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Today we’re going to cover a lighter subject than usual. All links and citations can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/93832680
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Longest SPG video to date?
The idea that one must be an authority on a subject in order to speak on it is bullshit. Don't sell yourself short; you are intelligent and you have great perspective.
So this is the longest video about a single game?
Thanks for another great new vid. I guess I really should take some time to finally play through this game sometime. 😀
I also feel imposter syndrome about my job, but I don't feel as bad about it anymore as 99% of my users couldn't tell the difference if I absolutely bullshit an explanation.
I'm glad you gave cyberpunk a second chance I played it when it first came out and finished it glitches and all and I saw what was there and loved it and I'm glad cdpr kept working on it and with help from the anime it came back to life 😊
I do like the view Milan Kundera has on "the road not taken". He describes in his novel 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' that the road not taken is left open to imagination. Thus it is not tainted by reality. It just exist in ones mind and can therefor be ideal. So the protagonist purposely avoids decisions with the most promising result, so he can imagine the perfect outcome, without getting disappointed by reality.
Now just writing it makes me think Kundera probably expressed the darkest take on life decisions …
But it still is kind of comforting when looking back, at least. But probably not the best advice to come to a decision.
😉
Thank you so much for this video.
Finally someone who isn't stuck between game release babyrage years after, or level-0 reading of the material.
Sry i'm being a bit unfair : the second one is ok.
This is what i love about Cyberpunk : multiple level or readings, with existential and political questionning hiding behind the glitter of a cyberarm (which is fine too, fun is an end like any other).
To me, it is characters like Johnny Silverhand or Solomon Reed who embodied the best all the riches of this game's (and licence) themes.
I have to admit that i was far from the analysis that you had (because yeah, i don't play Cyberpunk 2077/RED/2020 with a philosophy book in hand) but more of a socio-political reading grid.
But it rejoined all that as i already had my own "conclusions" (if we can call it that) and am now hellbent on what this cyberpunk (and our) society hammers in our heads about those themes.
And to me the best illustration is : just mentionning Reed or Silverhand always gets me to argue for either half or full hours with my best friend about these character's attitudes ideas and actions (which can diverge HARD).
And when we do, we ultimately go back to reflecting on our experiences to explain our exact opposite reading of the greatest characters in this game.
Says she is not the person as she has not had "enough school"… Then goes on to go in depth into SP2077 better then any Uni Proff I have met.
Fantastic analysis! I certainly didn't expect Sartre to come up. I read Les Jeux Sont Faits in college and it's always stuck with me. It's what got me interested in existentialism. As for Cyberpunk, it's one of my all time favorite games. The genre was already right up my alley, but the setting, themes and narrative are something else.
As for themes of capitalism, I never had the impression that the game's message was anything but anti-corporate. However, it suffers from the same vague hypocrisy as all other big budget games and movies that try to tackle these concepts. I always come away feeling like the message is that everyone else except us is evil so don't feel guilty about consuming the products we're peddling.
As for Takemura, I think he reflects two aspects. First, he's evidence that honorable exist within a broken system but more importantly, he shows how opportunity shapes perspective. He defends the Arasaka because it pulled him out of poverty but in the process has become oblivious to the harm it continues to cause. Now, the debate around Songbird in Phantom Liberty is a whole other can of worms.
"Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?" are also the big questions most forms of Art try to answer. Since many video games deal with those questions too, it's not that unusual to grapple with philosophy when thinking about them.
I would have never guessed your age correctly. From the amount of thought and insight you put into your work, I thought you were older. 🙂
Hi! Can you do an update on impregnation games? My list is getting stale. Thank you!
The game is not the revolutionary RPG with limitless choices and consequences that was pumped up to be, but it remains an incredible game nonetheless. Most of the side content is forgettable, but the main narrative (including PL), characters, setting, and overall atmosphere are absolutely top-notch. I do agree that it features existentialism aspects. The narrative is purposely depressing more often than not; the world of Cyberpunk is an oppressive one full with people with traumatic problems and plenty of regrets. A masterfully written world, in my opinion.
Existentialism and transhumanism make a funny menage-a-trois when Theseus' ship joins them.
Wooohooo, a long video on Cyberpunk!
I came for lasciviousness, I stayed for philosophical analysis. Thanks for an excellent video.
Cyberpunk as a genre has always been dystopian. It's a warning, not an aspiration.
I'm mostly with you here, but you're off when you're talking about Takemura and CDProjekt defending billionaires. Takemura represents only one PoV in the game, and it is a very specific "good corporate soldier" sort of thing. There are plenty of examples of places in the game where the corporations, especially Arasaka, are blatantly criticized. There's the underwater town you explore with Best Girl Judy for one, all sorts of stuff in the Aldecaldos story line, and the mission to steal the truck full of medical supplies for El Capitan in the DLC. That's just three off the top of my head, not to mention all the dialog options you have as V to slam the "corpo-rats" throughout the game.
To me, that's as it should be. We should see as many different perspectives as the narrative allows in a game, so in an open world RPG, that should hopefully be a very well rounded representation. Then, with any luck, the player will be free to pick a path that suits them, not some predetermined "correct" choice as dictated by the developer, and perhaps based on the developers personal politics. What makes exploring these themes worthwhile in a game is being able to see them from a perspective you may not have considered before.
That out of the way, I'd be very interested to hear what you have to say about sexuality in the game. That's always been a fascinating part of the genre to me, as it relates to the transhumanism and the hedonism that are often a big part of it. Its not only about the cynicism of the corporatocracy, but what happens when people can literally replace their bodies. At what point do we stop thinking about our bodies as we do now and start to think of them as a commodity? Our bodies can already be a commodity, sure, but I mean in a more extreme way, when they are almost separate objects from our "selves" because of how easily we can modify them, or change them wholesale?
That's another part of the reason why there's so much sexually explicit advertising in the game. It's a reflection of how our views on such things change when showing off those new implants isn't considered any different from showing off that new jacket or that new car.
well put.
Have you ever played or reviewed "Coffee Talk" episode 1 & 2? I would call it a slice of life, interaction and fantasy game with an interesting gameplay involving drinks. Good luck playing digital or physical copy. Sadly RIP for the creator of the game.😢
The lead quest designer apparently has a licence in philosophy, which explains why the game is so deep and full of it. You brillantly cover one aspect. There is a lot that is sometimes hidden, sometimes not. The tarot cards with Misty describe one of these aspects. There are quests that are actually tied together to talk about hidden plots. All the shards and logs and mails sometimes tale stories too, that you can recombine if you have good enough memory. And often it's plainly on a quest. The main story itself talks about several different things, and youreally need to do all the endings to understand all the intricacies of it.
Thank you for for this videon it's always interesting to have this subject talked with the serious it deserves yet without it taking an hour to watch.
Deep.
I belief in a way humans are part of the universe, so our evolution is part of the never ending story, everyone has potential, potential should not be wasted, no one should be kept below or suppresed, to remove limits, like shame and fear it will boost our evolution, i think things like meditation, adult gaming and philosophy have this in common they help to explore our nature, what we desire, who we are. Maybe there is a higher plan, maybe we can overcome duality and ascend to a higher way of existence, maybe we can evolve spiritualy and also evolve technology, maybe we need to overcome religion and explore the idea of God more as a collective consciousness of all life, basicaly all life is part of the universe, one earth, one love, everyone is unique and connected like raindrops in one ocean. We have a lot of different people, this diversity is beautifull, so much to see, to explore, you can explore the entire earth, but new ideas create new things, they create new ideas, we all have the same enemy pain itself, we seek to make thinks better, to evolve. Freedom and order, beeing unique and beeing in harmony, dark and light, can we balance it ? Maybe we need to bring balance to good and evil, instead of fighting some parts of our nature we need to find a healthy way to work with both. So be yourself, try to survive, do as good as you can, try to respect others and yourself and if we work toogether, all the different ideas, we can create a better future. No shaming just gaming.
Don't sell yourself short, this was very good.🖖🏿
May I humbly direct you and your correspondents to the interviews given by Mr Keanu Reeves.
He makes a point that, while both the game and gaming in general are escapism, the nature of our world, the one we experience, anyway, requires a measure of self-imposed order. That's what Cyberpunk, and many others, bring to us, an ability to make ridiculous superhuman lives relatable, and at the same time relating us to a way of seeing order in our own chaos.
This was discussed, albeit in terms of reading scifi, with Burroughs and Asimov that I remember, Heinlein I think. There may have been others. They all state that the medium allows us to confront concepts we'd normally consider "too big" or otherwise outside of our limits. Philip K Dick was a master at that.
As for not being qualified…pffft. If someone has read a dystopian novel ( I include graphic novels) and thought about it, considered how it relates to our experience in this world, what differences it might make….yeah, I'd say you have a tenured professorship.
the vehicle handling is also an example of absurdism
I thought the title was "Cyberpunk 2077 and Exhibitionism", but was pleased regardless.
Interesting video, Annie. I appreciate the time that you put into this. Keep up the good work!
2 cents from an actual PhD: There arent better or worse people to discuss a given topic. The truth/false value of a given proposition/sentence is independent of the person saying it. If a blind person says that sky is blue, he is no less correct or precise as a person with correctly working eyesight. The color spectrum of the sky does NOT care or depend in any way shape or form about people commenting on it.
So stop with the 'i am not good enough'. You are only as good as work you've put into research, thinking and digesting the topic. However experienced you are, no thinker ever makes no mistakes and no thinker ever is perfectly precise in their thoughts and words. There is no objective bar of 'good enough' which separates people who can and cant talk about a subject. Noone is good enough just by what they are. Moreover, thinkers become better by doing the mental excersises like the one you've done here, so this should be encouraged.
The biggest problem I see here is that existentialists lived in a completely different world than we do now. They did not realize how much we can improve and how quickly. In my eyes, the entire movement/brand of thought is just a curiosity in the history of philosophy – interesting, entertaining, a good mental excersise, but ultimately useless and false, inapplicable to the real world. The real world is not what existentialists thought it was.
Cyberpunk 2020/2077 is perfect example of this. It's a matter for a chain of essays, but both the universe in its construction and the story of the game fall apart at so many places that they are unfixable in the worldbuilding sense – a reality which cannot happen. V's choices are very artificially limited in the game. There are multiple plays and strategies which would be realistically possible but you cannot make because the game does not allow you – and those routes would ruin the 'existentialist' take.
Philosophical and worldbuilding shallowness of CP2020/2077 is sad, but not surprising. It's a background for one of early RPG worlds, and many of those were very poorly made. There are much better takes on Cyberpunk genre – and i think that there are quite a few things which can be done with it, starting with how the Cyberpunk era ends in a given world, what it transitions into. Because lets face it, Cyberpunk world is inherently unstable in the social and political sense. It cannot last.