discussions about; characters, weapons, campaigns, ect
Cyberpunk general
Hudson Lewis
William Jenkins
Anyone got a beta copy of Vurt yet?
Ian Sanders
What are the big issues that cyberpunk as a genre should be dealing with today, in 2017?
Lincoln Hughes
EULAs
Corps trying to prevent you from ever actually owning anything, trying to make it more like rent-based, rather than purchase-free.
Tyler Walker
Pretty esoteric legalese, but okay.
Evan Ramirez
You could just use the Shadow run general, considering no one plays anything cyberpunk outside of that setting/system.
>Mass surveillance
>Corporate globalisation
>Corruption
>Drug abuse
>Organised crime
Basically the same stuff it already does, except now there is more real world examples to draw from.
Jonathan Fisher
Kinda like what the Queen of England did with the colonies.
Adam Thompson
Is this pixel art from game?
Isaiah Diaz
I was more referring to what video game publishing companies try to do with digital copies the games they publish.
You can't even resell them.
Jackson Foster
From one of the writers if the original Deus Ex
vice.com
"Human beings feel pleasure when they are being watched." htis is truer than ever. Many of us chose to sacrifice privacy and put a version of our lives in front of an audience. Yet the theme isn't touched upon again, and social media is conspicuously ab sent from Deus Ex. I'm being unfair, considering that the game hails from the age of GeoCities and HamsterDance.com. However, if you were to approach Deus Ex once more, would social networks have a place in that world? If so, what would they have looked like?
> If I were approaching the Deus Ex universe today—and I must admit that I have no insight into what Eidos is planning for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—would have to accept social networks as a physical fact of the world.
I think conspirators would concern themselves with personal identity and public opinion, constructing false personas and sabotaging the identities of real people. We've seen a single tweet ruin lives. In a story about truth and falsehood, the public personas of the characters would be a key battlefield.
That said, how would a game depict social media? Would some poor intern need to write mile-long Facebook feeds? I wonder if, mechanically, the impact of social media would need to come through in traditional news stories, cutscenes, murmurings of a city's inhabitants. In that sense, barring a game mechanic that allowed players to actively manipulate social media, I think social networks would simply amplify the power of media and public opinion, already a strong presence in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But I would love to see a game mechanic that allowed engagement with a social network. You could have a lot of fun with a man-in-the-middle attack on an Illuminatus's LinkedIn profile.
Carson Davis
Well, fucked up the green text.
Cont:
In a Kotaku interview, you cited the devaluing of the human being as a theme you'd explore if you were to reimagine Deus Ex. Any other themes that you would like to get your teeth into?
> Not that htis theme isn't present in Deus Ex to some extent, but the dehumanization of warfare through automation is a trend I would want to explore. The calculus for using force changes dramatically when you don't have to risk your own people's lives. We're familiar with htis from governmental drone strikes, but imagine what an organization willing to use suicide bombers would attempt with drone technology.
> Cyberwarfare between nations—and the success of governments in suppressing aspects of the internet they don't like—is another realm of societal conflict that suddenly seems like a plausible part of the world's future. In a Deus Ex game, I would be tempted to touch on cryptography, dark nets, and the accelerating arms race between secret subcultures and the governments that would observe them. To create a truly "secret" society in the future, you'll need to be a master of cryptography and computer security"
Brody Watson
And here's the actual link because I am an out of control moron
vice.com
Camden Watson
Corps. copyrighting your personal information.
Corps. copyrighting food (gmo).
In home surveillance.
Media, gov, corps as one big entity.
Perpetual war.
Throttled down/censored internet.
Juan Anderson
Splinternet, the internet controlled, censored and suppressed by national governments, is the dystopian future that proto-internet pioneers could not imagine. And it's here today.
Brayden Powell
We need more generals about cyberpunk cause Shadowrun is hot garbo.
Liam Moore
At least the OP for SRG has a load of Gibson in the links
Caleb Young
Gibson's stuff is almost 40 years old now. That's worse than people in the 90s thinking Slan was still contemporary sci-fi.
Brody Murphy
Dude, it might not be to your taste but there is no denying the influence Gibson has had on the growth and inception of cyberpunk
Samuel Howard
I never denied it. I just said it's OLD. Just like William Morris had a huge influence on Tolkien and Dunsany had a huge influence on Lovecraft, but hardly anybody reads them anymore as their prose style is archaic by modern standards.
Isaiah Thomas
I would agree though i personally enjoy some of the older stuff, the archiac-ness doesn't turn me away. Its all up to ones preferences
Mason Williams
Well for one, the collapse of the middle class actually HAS happened due to technology making most middle-class jobs pointless. The guy who owns McDonalds refuses to raise minimum wage, and if he did he outright admitted he'd rather just buy a robot to do the job for $64k once rather then pay $34k a year for a human to do it and sometimes still fail.
In addition, there's large bits of the USA that are increasingly disenfranchised; gerrymandering means political appointees are largely no longer responsible to their constituencies in many places because they can't actually loose elections anymore if they displase them.
The immigration thing is another one; this year a lot more people were displaced due to poverty and war and such, and you can talk about the economic troubles and socio-political difficulties that come from random influxes of new cultures, either legally or illegally.
Blake Harris
>Dunsany
>archaic
Now I know I'm not the average reader, but Dunsany was pretty easy to read.
Certainly wasn't motherfucking Danté.
Blake Baker
Actually, a lot of the more serious problems talked about in Gibson's cyberpunk novels ended up actually happening by now.
We just didn't get the cool technology to compensate.
Brayden Foster
>The guy who owns McDonalds
>The guy
Brayden Gutierrez
DUDE BLADERUNNER LMAO
Anthony Scott
We did, though. Just off the top of my head, we've got artificial limbs, virtual reality, self-driving cars, performance-enhancing drugs, wearable biometric sensors, and all kinds of crazy military tech. We'll probably have general AI soon. The only thin we don't really have and isn't around the next corner are neural enhancements.
Shit, as per the recent Vault 7 leaks, the CIA can hack cars and probably used that to assassinate a journalist. 2017 is cyberpunk as fuck.
James Mitchell
I'm all for cop campaigns in cyberpunkish megalopolises.
Brutal cybergangs, hordes of insane junkies, powerful crime syndicates, corrupt politicians, hackers, crooked cops, ruthless corporations, sadistic psycho-killers, mad scientists, rogue replicants, genetic experiments that went wrong, crazy cults, rampaging cyberpsycho S, terrorists, and those damn overequipped corporate cops.
Kevin Richardson
I know it's not terribly "cyber"punk, but it fits the world: Pharmaceuticals. Pills for everything. Uppers, downers, performance enhancers, nootropics, appetite suppressors, pills for everything. They require regular prescriptions, so corps get regular money from people who need the boost to keep up with school/work (because everyone else is on pills), and the extras to treat the side effects of the prescriptions they're already taking. Not as scary as surgery for the consumer, and more profitable if you get them hooked young. $30/month on the low end, starting at 18, given how long people could live in the future? Prescribe that to 100 million people, and you're making bank.
Benjamin James
>Shit, as per the recent Vault 7 leaks, the CIA can hack cars and probably used that to assassinate a journalist. 2017 is cyberpunk as fuck.
Actually, that's been possible for awhile, just not always easy to do.
It's also harder to do then you'd think as is, because every new car model or software update plugs up the security flaws that make it possible in most cases.
That said, if any of that shit on the WikiLeaks thing is true (and it looks like at least some of it is, some of those technical exploits are legitimate and caught folks by surprise) then it will relatively simple to fix those exploits.
Network security problems are easy to resolve in nearly all cases, and once you resolve them they flat out stop being a problem (literally nothing hacking uses to do in the 80's and 90's is relevant for example). The issue is the endless search for NEW exploits or security flaws that inevitably any new system update or bit of software will initiate.
Network security ended up not being like more powerful bullets vs. better armor like people used to think it was going to be, but rather like constantly shifting pieces of totally invulnerable armor around your body while the person tries to find new gaps you have to divert resources to plug up.
Even then there's no real fix for people just being idiots, which is the cause of something like 99% of the security problems I have to fix; people are easier to hack then systems are.
Alexander Hall
Nevermind that killing someone with an 'autonomous' car is retarded as fuck because the company that produced the car always will do an investigation.
Last thing you want is Tesla yelling "SHADY SHIT WITH THIS CRASH!" all over the news an Twitter.
Hunter Long
Websites will be like TV channels. You buy packages to access them. You got your social media package, your news, your sports, your games. Like tv shows, it'll be near impossible for ordinary people to make their own sites or have it hosted.
Christopher Myers
A lot of your classic cyberpunk protags do a LOT of drugs, some of which are even medicinal.
Hell, Case did so many drugs that his benefactor got him a new drug-proof liver, and the first thing he does is to try (successfully) to find drugs that will still affect him.
And both him and Marîd Audran have fairly intense drug habits