberpunk usually serves us.

Look at modern day. We have most of the technology either done, better, or in development.

Cloning. Check.
Cyber-eyes. Check.
Complete computer dominance of society. Check
Replacement limbs that are better then the original. Check.
Impersonal fire and forget weapon systems used from hypertech machines. Check.
Self driving cars. Check.
Corporations so large and powerful that they dictate to governments how they have to spend their money. Check.
A world so embroiled in violence that micro wars are going on everywhere. All the time. And nobody cares. Check.
Police states killing there own citizens to try to keep them from rising up and demanding accountability. Check.

Seems we have already done it user. Look at your distopian future from the nice comfy seat of the protected, and lied to, middle class.

>How can we modify the shadowrun/cyberpunk genre to grow away from it's 1990's roots & common tropes into something new?

Add modern politics and religion to it.

Eg, Islamic terrorism, Chinese megacorporations, African refugees, massive government surveillance via internet-connected-everything, death of free speech because of terrorism+political correctness, suffocating megacities with 10s of millions of people, increasing wealth & tech but also inequality, no space travel worth mentioning.

>death of free speech because of terrorism+political correctness
Had to toss that one in there didn't you

In any cyberpunk setting worth its salt, someone on the internet saying "omg you can't just call people niggers!" is the least of your problems.

This wasn't a commentary on using the word 'nigger'. The entire editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo being executed because they printed a cartoon of Mohammed is a big problem. The criminalization of criticisms of certain ideologies, like Islam or socialism, is a big problem. People being offended by opinions IRL AND TRYING TO LEGALLY PUNISH/IMPRISON ANYONE THEY DON'T LIKE is a big problem, and that's what I mean by the death of free speech. This brings on a host of other social ills that match any other ones in cyberpunk, save that of nuclear armageddon.

Also, cf. Turkey's and Russia's once-free press, and how they were fired/muzzled/jailed.

Well, the future is here.

The Internet is ubiquitous, everyone has cellphones, drones are a real thing, computer systems are either lazy hackjobs and exploitable or mostly secure.

A few people have decent "cyber" legs. Hands are more complex. There's no direct neural anything, the brain is hella complex.

And the corprocracy has taken over our government. It's not quite as heavy handed as shadowrun and gibson.

So... More less... We've caught up with the futuristic view presented. Both good and bad.

But what's on the horizon? Where does "near-future friction" bring us?

Gene Therapy: We're working on fighting aging and death. Get ready for Bill Gates to reneg on his "give it all away in my old age" mentality. Get ready for immortal CEOs who want MORE. Eternally.

Fully autonomous killbots: Planes, things on tracks. Get ready for war being fought by people only when they're poor. Police actions can be largely performed by roombas.

Total Panopticon: Everyone is expected to carry a tracking device at all times. Google knows where you are, what you're doing, and largely what you're thinking about. And the government can go fetch it all.

Artificial Intelligence: Remember how robots took away about half the manufacturing jobs? Get ready for that shit to hit the white collar workers. How monotonous and repetative is your desk job? Soul crushing? Well computers don't have souls and will do it for pennies. So pack up and get on the dole, you're fired! (Also truckers, you're fucked)

And the old tropes like DNI, cyberlimbs, and brutal unaccountable police are still valid Coming Soon(TM) items.

It gets worse.

Appeals court just upheld that national security trumps freedom of speech when it comes to 3D printing guns.

It's going to be a thought crime to be in possession of certain banned 3D models. Kiddy porn and digital guns are going to be the tools they use to cripple encryption and make it illegal.

You know, to fight the terrorists.

>All that shit will look about as quaint (culturally-speaking, not technologically) 30 years from now as ray guns and silver space suits do to us now. It will say more about a certain time period and it's conceits than about the future.

Or how about that crazy sci-fi guy Arthur C Clark and his fantastical contraption called "the satellite" in 1945? He also wrote about ray guns and space suits.

Some parts of retrofuturism are silly. Some parts are someone right if you squint. And some science fiction is fucking HARD.

...And the gemini space suits WERE silver. WTF dude?

I heard a urban legend that Shadowrun was originally built as just a normal Cyberpunk system.
Then Cyperpunk [year that I can't remember] came out and people making Shadowrun had to figure out some gimmick in their thing to not look like copycats.

Don't let the fucker try and pull some high'n'mighty literary gene-lord crap on you.

I know exactly what you're talking about. You've used the english language as a tool to communicate an idea. It worked. Move on. Fuck Nuance. Be a grammarpunk.

>Or how about that crazy sci-fi guy Arthur C Clark and his fantastical contraption called "the satellite" in 1945?

The concept of satellites is way older than Clarke.

Looks like I don't need to go buy a new blade for my razor, I can just use the edge in these posts.

Funnily enough I'd argue we need the exact opposite, cyberpunk dystopia is more overdone than European fantasy at this point.

>Scene of ~20 dudes with machine guns on high ground with cover prepped to shoot someone coming through a doorway.
>Everyone immediately opens fire
>Every shot misses
>Target waves a pair of guns around and everyone dies.

>Aeon Flux is realistic as fuck

...

But Clarke wrote stories in the age of ray guns and silver space suits and pulp sci-fi.

Thats because cyberpunk utopia is no longer cyberpunk then it's just sci-fi.

I imagine you could write a sort of cyberpunk Brave New World that is technically an utopia but morally repulsive to modern sensibilities

Heinlein did utopian but morally repulsive to modern liberals better.

>Appeals court just upheld that national security trumps freedom of speech when it comes to 3D printing guns
What's going on now?

>morally repulsive to modern liberals
Wasn't Stranger in a Strange Land all about hippies?

Heinlein's politics shifted constantly in his career.

And Verne wrote about the Internet when the telegraph was till a big deal. And Leo De Vinci designed helicopters when people were still dying of the plague. A lot of modern concepts are much, much older than we think. The ingenuity has always been there for a lot inventions, but the practicality hasn't.

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/court-groups-3d-printer-gun-files-must-stay-offline-for-now/

Sure, but you know how it goes.

Look outside your window. We are living in that future right the fuck now. People rob banks with computers. People live online in a virtual reality. We've got folks walking around on cybernetic limbs controlled by their own brains. Hackers are the new villains and anti-heroes. Corporations dominate the politics of nation-states, who wage cyber-war on each other.

To update this shit for sci-fi, just take current news headlines and extrapolate a future timeline.

Also gotta say, read some John Brunner - specifically Stand on Zanzibar and Shockwave Rider. Cyberpunk is rooted in 70s New Wave sf, it just didn't really solidify as a movement until the early 80s.

That'd be some pretty nice satire.

Future utopia gives this group of teens everything they could really want: Free housing, meals, education, work when they want it, counselling and support, movies, games, VR alternative lives...

But they're still punks at heart complaining about how "the man" is keeping them down and they have to fight the system.

>Heinlein's politics shifted constantly in his career.
Siiiiigh, he wrote a lot of shit, but it doesn't mean he actually WANTED a military junta just because he wrote a militaristic uptiopia in Starship Troopers.

He went crazy with regards to women later on in life, and he was never exactly stable. But don't confuse a story for the author's political views. Also, Sir Patrick Stewart can't ACTUALLY read your mind.

>The ingenuity has always been there for a lot inventions, but the practicality hasn't.
Oh yeah, I'd agree. Some things are ahead of their time. That's kinda my point though. The transhumanism, the singularity, or post-scarcity, might be just another accepted fact in the future. But fuck That Kurtswill guy. He's nuts.

I'd like to say I'm surprised but I'm not really. I like how the quote in the article (I'm too lazy to find and read the entire quote) mentions that (paraphrased) "Normally ensuring people have their rights is priority, but not in this case." It sounds a lot like admitting they they are violating the Bill of Rights intentionally. Judicial branch has so much fucking power.

What the fuck kind of Obama supporter doesn't ALSO support Snowden?

The biggest cry for his execution has come from the war mongers in the GOP and those with the hair-trigger TREASON reaction.

>Judicial branch has so much fucking power.
About a third of it. Ideally.

Play Interface Zero

Ideally. But they are really the last stage of the law, they decide what is and isn't legal moreso than lawmakers or law enforcers do.

First and second amendments are limited all the time. A restriction on 3D printing a gun doesn't sound like a new development at all. It sounds pretty in line with how laws regarding these things have always worked.

Most Americans don't support Snowden, you've been reading to many European* opinions.

*Mostly Germany desu

>What the fuck kind of Obama supporter doesn't ALSO support Snowden?

Treading on some thin ice, /pol/-wise, but look at how Obama has treated every other whistleblower. Look at how many people he's killed with drones, who are targeted using intelligence gathered by US and 5 Eyes agencies. I'd reckon there are plenty of Obama supporters who are anti-Snowden.

The sad thing about cyberpunk is that you can't really have a talk about it without things getting way political in a way that's detrimental to original topic.

Of course these days you can't escape politics even in porn boards, so I guess we just are fucked at least until the actual elections.

Hush now, you can't disagree with democrats, you're not a racist are you?

American politics make me feel like an edgy teenager since I think they're all terrible.

>but it doesn't mean he actually WANTED a military junta just because he wrote a militaristic uptiopia in Starship Troopers.

He actually based the Federation on Switzerland, where all male citizens are part of the national guard. He felt a society like that was humanity's best hope of preventing nuclear war.

Henlein had some good ideas in the book, but I don't think he communicated them that well. Had he not written the work like a piece of utopia fiction I'd probably have less issues with what he plugs. Superficially, it sounds dangerously close to fascism so it's no surprise that's what people get out of it.

Aren't you missing the point?

Only 12% of former hippies called themselves liberal In 2008, 46% refer to themselves as conservative.

Most deeply regret cultural changes they brought in their youth.

Sauce?

articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/12/opinion/la-oe-bowman-baby-boomers-more-conservative-20110912

nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/08/upshot/how-the-year-you-were-born-influences-your-politics.html

Etc.

Pretty meaningless. Being conservative in 2016 means you are for conserving whatever was radical in 1968.

Coolio. I'm not the guy you were talking to originally btw, just thought your comment looked interesting.

What, is this what Swedes think conservatism is or something?

I like some of the elements from VA-11 HALL-A.
>Corporate government pumps the water supply full of nanomachines
>Supposedly helps fight disease, but also spy, can knock you unconscious, etc.
>Large percent of people's immune systems reject nanomachines, killing thousands every year
>Government insists the nanomachines aren't a problem and that theyre doing everything they can to cure nanomachine rejection syndrome
>People find some limited success with genetic modification, cleansing treatments, therapies, etc.

>Future utopia gives this group of teens everything they could really want: Free housing, meals, education, work when they want it, counselling and support, movies, games, VR alternative lives...
Well, in cyberpunk settings life is pretty good for most people.

The issue usually is that people outside of the nice corporation controller lives are fucked in the ass royally and/or that the nice life people have is lacking or actual freedom.

I feel that one way to do it would be to have cyberpunk fuck the man setup against evil corporation and then reveal that the corporation is honestly attempting to build as good world as they can, but are limited and it's just impossible for them to create perfect utopia no matter how hard they try, so some people get the short stick out of bad luck.

Gallup and ANES regularly do polls to observe the political shift phenomenon of hippies to conservatives.

It's actually really interesting, Luhrmann of Stanford did a whole bunch on about how the conservative evangelical movement originated from the far-left Christian hippies.

What the fuck did Blade Runner contribute to cyberpunk again?

Given that "conservatives" believe in such radical ideas as "creative destruction", open borders, and unregulated trade, the use of the word is honestly absurd and they should just be called what they are; liberals.

What the hell do you think they are "conserving"?

It also takes a huge amount of effort to get anything under the Supreme Court's radar. The SC has a lot of power, but it also takes a lot for them to even be able to exercise that power. Your local judiciaries have a lot more power in your day-to-day life than the Supreme Court.

The entire visual personality of the genre.

Yeah, judicial branch, not just supreme court.

That being said, the supreme court "cases" are really a farce and whatever the judges want beforehand.

>Veeky Forums - Politics

Implying I haven't been involved with it

American politics as a pro-life democrat is suffering

Can you imagine the novel that starts
>In a world plagued by terrorism, constant warfare, and political correctness...

Not only is the inclusion of political correctness ridiculous in that row, it's also completely at odds with cyberpunk. Cyberpunk settings are worlds where people are alienated from each other to the point of being cynical individualists. If there's anything keeping this world from being a cyberpunk dystopia it's the bleeding hearts reminding everyone to please be considerate of everyone's feelings.

I'll tell you one thing, though. The vehement and occasionally even violent response they get from anonymous pricks who congregate in dark corners of the internet and created some sort of piecemeal cargo cult political movement out of memes that's trying to get a businessman/reality tv star with no political experience into the White House seemingly entirely out of spite? That's pretty cyberpunk.

>I'll tell you one thing, though. The vehement and occasionally even violent response they get from anonymous pricks who congregate in dark corners of the internet and created some sort of piecemeal cargo cult political movement out of memes that's trying to get a businessman/reality tv star with no political experience into the White House seemingly entirely out of spite? That's pretty cyberpunk.
Still better than the alternative.