Quote from: BadApple on August 26, 2023, 01:27:02 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 26, 2023, 12:42:32 PM
Cyberpunk as a genre IS political, usually Leftism + Nihilism. Those are the 80s tropes you decry.

By making it farther in the future and extrapolating from the present it would have to be either Libertarian or Right wing. I would also eschew the Nihilism if possible.

I disagree.  Cyberpunk is neither leftist nor nihilistic.  It would be far more accurate to saying that it's anarco-libertarian.  It breaks my heart that so many see punk and miss the message.

The -punk part of the name is the biggest clue as to what it's about.  Punk is a rejection of and the rebellion against the idea that submitting to authority is an inherently moral position and being intentionally oppositional to "because I said so."  (I think it's well worth pointing out that Johnny Rotten, a punk trailblazer, supported Donald Trump as POTUS.)  Indeed, true punk movements tend to be stronger and more confrontational when and where leftism is control.  There is a major punk movement in China right now where it's flatly illegal and the government is spending a lot of time and money trying to suppress it.

While superficially it's easy to see punks as being nihilistic, I don't think that's the case.  Nihilism it the belief that there is no real morality and life is meaningless. The real belief of punks is that it's on the individual to internally root their morality.  Is it moral because I'm told it's moral or is it moral because I know it's moral?  In my life, I have found that punks tend to be some of the most human and compassionate people.  I will say that this means that some punks take a left turn on being decent human beings and it is certainly not a philosophy for psychopaths.  There's a good number of examples of it going very badly.

While certainly not in the musical style of the 70s and 80s British punk music, Rich Men North of Richmond is very punk in it's message.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqSA-SY5Hro&pp=ygUacmljaCBtZW4gbm9ydGggb2YgcmljaG1vbmQ%3D

Finally, if you go back and read the early Cyberpunk material and look at the interviews of the creators, you'll see that they didn't have left leaning views.  William Gibson, Mike Pondsmith, Bruce Bethke, and Philip K. Dick (precursor to cyberpunk) were and are not socialists or communists.  They all are people concerned about overbearing central authority.

Ehhhh, sort of.  I think the issue is that punk is not inherently left or right; it's more a discussion on individualism vs collectivism without a clear conclusion.  It equally warns against pure individualism (often via the mechanism of the body modifications), as some people have used that pure freedom to make themselves into monsters.

The difference is that modern media (dating back to the 1960s) will not allow any idea to enter the public consciousness without manipulating it to support the leftist world view.  This is why "cyberpunk" authority is most often associated with out-of-control corporations (which the left conflates with right-wing ideology, but this isn't the time or place for that discussion) in books, movies, and RPGs (from Cyberpunk to the almost-parody of Shadowrun).  There is a conscious attempt to portray the censorious and authoritarian forces in modern society as right-wing (which is why the media was all abuzz with the 80s' Satanic Panic).  Ask an average bloke which political ideology would most likely be behind imprisoning people for false accusations of Satanic-inspired child molestation or censoring obscene record lyrics and it is a safe bet that they'd instantly point to the right-wingers (when in actuality it was Janet F'n Reno and Tipper Manbearpig Gore responsible, respectively).  So the portions of "punk" that can be used by the media to denigrate their opposition tend to be emphasized, while contradictory conclusions are ignored.

It's one of the best things about the growth of the Internet and the OSR for RPGs: it's much harder to gate-keep ideas and harder to enforce strict interpretations of complex subjects.  People have a general sense of what is real and what is overblown.  When there were 3 channels of TV and every news program said the same thing, they could get away with tying RPGs to Satan (which was stupid on its face, even then).  It's a lot harder today to convince people that the right is the same level of threat.  Think about the recent revival of that second-rate book by a second-rate author, The Handmaid's Tale.  Five years ago they made TV shows, wrote articles, showed up at Republican events protesting in clothes from the book, etc.  Why wasn't there ever an RPG made of it?  Seriously, if The Handmaid's Tale was that much of a timely social commentary, an encapsulation of the zeitgeist of the moment, why didn't someone make an RPG based on the property, or even a clone?  If RPG players lean left, it would seem like they would be an eager audience for this, especially if it identified a real threat.  But nobody did (or if they did, nobody who even pays close attention to RPGs ever heard of it, and no one is playing it today).  That's because the ideas within are so contrary to the concerns of modern society (which is much harder to shape in today's electronic world) that nobody would even take it seriously.

So, I think that RPGs (and media) in the past may have been made by people with a more nuanced view, but they were often shaped to serve as tools in the budding culture war, even if they didn't quite fit.  That's harder to do today...

Quote from: BadApple on August 26, 2023, 01:27:02 PMFinally, if you go back and read the early Cyberpunk material and look at the interviews of the creators, you'll see that they didn't have left leaning views.  William Gibson, Mike Pondsmith, Bruce Bethke, and Philip K. Dick (precursor to cyberpunk) were and are not socialists or communists.  They all are people concerned about overbearing central authority.

Another side note as well is that William Gibson seems to have a center left establishment bias.  For a guy who has written against centralization of authority, he was against Brexit and was very much against Trump.  He doesn't seem very coherent in applying the principles of his past writings to reality.  He also buys into the climate narrative, so it makes one wonder if he supports more government control over consumption in the name of "global warming."

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that, while conceptually, Cyberpunk as a genre is libertarian or anarcho-capitalist, many of its greatest contributors seem to be more supportive of statism or leftism than you would expect.

Much of the confusion surrounding "punk" stems from the left's smashing success at tricking everyone that authoritarianism was a unique property of the German and Italian flavors of ice cream, rather than a general property of ice cream itself which was shared by the Russian flavor.

The right did not do themselves any favors over the past fifty years, either. Two deals with the Devil were made in mid to late 20th century America. The Democrats aligned themselves with communists, and the Republicans aligned themselves with the American Taliban. The left does have religious people in their ranks, but when someone goes off the rails about their religion and starts trying to use the State to force their religion onto society at large, that person has been on the right the overwhelming majority of the time. The right definitely doesn't have a monopoly on religious people, but they do appear to have a monopoly on religious crazy people.

Quote from: Nameless Mist on August 26, 2023, 03:22:28 PM
I agree overall, although I'm kind of divided on Mike Pondsmith.  Every statement I've read by him seems to be against authoritarianism in general, but I don't think he realizes the Marxist agenda of BLM.  He's voiced support for BLM.  Mike realizes police brutality affects all people, but BLM is race-obsessed and very much leftist.

BLM snookered a lot of people. My first impression of my neighbors with BLM signs isn't that they're communists, it's that they're gullible. They want so badly to be good liberals that they can't fathom someone would take advantage of them and exploit their desire to be good liberals for personal and political gain.

Who are the bad guys in a Cyberpunk game? Is it the government? or is it the corporations usurping the government?

To be an-cap it should portray the government as the bad guys, to be libertarian ditto.

Is it assumed that the PCs can change things for the better? No
Is it assumed the PCs are heroes or just a bunch of oportunistic asshole mercenaries selling their guns to the highest bidder?

Leftism + Nihilism

I rest my case.

Quote from: Nameless Mist on August 26, 2023, 03:44:15 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 26, 2023, 01:27:02 PMFinally, if you go back and read the early Cyberpunk material and look at the interviews of the creators, you'll see that they didn't have left leaning views.  William Gibson, Mike Pondsmith, Bruce Bethke, and Philip K. Dick (precursor to cyberpunk) were and are not socialists or communists.  They all are people concerned about overbearing central authority.

Another side note as well is that William Gibson seems to have a center left establishment bias.  For a guy who has written against centralization of authority, he was against Brexit and was very much against Trump.  He doesn't seem very coherent in applying the principles of his past writings to reality.  He also buys into the climate narrative, so it makes one wonder if he supports more government control over consumption in the name of "global warming."

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that, while conceptually, Cyberpunk as a genre is libertarian or anarcho-capitalist, many of its greatest contributors seem to be more supportive of statism or leftism than you would expect.

I would describe Gibson as apolitical and ill-informed.  The interview he did on The Screensavers pretty much laid that out bare for me.  He's really just an author writing stories he thinks are cool.  There was a brief period of his life where he touched on an important life question and now it's gone.  He intentionally created steampunk (The Difference Engine) as a way to distance himself from it and as such hasn't written enaything nearly as meaningful as his early 80s Sprawl novels.

In truth, many public people who seem to have a position based on their creative works turn out to be very different in their personal lives.  I'm ok with that.

With Cyberpunk, the social questions it makes are deeply important, even if the creators and readers don't really understand them.  I don't think the Wachowskis had any clue what themes and ideas they were exploring in The Matrix.  As it is, I think cyberpunk (and punk in general) goes way beyond topical social commentary through to the existential questions of the meaning of life and core morality and soul. 

Or I'm just a nerd overthinking things and taking one of my favorite genres of entertainment too seriously.

Quote from: Corolinth on August 26, 2023, 04:09:58 PM
Much of the confusion surrounding "punk" stems from the left's smashing success at tricking everyone that authoritarianism was a unique property of the German and Italian flavors of ice cream, rather than a general property of ice cream itself which was shared by the Russian flavor.

The right did not do themselves any favors over the past fifty years, either. Two deals with the Devil were made in mid to late 20th century America. The Democrats aligned themselves with communists, and the Republicans aligned themselves with the American Taliban. The left does have religious people in their ranks, but when someone goes off the rails about their religion and starts trying to use the State to force their religion onto society at large, that person has been on the right the overwhelming majority of the time. The right definitely doesn't have a monopoly on religious people, but they do appear to have a monopoly on religious crazy people.

I disagree on one point.  The left has its own religion: Woke.  Its fanatics make the Christian fundamentalists of the 90s look tame by comparison.  I think the lesson here is that political fanaticism of any stripe functions like religious fundamentalism.  The same could be said for Maoism.

Quote from: Corolinth on August 26, 2023, 04:09:58 PM

Quote from: Nameless Mist on August 26, 2023, 03:22:28 PM
I agree overall, although I'm kind of divided on Mike Pondsmith.  Every statement I've read by him seems to be against authoritarianism in general, but I don't think he realizes the Marxist agenda of BLM.  He's voiced support for BLM.  Mike realizes police brutality affects all people, but BLM is race-obsessed and very much leftist.

BLM snookered a lot of people. My first impression of my neighbors with BLM signs isn't that they're communists, it's that they're gullible. They want so badly to be good liberals that they can't fathom someone would take advantage of them and exploit their desire to be good liberals for personal and political gain.

Agreed.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 26, 2023, 04:17:35 PM
Who are the bad guys in a Cyberpunk game? Is it the government? or is it the corporations usurping the government?

To be an-cap it should portray the government as the bad guys, to be libertarian ditto.

Is it assumed that the PCs can change things for the better? No
Is it assumed the PCs are heroes or just a bunch of oportunistic asshole mercenaries selling their guns to the highest bidder?

Leftism + Nihilism

I rest my case.

Fair points, although...  this could be a long tangent, but corporations technically are a government invention.  Corporate law, for example, is the reason why liability works differently for a corporation than for an individual.  If you could hold the board of Pfizer personally responsible for all vaccine adverse effects, for example, Pfizer would probably operate differently from how it currently does.  This legal shield (or corporate veil as it's called) only exists because of government.

So technically, you could say that a true free market has no corporate law, or at least, that individuals running a corporation would be equally as liable as individuals for corporate actions.

In effect, the megacorporations of the Cyberpunk genre only wield power to a massive degree due to having governmental powers in all practicality.  Many Cyberpunk stories hint at how laws allowed them to acquire their power as well.  Overall, corporations and the government are one and the same in these stories, and in reality, this is kind of true as well.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 26, 2023, 04:17:35 PM
Who are the bad guys in a Cyberpunk game? Is it the government? or is it the corporations usurping the government?

To be an-cap it should portray the government as the bad guys, to be libertarian ditto.

Is it assumed that the PCs can change things for the better? No
Is it assumed the PCs are heroes or just a bunch of opportunistic asshole mercenaries selling their guns to the highest bidder?

Leftism + Nihilism

I rest my case.

Anarchy simply means to be without anyone in the position of being a ruler.  Lateral organization and cooperation is not in conflict with Anarchy.

Libertarianism is recognizing that the individual is the ultimate minority and that individual rights must be protected for society as a whole to be health and function.  An overbearing authority can come in the form of a government, a religion, or a private group of any kind that seeks to over ride the individual will in favor of the will of the (as perceived by the libertarian) illegitimate ruler.     

Oddly, everyone of the Cyberpunk games I've ever run ultimately turns into the players exploring the morality of resistance.  It's amazing to me that ultimately the idea of being amoral operators ultimately brings out some of the most "do the right thing even if it's hard" behavior in my players.  It's some of the most beautiful moments at the table I have ever seen. 

P.S. - Geeky, I'm not trying to be dismissive of your views, but I am trying to challenge them.  I wish I could more clearly share my perspective.   

Quote from: BadApple on August 26, 2023, 04:32:05 PM

Quote from: Nameless Mist on August 26, 2023, 03:44:15 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 26, 2023, 01:27:02 PMFinally, if you go back and read the early Cyberpunk material and look at the interviews of the creators, you'll see that they didn't have left leaning views.  William Gibson, Mike Pondsmith, Bruce Bethke, and Philip K. Dick (precursor to cyberpunk) were and are not socialists or communists.  They all are people concerned about overbearing central authority.

Another side note as well is that William Gibson seems to have a center left establishment bias.  For a guy who has written against centralization of authority, he was against Brexit and was very much against Trump.  He doesn't seem very coherent in applying the principles of his past writings to reality.  He also buys into the climate narrative, so it makes one wonder if he supports more government control over consumption in the name of "global warming."

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that, while conceptually, Cyberpunk as a genre is libertarian or anarcho-capitalist, many of its greatest contributors seem to be more supportive of statism or leftism than you would expect.

I would describe Gibson as apolitical and ill-informed.  The interview he did on The Screensavers pretty much laid that out bare for me.  He's really just an author writing stories he thinks are cool.  There was a brief period of his life where he touched on an important life question and now it's gone.  He intentionally created steampunk (The Difference Engine) as a way to distance himself from it and as such hasn't written enaything nearly as meaningful as his early 80s Sprawl novels.

In truth, many public people who seem to have a position based on their creative works turn out to be very different in their personal lives.  I'm ok with that.

With Cyberpunk, the social questions it makes are deeply important, even if the creators and readers don't really understand them.  I don't think the Wachowskis had any clue what themes and ideas they were exploring in The Matrix.  As it is, I think cyberpunk (and punk in general) goes way beyond topical social commentary through to the existential questions of the meaning of life and core morality and soul. 

Or I'm just a nerd overthinking things and taking one of my favorite genres of entertainment too seriously.

Oh I totally agree.  I would actually argue that Gibson is just a product of his environment.  When he was young and a rising writer, he was still in touch with society and the common man.  This is why his earlier work is better.  After a certain level of success, many creative people develop a social bubble around them that isolates them from the common man, and then they start developing elitist views that the mainstream media promotes.  I've seen this happen to a friend of mine that isn't in a creative field, but he is very successful with a military contractor.  He lives in the Beltway and clearly doesn't understand things like the rural American perspective, despite originally coming from a Southern city.

Quote from: Nameless Mist on August 26, 2023, 04:34:54 PM

Quote from: Corolinth on August 26, 2023, 04:09:58 PM
Much of the confusion surrounding "punk" stems from the left's smashing success at tricking everyone that authoritarianism was a unique property of the German and Italian flavors of ice cream, rather than a general property of ice cream itself which was shared by the Russian flavor.

The right did not do themselves any favors over the past fifty years, either. Two deals with the Devil were made in mid to late 20th century America. The Democrats aligned themselves with communists, and the Republicans aligned themselves with the American Taliban. The left does have religious people in their ranks, but when someone goes off the rails about their religion and starts trying to use the State to force their religion onto society at large, that person has been on the right the overwhelming majority of the time. The right definitely doesn't have a monopoly on religious people, but they do appear to have a monopoly on religious crazy people.

I disagree on one point.  The left has its own religion: Woke.  Its fanatics make the Christian fundamentalists of the 90s look tame by comparison.  I think the lesson here is that political fanaticism of any stripe functions like religious fundamentalism.  The same could be said for Maoism.

You won't get any argument from me on the proposition that wokism has metastasized into a religion, but we only recognized this very recently. Moreover, it doesn't refute the main point that the American right earned their reputation as religious authoritarians on their own merits.

Yes, the woke fanatics are far worse than the Christian fundamentalists ever were, but the damage is already done, and it's damage that can't be fixed until enough time passes that the people who permanently hate the right are gone.

Quote from: BadApple on August 26, 2023, 04:43:55 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 26, 2023, 04:17:35 PM
Who are the bad guys in a Cyberpunk game? Is it the government? or is it the corporations usurping the government?

To be an-cap it should portray the government as the bad guys, to be libertarian ditto.

Is it assumed that the PCs can change things for the better? No
Is it assumed the PCs are heroes or just a bunch of opportunistic asshole mercenaries selling their guns to the highest bidder?

Leftism + Nihilism

I rest my case.

Anarchy simply means to be without anyone in the position of being a ruler.  Lateral organization and cooperation is not in conflict with Anarchy.

Libertarianism is recognizing that the individual is the ultimate minority and that individual rights must be protected for society as a whole to be health and function.  An overbearing authority can come in the form of a government, a religion, or a private group of any kind that seeks to over ride the individual will in favor of the will of the (as perceived by the libertarian) illegitimate ruler.     

Oddly, everyone of the Cyberpunk games I've ever run ultimately turns into the players exploring the morality of resistance.  It's amazing to me that ultimately the idea of being amoral operators ultimately brings out some of the most "do the right thing even if it's hard" behavior in my players.  It's some of the most beautiful moments at the table I have ever seen. 

P.S. - Geeky, I'm not trying to be dismissive of your views, but I am trying to challenge them.  I wish I could more clearly share my perspective.

It's not about the ideologies (an-cap/libertarian) [look at Nameless Mist for what a libertarian thinks about evil corps (only exist because of the state)], it's also not about what your players ended up doing, it's about the assumptions of the setting, Pundit said that to make a Cyberpunk game without the classic tropes it would be a political game...

I agree, but Cyberpunk has ALWAYS been political, and if the writers thought they were writting the ultimate pro ancapistan novel they failed miserably, all the settings are leftist/nihilistic bullcrap.

To make a Cyberpunk game free of those tropes you would need to go right wing, to extrapolate from current year and say: "Okay, let's say the lunatics win and seize power forever, what would happen? Where is the current year events and policies taking us? What would that future look like?

If you ask me it would look a lot like Armageddon 2419 A.D. plus involuntary implants (credit card/phone chips implanted, maybe the neuralink), mandatory homosexuality, pedos openly in power and corporations assuming the power of the state.

Chinese corporations or their allies/puppets.

America (the whole continent) as a Chinese colony, Africa enslaved by the CCP, Europe as part of the Islamic state, with Russia taking all of eastern Europe and maybe parts of Asia.

That's the setting you would get from extrapollating from the direction we're headed, Pundit knows it, and he knows it would be read by his enemies as a political screed, even if he was a leftard and he isn't.

Quote from: Nameless Mist on August 26, 2023, 12:21:01 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on August 26, 2023, 12:10:17 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 24, 2023, 01:21:26 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on August 24, 2023, 09:58:09 AM
There are of course real conspiracies, but the ones who take the form of "secret societies" are generally pretty lame ones (the only ones that had real political impact in the 20th C. West that I can think of being Skull & Bones and P2).

Most of the "conspiracies" are in plain sight, however. For example, the WEF.

Hiding in plain sight works wonders when you have the media on your side or pocket or both. A shame if one were to create such a conspiracy for a game book it would be so on the nose it would read as pushing IRL politics into the game.

That's my problem with doing a Cyberpunk game. I wouldn't want to do one that recreates 80s tropes; I'd want one that reflects the near-future dystopia that has been presented to use in Current Year, but that would make it by far the most "political" RPG I've ever written.

You could do a post-apocalyptic game where there are remnants of Cyberpunk-esque tech, but the collapse of civilization has made it necessary for humans to return to basic common sense for the sake of survival.  It would be like Horizon Zero Dawn, but without the woke tropes.

Then that wouldn't be cyberpunk. cyberpunk isn't about cybernetics, or hackers, or guys in body armor with katanas and mohawks. It's about the dystopia that truly threatens the near-future; in the 1980s that was the bottomless greed of corporations and America's seeming inability to compete with foreign corps; in Present Year it is the agenda of the WEF that all our leaders seem ready to betray everything for.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 26, 2023, 12:42:32 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on August 26, 2023, 12:10:17 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 24, 2023, 01:21:26 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on August 24, 2023, 09:58:09 AM
There are of course real conspiracies, but the ones who take the form of "secret societies" are generally pretty lame ones (the only ones that had real political impact in the 20th C. West that I can think of being Skull & Bones and P2).

Most of the "conspiracies" are in plain sight, however. For example, the WEF.

Hiding in plain sight works wonders when you have the media on your side or pocket or both. A shame if one were to create such a conspiracy for a game book it would be so on the nose it would read as pushing IRL politics into the game.

That's my problem with doing a Cyberpunk game. I wouldn't want to do one that recreates 80s tropes; I'd want one that reflects the near-future dystopia that has been presented to use in Current Year, but that would make it by far the most "political" RPG I've ever written.

Cyberpunk as a genre IS political, usually Leftism + Nihilism. Those are the 80s tropes you decry.

By making it farther in the future and extrapolating from the present it would have to be either Libertarian or Right wing. I would also eschew the Nihilism if possible.

Cyberpunk isn't inherently leftist. It is a warning against letting a certain kind of exploiter class control the world. In 1980s America, that exploiter class was mostly working on Wall Street, wearing bespoke suits and voting for Reagan. Now, the very same class has "BLM" stickers on their cars and are showing off their transed-kids to the rest of the board of Hasbro at the stakeholders meeting before jetting off the Davos to hear from Klaus' experts about how to steal billions from taxpayers by pretending to fight global warming.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 26, 2023, 04:17:35 PM
Who are the bad guys in a Cyberpunk game? Is it the government? or is it the corporations usurping the government?

To be an-cap it should portray the government as the bad guys, to be libertarian ditto.

Is it assumed that the PCs can change things for the better? No
Is it assumed the PCs are heroes or just a bunch of oportunistic asshole mercenaries selling their guns to the highest bidder?

Leftism + Nihilism

I rest my case.

In 1980s Cyberpunk the fear was corporate power run amok, where corporations would take the place of government, which would be reduced to a near-powerless figurehead.
Instead what happened was that the non-elected bureaucracies of government took over both the state and corporations.

Quote from: RPGPundit on August 30, 2023, 06:13:29 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 26, 2023, 04:17:35 PM
Who are the bad guys in a Cyberpunk game? Is it the government? or is it the corporations usurping the government?

To be an-cap it should portray the government as the bad guys, to be libertarian ditto.

Is it assumed that the PCs can change things for the better? No
Is it assumed the PCs are heroes or just a bunch of oportunistic asshole mercenaries selling their guns to the highest bidder?

Leftism + Nihilism

I rest my case.

In 1980s Cyberpunk the fear was corporate power run amok, where corporations would take the place of government, which would be reduced to a near-powerless figurehead.
Instead what happened was that the non-elected bureaucracies of government took over both the state and corporations.

Except that the WEF is a private org, the political class is working on behalf of their donors and/or has been coopted by the WEF, and a lot of this is funded by people like George Soros and Bill Gates. So there's a still a strong element of ultra wealthy individuals and orgs run amok and taking over the government. Even if elements within the government are taking a more active role.