Good point Thanatos...

But I think that it's more a question of the degree to which you blend to genres.  It's easy to blend the aesthetic cues of different genres to give you the likes of Shadowrun (fantasy + cyberpunk) and that stupid D20 game with dragons in space or even sport films with traditional D&D (Dungeon Crawl).

But it's another issue to make the two genres stick properly together.

The easiest genres to blend are the stylistic ones such as noir or martial arts ; they go with practically anything.  Such as C=SPAN and kung-fu but the more involved genres such as horror or cyberpunk tend to be quite complex making them more difficult to blend properly.

Quote from: Thanatos02Can't mix tone. Can mix any genre, with a good eye.

Bingo.

But is space opera necessarily utopian? If we look at the wiki definition of distopia then we see Flash Gordan and Star Wars have strong distopian themes.  A campaign set on Coruscant would automatically have cyberpunk theme for most of the timeline of the movies and the Extended Universe!

Star Trek is utopian, occasionally painfully so.  Star Trek is Space Opera.  But that doesn't mean that Space Opera is utopian

So I think I an agree on tone.

I'm looking through my collection of gaming products, and I can't find a single example of genre-mashing that I enjoy.

My tastes - when it comes to my personal favorites - tend to be fairly conservative, with a strong skew toward single genre emulations low on metaplot and high on versatility.

That being said, I can truly appreciate a lot of different kinds of games for a lot of different reasons, I just don't consider them personal favorites. I appreciate "Shadowrun" for what it is, but I'd never run a game, and would be unlikely to play in one for long.

Quote from: Hastur T. FannonI'm not sure about this.  Could it be because space opera is inherently utopian and cyberpunk is inherently distopean?

Because a lot of recent hard sci-fi (Ken McLeod, David Brin, heck, even Ian M. Banks) mixes space opera and cyberpunk tropes very effectively.  I'm not saying you're wrong, just that I'd like to discuss this

I think you're right about utopian/distopean -- or at least on the right track... the tropes are less important than the over-all theme; certainly certain kinds of technologies could exist in either genre and space-opera can be dark enough to cover cyberpunk.

For me, cyberpunk is usually much smaller in scale... more personal, in some ways... and has a lot more moral ambiguity. In space-opera, there's or no moral "gray zone" and the scale is epic.

It goes without saying that Space Opera often takes place at the higher-end of the technology curve, while Cyberpunk's more grounded, but I don't think that, by itself, is what prevents them from mixing.

Cheers,
-E.

What about zombies and mecha?


I really can't see that one going anywhere... maybe I'm wrong.

That could go anywhere.  Zombies are a monster, not shorthand for apocalyptic morality plays.

I doubt you could do a zombie apocalypse game with mecha; the zombies and survival horror would trump the robot element pretty quickly.  However, a game that involved an army of mech pilots waging war against necromancers who combined corpses into massive murder engines would be pretty tech.

Once again theme trumps genre.  Could you have a romantic comedy set in the Old World?  For a little while, maybe, before the Empire's festering heart turned your comedy of errors into a comedy of ratmen eating your fiancee.

A romantic comedy set in a more hopeful, high fantasy setting might be big business.  "He's 154th in line to the throne of Karameikos; she's the newly-crowned queen of the mountain raiders!  He wants her to win over his domineering family; she wants to eat his mother's heart and gain her power!"  Every centers on one of them learning some key element of the other's culture. (She finds out what a spoon is; he learns that boiled goat eyes are good eatin'!)

Quote from: beejazzWhat about zombies and mecha?


I really can't see that one going anywhere... maybe I'm wrong.

My game Cloak of Steel has mecha MADE from zombies. Does that count?

Quote from: GRIMMy game Cloak of Steel has mecha MADE from zombies. Does that count?

YotZ has (optional) giant robots

I haven't yet managed to have them piloted by Japanese Lesbianstripperninjas, but I'm working on it

Edit: honking great typo

Quote from: fonkaygarryThat could go anywhere.  Zombies are a monster, not shorthand for apocalyptic morality plays.

zzzziiinnng!

Quote from: fonkaygarryZombies are a monster, not shorthand for apocalyptic morality plays.

If you do that then you're wasting a good trope.

(Personally I consider zombies to be an environmental hazard)

Yet my Mystara RomCom goes unremarked?

Pearls before swine, I tells ya.

Truth be told, I just don't like zombies.  As far as apocalyptic fiction goes, I rank them far below Mad Max wastelands.  I greatly prefer "Ah'll droive that tankah!" to people screaming at each other in the locked building of your choice.