TECHNOLOGICAL DISRUPTIONS: The Interplay of Subjective Flaws and Virtual Space

CHAPTER 2.6: EXTERNAL AFROFUTURISM

The previous two sections of this chapter dealt mostly with Cyberpunk 2077’s in-game narrative, along with how that narrative might be incorporating real world historical/racial contexts. That angle of analysis will continue in this section as well, but now that we understand the genre conventions implemented in the game that are important to our exploration of how media reinterprets technological disruptions, I also want to incorporate the meta-narrative at play here. It is time to shed some light on the minds behind Cyberpunk 2077, and their potential reasoning behind the creative choices that we have been looking over.

First, some clarifications on CD Projekt Red itself. Known for The Witcher video game series and for founding GOG.com, CD Projekt Red is the second-most profitable European video game company. It has a far-reaching, international audience. Cyberpunk 2077 will be their first video game that takes place in America, as The Witcher was a Polish fantasy video game series that was adapted from Andrzej Sapkowski’s books of the same title. Most of the writers from The Witcher have gone on to lead the narrative team for Cyberpunk 2077. Because the three head writers—Marcin Blacha, Jakub Szamałek, and Stanisław Święcicki—are all white Polish men, their fictional version of America comes from a distinctly external viewpoint. This is not necessarily a critique. The aspect that I believe to be problematic is how the writers seem to assume that their target audience shares some similar identities.



As an example, take the multiple versions of V that CD Projekt Red has portrayed through their demos, trailers, and screenshots. Across all three types of visual media that have shown Cyberpunk 2077 and its protagonist, none have portrayed a character customized to be a person of color. The developers have clarified that it will be possible to alter the character’s race, gender, and many other visual aspects, but there have not been many actual examples of different types of V.

Thomas H. Apperley’s essay “The Body of the Gamer: Game Art and Gestural Excess” does a wonderful job of relating the human body behind the video game to the game avatar they control. Apperley highlights a specific aspect of this relationship in the following passage:

While the ‘body of the gamer’ is often not explicitly visible in game art—particularly glitch art—it often implicitly exposes or reveals the labour in gameplay. Through exposing labour, game art does implicitly reference the labouring body, the physically embodied actions that both perform play and construct game environments. (150)

Though Apperley is talking about physical labor here, I think that his ideas about “exposing labour” can also be applied to the visual connections between player and avatar. The developers of CD Projekt Red mask their labor in the stages of development. Just as we don’t typically see the hunks of rock that a sculptor has shaved away from their finished product, the individual contributions to Cyberpunk 2077 are smoothed over by polished showcase videos and tailored images. Regardless, the game is the collective result of a set of people’s creative output. As emphasize in the first chapter, those people’s identities do not melt away just because they’re working in digital environments. If the body of the gamer can make itself implicitly known through art, so can the bodies of the developers.

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