Biography
Evan Torner (PhD UMass Amherst) is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where he directs the Undergraduate Program in German Studies as well as the UC Game Lab. His research publications are primarily on the topics of East German cinema, science fiction, critical race studies, and role-playing games.

Tabletop Role-Playing Games and Mike Pondsmith’s Road to Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)

My talk here is about Cyberpunk 2020, and is part of a larger project of game genealogy, in the hope that we might be able to further situate digital games in terms of their analog predecessors and contemporaries.

To those of us interested in genre analysis –– acknowledging that all genres are always hybrids –– I want to remind us all that the cyberpunk sub-genre’s predecessors and contemporaries emerge from unexpected sources beyond simply William Gibson and other literary figures. Finally, biography, identity, and ideology should not be excluded in our discussion of game mechanics and cyberpunk culture. It is with these premises that I’ll now proceed to discuss one of the most influential figures in modern cyberpunk media, Michael Alyn “Maximum Mike” Pondsmith.

Our year of 2020 is of crucial importance in cyberpunk media, for it is when Pondsmith’s famous tabletop role-playing game (TRPG), Cyberpunk 2020 (1990) is set. TRPGs involve shared narration of an unfolding story among several players, who roll dice according to rules governed by game books and a game referee to determine uncertain outcomes. In this “dark future” first imagined over 30 years ago, players take on the role of characters, so-called “edgerunners” who are “survivors in a tough, grim world, faced with life and death choices. … [They] are the heroes of a bad situation, working to make it better (or at least survivable) whenever they can. … [The] quintessential Cyberpunk character is a rebel with a cause.” (Pondsmith, et al. 3)

Our arrival in this canonical cyberpunk year has also been accompanied with the ever-delayed release of the hotly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) videogame, designed by Polish game studio CD Projekt Red, which is known worldwide for the Witcher series. Unlike many videogames licensed from tabletop RPGs, Pondsmith has been intimately involved with this game’s creation from its announcement in 2012. This has thrust Pondsmith into the worldwide gaming spotlight a second time. The first time was when the original Cyberpunk (1988) and Cyberpunk 2020 (1990) were worldwide hits, immediately optioned for films and videogames already in the early 1990s. Cyberpunk and copycat lines such as FASA’s Shadowrun (1989) or Steve Jackson Games’ GURPS Cyberpunk (1990) quickly drowned out spacefaring sci-fi TRPGs as subjects of interest. Pondsmith’s company R. Talsorian Games became a celebrated 1990s success story, delivering him both an Origins award and the presidency of the Game Manufacturer’s Association (GAMA). Cyberpunk 2077 signals the triumphant return of R. Talsorian’s meticulously assembled dark future world to be enjoyed by millions of digital gamers during a time when video games have enjoyed more visibility than ever.

It is not an overstatement to say that Cyberpunk 2020 mechanically and aesthetically framed not only its direct game adaptation, but almost all subsequent game adaptations of the cyberpunk subgenre, including the Shadowrun and Deus Ex franchises. Lesser known, however, is the highly specific genealogy of Cyberpunk 2020 outside of its obvious filmic and literary foundations. Pondsmith has given much credit for his original game-mechanical ideas to Marc Miller and his space-faring hard sci-fi TRPG Traveller (1977), with the Cyberpunk Interlock™ system owing much to iterations of Pondsmith’s early anime mecha fighting TRPG Mekton (1984). Just as cyberpunk emerged from a faction in New Wave sci-fi, so too did the breadth of cyberpunk game patterns emerge from a curious confluence of space exploration and mecha combat, coupled with Pondsmith’s own background as a Black American steeped in child psychology, the US military, and the American West Coast tech sector. So here I’m arguing that Cyberpunk 2020 comes from a marriage between hard sci-fi and anime fandom –– not Dungeons and Dragons (1974) –– and that Pondsmith’s biography continues to ripple through some of the major components of the game: a meticulous focus on weapons, an open-ness to cultural diversity and intermixing, the importance of lifepaths, and a conscious revision of the way the Internet operates as our own present-day tech has evolved. In other words, it’s not so easy to separate this influential game from its creator.

A brief summary of Pondsmith’s biography is helpful. He was born to a military family –– his dad a US Air Force officer, his mom a psychologist –– and moved around the world until he settled in Berkeley, California. He describes the outfit of his younger years as “mirrorshades, a ratty army jacket, motorcycle boots and carried a six-inch knife” (Purchese 2017). He received degrees in graphic design and behavioral psychology from UC Davis, aspired to become a child psychologist, but wound up instead working for a packaging company California Pacific, which manufactured boxes for the then-unknown Ultima (1980) series of games by Richard Garriott. His work in typesetting combined with his interest in game design when he made a hack of Marc Miller’s sci-fi game Traveller called Imperial Star in 1982. What followed was his take on Mobile Suit Gundam (1979-1980) called Mekton, the founding of R. Talsorian as the first Black-owned TRPG company with $500 from his mother, then a comedy game Teenagers from Outer Space (1987) before landing a hit with Cyberpunk, which struck a nerve among fans of William Gibson, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), and Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades (1986) anthology. Tensions with the fans over increasing Japanese anime influences on Cyberpunk in the mid-1990s meant that the studio would develop alternative product lines such as Dream Park (1992), the youth rebellion game CyberGeneration (1993), the breakthrough steampunk TRPG Castle Falkenstein (1994) and cyberpunk anime classic Bubblegum Crisis (1996). By the late 1990s, however, the bottom had fallen out of the TRPG industry, and Pondsmith put his company on ice and worked for Microsoft in Washington, where he developed video games for the early XBox console in the early 2000s. He then put out a new edition of Cyberpunk in 2005 that was panned by fans and critics alike, gave up a second time, taught game design at DigiPen in Redmond, Washington, and then Kickstarted Mekton Zero in the early 2010s before Cyberpunk 2077 became a widespread sensation and led to media attention, which highlighted Pondsmith as an innovative world builder and games guru.

It is curious that most of us who grew up with R. Talsorian’s attractive game lines didn’t know Pondsmith was Black. Game publishers were admittedly fairly anonymous unless one regularly attended conventions, and Pondsmith’s social background was simply not mentioned in early press coverage of R. Talsorian’s releases. Does, then, the highly influential Cyberpunk TRPG franchise fall under Afrofuturism, as outlined by Isiah Lavender III and Graham J. Murphy (2020) in the Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture? Their vision of Afrofuturism involves peoples of African descent portrayed as inheriting and creating technological progress and social liberation, with examples such as Samuel R. Delaney (Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand, 1984), Nnedi Okorafor (The Book of Phoenix, 2015), and Walter Mosley (Futureland, 2001). Cyberpunk as a white science-fiction genre has us default to considering Cyberpunk TRPGs to be white, too, and Pondsmith’s team at R. Talsorian is admittedly very much so. But for its time, the R. Talsorian team also indulged in a few flourishes of Black American culture. For example, the Cyberpunk 2020 word for close friend or family member, “chombatta” is described as “Neo-Afro American slang for friend, family member (Pondsmith, et al. 34).

Each character also has an “Ethnic Origin” as “the Cyberpunk world is multi-cultural and multinational. Where you come from determines your native language, customs and allegiances.” (ibid.) The 10 possible ethnicities subdivide Anglo-American from European from Central Europan/Soviet, and makes conscious distinctions between African and Black American origins, between Pacific Islander, Japanese/Korean, and Chinese/Southeast Asian origins. Cyberpunk 3.0 (2005) features Pondsmith’s mugshot, as well as predominantly non-white action figure images, to convey that its dystopian vision is at least not of a white-dominated future. As the first-ever Black-owned TRPG company, R. Talsorian is both attentive to matters of race and ethnicity without being overtly preoccupied with them. Cyberpunk 2077 reduces race/ethnicity to “skin tone,” which is perhaps a AAA compromise from that position.

In fact, both Pondsmith’s work and Cyberpunk 2077 have been subjected to withering critiques of their social forms of representation. Attebery and Pearson (2018) note that Cyberpunk 2020 served as the origin point of the “psychic ‘budget’ to limit cybernetic augmentation as a game mechanical balance on player power.” (72) Effectively, the more cyberware you add to your character in Cyberpunk 2020, the more the character loses their “Empathy” stat and becomes increasingly anti-social. This both offers a specific vision of what it means to be human –– and what one sacrifices in the dark future to remain fashionable and deadly –– as well as an ableist stereotype of those with prosthetic limbs or organs somehow being “less” human. The Cyberpunk 2020 unabashedly indulges in the rhetoric of “tribes” to describe rolling biker gangs, and one edition of Cyberpunk 2020 contains an offensive “Cultural Similarity Table,” which Kazumi Chin (2020) posted for an open-season Twitter bashing earlier this year as Aboriginal and Japanese cultures are branded as “alien” vs. Australian (distinct from Aboriginal!) and American, which are “similar” (27). Moreover, the representation of trans* individuals in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, supposedly a space of limitless body modification, still boils trans* individuals down to their genitals and male/female voices, which will then invite constant misgendering from the entire cast of NPCs as one plays. But the conversation that I think is particularly pertinent to Pondsmith’s long-tail influence on the genre is the question of firearms; guns are what make the Cyberpunk TRPG tick.

“Cyberpunk weapons are large, black, lethal, dangerous things that look distinctly unfriendly.” Mike Pondsmith noted in a recent interview about how he desk-rejected earlier cartoon-ish raygun designs by CD Projekt Red “… They look like ‘I’m here to kill you now.’” (“Cyberpunk creator…”) He emphasizes later that a “core element” of the Cyberpunk universe is that the weapons are “realistic,” nodding with approval at a wall of real guns used for modeling at CD Projekt Red. We can recall that Blade Runner (1982), Pondsmith’s primary visual inspiration for the TRPG, had exactly two types of gun. Cyberpunk 2020, by contrast, devotes 7 pages to different varieties of weaponry, with Derek Quintanar’s quintessential Cyberpunk weapons guide Blackhand’s Street Weapons 2020(1995) containing “over 250 weapons compiled in one volume *plus* one new gun.” Of course, Pondsmith may have been simply participating in a larger cultural moment in gun fetishization: R. Talsorian’s TRPG competitors TSR and Palladium Games devoted similar amounts of space to weapons tables and weapon-rack-style imagery. Nevertheless, Pondsmith’s military background and overall closeness with law enforcement officers (2020) is distinct from, say, William Gibson’s draft-dodging and Greg Egan’s outback pacifism. Guns are at the core of Cyberpunk 2077, I think, because they are fundamentally important to Pondsmith, his team, and the overall fandom, rooted in American exceptionalism and gun culture. West Coast gang violence of the 1980s mixes together with militaristic fantasy here.

Although I’m certain the audience of this talk is aware of this, cyberpunk as a sub-genre came much more from a core of science fiction authors interested in space and space travel than gritty urban fiction. This is also the case for Pondsmith, who took heavy inspiration not only from Blade Runner but in particular from Marc Miller’s space opera TRPG Traveller (1977). Pondsmith remarks that Traveller was “the first true science fiction RPG in a world of D&D wannabes and fantasy flavors-of-the-month” (Lowder 331). From a game mechanics perspective, Cyberpunk 2020 is built on the bones of Traveller, not Dungeons & Dragons. As in Cyberpunk, players in Traveller do not start with a novice character, but someone with a lifetime of experiences that inform their abilities and who they are. The Lifepath character creation mechanic featured in Cyberpunk 2077 dates back to 1977 and Miller attempting some semblance of Asimovian social realism within a sci-fi setting. Pondsmith’s extreme attention to detail for Internet hacking, or “netrunning,” has also had substantial reach, with dungeon-like charts of enemy mainframes and arsenals of programs that would later inspire the Netrunner card game. This sort of mini-game within a TRPG is in direct dialogue with, say, Miller’s similar attention to starship building: “Traveller was also unique in its day as the first RPG that really gave the game master tools. The rules encourage game masters to get in there and get their mental hands dirty — the tools for making ships, planets, animals, and aliens are all laid out in lucid, precise text, just begging to be used. Need a spaceship? [The game] shows you how to build the ship you want, customized and ready to be improved.”

What we as game designers now know as choice design, randomization tables, and customizability, Miller had framed as a means of giving players “realistic” moves within his brand-new sci-fi universe. Pondsmith’s initial published games from the early 1980s, Imperial Star and Mekton, appear much more obsessed with these particular sub-systems than the act of character embodiment and role-play. Yet Mektonillustrates another quintessential element of Pondsmith’s oeuvre, and that is that stylish (in this case, mecha) design triumphs alongside realism. Attebery and Pearson (2018) note the importance of style and fashion within not only the imagery but also the very mechanics and rules text of Cyberpunk 2020. Here, the surface-level attractiveness of manga such as Mobile Suit Gundam cannot be underrated as an influence. Pondsmith’s realism is the law of the land, until he determines that something would simply look cool, which in that case then it is brought into being on the basis of style over substance.

In summary, I’d like to portray Pondsmith as an innovative transmedia world creator, adept at the “media mix” (Steinberg 2012) required to further promote his games work. It should come as no surprise that he has now risen to prominence with Cyberpunk 2077, albeit accompanied by many other tabletop RPG designers who became videogame superstars: Warren Spector, Greg Costikyan, Richard Garriott. We find the roots of cyberpunk gaming in what Jon Peterson (forthcoming) calls “the two cultures” of sci-fi/fantasy fandom and wargaming, where D&D came from, but ultimately it was the Mobile Suit Gundam manga and Traveller that would spur Pondsmith to create role-playing games, not D&D. His background in child psychology and graphic design had him side with the player in approaching his cyberpunk texts. For many of my generation, Pondsmith’s graphic design, filmographies, biographies, lifepath narrative design, roles, equipment, and continuous worldbuilding in the Cyberpunk 2020 universe over the past 3 decades were the primary entry point into the genre. Moreover, Pondsmith’s experience with the military and the police all helped him conceive of a future in which every Friday night would feature an urban firefight. The United States in the 1980s was a violent place, and he only saw that violence on the rise in the coming decades.

This makes Pondsmith’s recent 2020 press release for R. Talsorian that focuses on his experiences as a Black American in the time of police rioting against protestors in the wake of George Floyd’s extrajudicial murder all the more powerful. He connects his own experiences as a Black American with larger societal issues and his own fictional world: “‘Your’ cops are out of control. They don’t care about who they work for anymore. Like the cops in Cyberpunk, they work for themselves. They have weapons, power and invulnerability that has been granted to them because of the devil’s deal the people in power made with them since the 90’s.” And then he returns to one of the classic modes of science-fiction interpretation: the Cassandra-like caution against dystopia, “If this goes on, then…”

“When I wrote Cyberpunk many years ago,” he recalls, “I meant it as a warning, not an aspiration. Of what happens when Power, Money, and Ruthlessness combine. Of what happens when the America you think you know morphs into a tyrannical state that combines the worst of corporate excess with the worst of authoritarian tendencies. We’re speeding on the way towards that Dark Future right now, and the color of your skin, or the money in your bank account are not going to spare you. It’s time to wake up; to face down the people who want in the end, to enslave all of us.” Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk 2077 remain influential and indelibly in the discourse precisely because Pondsmith’s viewpoint aligns with his own experiences of violence, greed, tech, privatization, and racism. Can his late-stage work help call us all to action against such a “Dark Future?” One can only hope.

Works Cited

  • Appelcline, Shannon (2014). Designers and Dragons: The 80’s. Silver Spring, MD: Evil Hat Productions.
  • Attebery, Stina and Pearson, Josh (2018). “‘Today’s Cyborg is Stylish’ The Humanity Cost of Posthuman Fashion in Cyberpunk 2020.” Cyberpunk and Visual Culture. Eds. Graham J. Murphy and Lars Schmeink. New York: Routledge. 55-79.
  • Chin, Kazumi (2020). “How not to write RPGs lmao.” Twitter. 7 April https://twitter.com/kazumiochin/status/1247624219669610497?s=20
  • Cyberpunk 2077 (2020). Video Game. Warsaw, Poland: CD Projekt Red.
  • “Cyberpunk creator talks clown gangs and making the biggest RPG of 2020 | Cyberpunk 2077 Interview.” (2019) Rock Paper Shotgun. YouTube. 28 August https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2j8cKfGb-M
  • Gygax, Gary and Arneson, Dave (1974). Dungeons and Dragons. Lake Geneva, WI: TSR.
  • Lavender III, Isiah and Murphy, Graham J. (2020) “Afrofuturism.” The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture. Eds. Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink. New York: Routledge. 362-372.
  • Lowder, James, ed. (2007). Hobby Games: The 100 Best. Seattle, WA: Green Ronin.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam (1979-1981). Dir. Yoshiyuki Tomino. Tokyo, Japan: Nippon Sunrise.
  • Miller, Marc W. (1977) Traveller. Normal, IL: GDW.
  • Peterson, Jon. (forthcoming). The Elusive Shift: How Role-Playing Games Forged Their Identity, in Theory and Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Pondsmith, Mike (2020) “Mike Pondsmith: Cops and Racists.” R. Talsorian Games. Blog. 12 June. https://rtalsoriangames.com/2020/06/12/mike-pondsmith-cops-and-racists/
  • –––, et al. (1990) Cyberpunk 2020: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future. Berkeley, CA: R. Talsorian Games.
  • –––. (1984) Mekton. Berkeley, CA: R. Talsorian Games.
  • Purchese, Robert (2017) “Making Cyberpunk: when Mike Pondsmith met CD Projekt Red.” Eurogamer. 13 July https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-07-12-making-cyberpunk-when-mike-pondsmith-met-cd-projekt-red
  • Steinberg, Marc (2012). Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Discord Discussion

This discussion has been copied from the Discord server, names have been reduced to first name, discussion threads have been grouped and edited for better readability.

Evan: So a few points to contextualize this space:

  1. I am here on Occupied Shawnee land, where just a few miles away dozens of protestors stand in sweltering heat to advocate for racial justice and freedom from police violence as COVID cases spike here locally. The violence and indifference of the past, present, and future all blur here right now.
  2. This paper is a hastily assembled set of initial thoughts as I write my 2000-word entry on Mike Pondsmith for the 50 Key Figures of Cyberpunk. Pondsmith has been vastly influential on the game-cultural manifestations of the genre, yet he’s rarely mentioned as a Black American creator, one of the chief innovators in the space. But…
  3. This is also personal for me! I got a chance to have Mike referee a table of Cyberpunk 3.0 during its final playtests in 2005. I played a Clown Nomad, and managed to impress Mike by rolling very well on some dramatic biker moves. My entire foray into the cyberpunk universe was facilitated for me as a kid NOT by literature or film, but by Pondsmith’s TRPG books.

Carmen: Bragging rights, Evan!!!

Evan: I don’t think I’ll ever forget that RPG session — it’s more vivid for me (due to the parasocial factors) than any movie!
So this sudden celebrity for him regarding Cyberpunk 2077 is as surreal for me as when George RR Martin made it big over a decade after he started GoT. Yay geeks!
Pen-and-paper RPGs — Just like cyberpunk, they keep getting declared “dead” or “out-of-style” and nevertheless surge back into relevance…..

Evan: *taps mic* *adjusts mirrorshades*
Strange but relevant plug: Misspent Youth, an excellent tabletop RPG about “teenage rebellion in a fucked up future” is going out of print and you can get yourself a copy quite cheaply right now.

Carmen: you’re evil. i don’t need another tabletop RPG. Or do I? Oh I do. Dammit!!!

Adam: (You definitely do need more)
Says the person waiting on one arriving in the post as he types

Anna: I only played my first RPG a couple of weeks ago but really got a taste for it – thanks for the tip!

Adam: If I might be nosy, what RPG did you get to play?

Anna: I was asked to play a new one called After the Maestro where you play different parts of the body. It was created by an artist, Tom Kemp, and our gameplay and post-match analysis are going to be available online as part of an online exhibition for Leicester Gallery. Nothing like going big with your first experience of an RPG!

Adam: Oh my, yeah. Definitely going big there. I’ll look forward to seeing your analysis of that, the ability to represent distributed constructs is a direction for RPGs I hadn’t actually considered

Alexander: it’s not quite the same, but it makes me think of the twine game Cyberqueen as a way of representing the AI or distributed parts of the body

Adam: Ooooh. Saving that link for later

Esko: Ooooohhh seconding this and reccing to everyone!

Evan: I can use this forum to just plug the vast array of cyberpunk TRPGs that Pondsmith didn’t make, but did influence… Wanna list?

Carmen: I would be interested! But I think I’m going to burn my credit card just before you post it

Adam: I’m always interested in TRPGs.

Evan Torner: Can also add some larps on here, but most aren’t purchasable….

Evan:

  1. Balikbayan — Jamila Nedjadi’s Filipino magical-realist cyberpunk RPG. Beautifully written and introduces Filipino folklore as a primary means of resolving the narrative
  2. The Sprawl — Our colleague Hamish Cameron’s cyberpunk RPG, focused on intensive, mission-based drama like an HBO show
  3. The Veil, a Canadian RPG dedicated to worldbuilding and character exploration
  4. Remember Tomorrow, Scottish designer Gregor Hutton’s scene-based story game
  5. Always/Never/Now by Will Hindmarch is basically an awesome action movie, pre-loaded and ready to go

Oh shout out to The Sprawl, I’ve been in a long-running game of that for…about 3 years at least and I have a lot of affection for it
Even if we’re maybe not leaning into the missions as much. Potentially taking more of a Veil approach, although I only passingly know that one

Alexander: Thank you for these recs!! Wish I had more time & people to play more RPG’s with.

Carmen: yeah! Looking forward to being able to meet with my group again

Evan: (Will save more TRPG talk until tomorrow)

Graham: I have totally missed the boat on this corner of the cyberpunk universe (which explains why I don’t do the editing chores on the contributions in these areas).

Lars: well only one of us needs the expertise, and I know shit about comics

Josh: excellent presentation! I do take a bit of an exception to characterizing Stina and my article on CP2020 as “withering critique.” We love the game, and thought that the empathy cost mechanic was one of the most interesting parts of the system Pondsmith created.
the only part we really get down on is the Parente art that was added to the 2nd printing of 2020.
those pinup-style illustrations for the roles …

Stina: Yes, to elaborate, tying an “empathy cost” to body modding and prosthesis is one of the most interesting parts of the game, precisely because it exposes the ableism which often structures cyberpunk worlds (including our own). The framing of empathy cost is really closely connected to the game’s description of policing and police violence. It’s not necessarily a problem to lose empathy points per se (and lots of players clearly explore those options), but doing so opens up risks re: structural state violence. It’s more a nod to the precarity of cyberpunk worlds than it is a critique of disability prosthetics. Any accommodation for disability within a cyberpunk world would necessarily be commoditized and policed,and Pondsmith is canny at identifying that as a problem for players to engage with

Evan: The Empathy mechanic is a long-term design legacy too — I think the RPG design community detests it more than we do, as scholars

Stina: ha, true. Especially the parts of the rpg community who want to min-max their way to “winning” a trpg… as if that’s a thing
I have a lot of affection for my low empathy cyberpunk 2020 character I made for our playtest of the game–“Becky Barnes” befriended robots and toasters and had to skirt the law at all opportunities

Josh: yes. Lots of often contradictory fan impulses converge around these kinds of mechanics. Munchkins, transhumanists into morphological freedom, and budding trans advocates all take issue with the HC system these days for very different reasons
Evan, I did find your comments on Pondsmith’s personal connections to gun culture interesting. I don’t know if the publishing priorities of CP2020 were really that different than other games’ emphasis on pushing out splatbooks full of guns n’ gear, but his position as a Black man modeling familiarity with arms does code it differently.

Evan: I know quite a number of black American men like Mike — fierce leftists and absolutely knowledgeable about and capable with firearms.

Josh: If you are going to pursue that connection, you might look into Lawrence R. Sims, the creator of the Battlelords TRPG.
Another Black TRPG writer/designer with a profound love of firepower

Evan: Yes I know Battlelords! But didn’t know the creator was a Black American man

Josh: It comes up occasionally in the text

Evan: ORUN now seems like a straight-up descendent of that title
Admittedly, Battlelords is flashing me back to 1992-93

Josh: One of my friends brought a copy of Battlelords back from Gencon in…. 1990 or 1991. I still think of it fondly but haven’t played it since the early 90s
We used the system to run our Rifts game for a while. There was just as much crunch, but the crunch actually made sense…

Evan: (I own 33 RIFTS books, which means I’m the first in line to dunk on that incoherent mess….)
Y’all probably have read my fellow game designer Fraser Simon’s piece on Humanity and CP2020, but I’ll post it for the wider audience.

Josh: yeah! I was exciting to see that.
I look forward to seeing other people engage with your talk tomorrow!

Michael: I backed his Retropunk Kickstarter.

Katherine: Hi Evan! I really got a lot out of your presentation. Thank you for writing it! I will be consulting it in the future for sure.

Evan: Thanks! Let me know if you have any ways I can make it more helpful

Lars: Hi Evan, can you comment a little on the Cyperpunk 2077-fandom myopia of Mike’s political agenda and his advocacy of Civil Rights? Some where already in the “don’t make it political” rage mode when he announce support for BLM … oblivious to him being African American it seems …

Evan: Lars — Started with the molotov cocktail I see
So… It appears that CDPR fans are not the same as CP2020 fans

Lars: No obviously, but there seems a strong divergence of fandom in CP anyway. I am part of a Facebook group and their posts are problematic for like 80% of the time

Josh: Same people who never paid attention to Rage Against the Machine Lyrics….

Lars: Rage against the Dishwasher+

Evan: We found this weird fandom dogpile happening already in 2012 that then intensified when the updated CP2077 trailer hit in 2018. And CDPR seems exceptionally clueless about social issues until far, far too late each time. Mike got a lot of publicity, but ultimately I think he’s most concerned with steering the pop-culture consumed-by-millions version of his magnum opus into port.

Graham: I’ve come in on the one of the hottest and most humid days after walking my son’s paper route picking up his collections — translation: I’m not in my right mind right now — but I think this comment aligns with the question I have regarding Pondsmith’s whole “cyberpunk was a warning not an aspiration” comment and the logistics of creating a game (of which I know absolutely nothing) that is supposed to be inviting for players to play and explore. Can these two motives be reconciled? Or is Pondsmith just being convenient?

Evan: CP2020 was a way for me, as a kid in a Midwest university town in the 1990s, to feel urbane and connected to broader trends in sci-fi. It was a way of rebelling against one’s parents too! We played badass characters with big guns who –– and here’s Mikes intervention –– had a complicated family backstory, restrictive rules on armoring up, and deep Humanity implications related to installing cyberware. So I think Mike was very cognizant of what he was doing: giving teenage boys a glimpse into not only the cyberpunk genre and its characters, but also how social realities and game balance will push back against their adolescent fantasies. And guns will f___king kill you, choombas.

Josh: Do you think the appropriation of select cyberpunk aesthetics in things like fashwave is relevant to that stream of fan reaction?

Evan: CDPR are whizkids with 3D software, but are absolute shit at community management, which is why Witcher fandom unintentionally trends toxic. And the social critiques leveled against CP2077 are, in my opinion, an outcome of the social-liberatory potentials inherent within cyberpunk (much discussed in this conference) and the reactionary qualities that modern AAA gaming fandom nurses
Mike’s BLM statement is a result of extreme pressures here in the States. Normally Mike doesn’t say hardly anything direct about race!
@Josh — Yes, Modern fascism is good at scavenging and repurposing –– much like TRPG game devs! –– and fashwave is just another subculture experimentation. I mean, if we take Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein remotely seriously with its thesis that “all subculture is mainstream now,” then fashwave — next to fascist furries, fascist CoD players, fascist suburban moms –– is all part of mass subcultural infiltration.

Josh: Its hard to imagine how you might proactively fash-proof cultural products in that environment. Still, as the conference has discsussed, there is a lot of neoliberal, social darwinist subtext in cyberpunk for the fashoes to plunder.

Lars: So basically the great potential and influence of the TRPG is now commodified into a neoliberal hypercapitalist bullshit whitewashed meme factory? Johnny Silverhand-style?

Evan: TRPGs require enough capital for large print outlays (which is why Gary Gygax lost D&D in 1984!) so they have always been more beholden to capital and reactionary impulses than one would hope. The reaction of the industry to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s was a retreat from most of the liberatory and creative potentials of the medium!

Sumeyra: Hi Evan, thank you so much for this great talk! Do you think we are on the way towards a dark mirror universe like a game hyperreality?

Evan: Game mechanics + gamification have been imported into all kinds of contexts. But it’s more a symptom than a cause –– thinking of all the ways that, say, religious logic infiltrated business decisions in 15th Century Europe, Hegelian historical logic infiltrated 19th Century politics, Freudian psychology 20th Century advertising, and so forth. Play can never be fully colonized or captured, whereas games are almost always tamed forms of play, even when transgressive.

Josh: I was interested in the ways that Richard Gariott and Pondsmith crossed paths in your narratives. Were they both just “in the mix” of that early period of game development, or are there more direct parallels in their roles in game design and legacy-making that you plan to draw out?

Evan: Garriott and Pondsmith overlapped in Silicon Valley circles in the 1980s, which were small in comparison to today. Mike never really left the videogame industry, I would say, and I believe that Garriott formed a model of how tabletop worldbuilding could be bridged into videogame design. I think that Mike’s role on CP2077 is very much in the shadow of how Garriott handled Ultima in the later years: as a benevolent guide with the full expressive vision of the world in his head, to help orient modelers and programmers somehow.

Esko: I could ask a bit more on Pondsmith/CP2020 and guns. I somehow think of the John Wick movies as similar, where their fetishization is so over-the-top that it almost (but maybe not quite) becomes a form of critique of gun culture. Could you expand on how one should be reading guns in the game?

Evan: Sure! Futuristic guns are a primary entry point for many fans into cyberpunk. They embody power, agency, and choice — and cyberpunk means that one can physically merge with one’s gun through SmartLink etc., which blurs the line between tool and user. So you’ve got this pretty silly (but painfully real!) fantasy of merging with one’s weapon through tech and mastery, but also (A) the embarrassing realities of gun violence and (B) the sociopathic outcomes of a society awash in guns. It’s very American to use a media product saturated in gun culture (and it was CP2020 that taught me the difference between a 9mm and a .357 bullet back in 1991) to then “critique” gun culture. Lightly.
“Guns will give you power, but isn’t that Not Awesome? Isn’t it? Ah well, enjoy the Friday Night Firefight.”

Josh: R Talsorian did publish one of the most festishistically complete firearms suppliments available

Evan: YES

Carmen: Ok that’s scary

Evan: These are the kinds of products lurking in the background of any game rooted in US cyberpunk culture. Only the past 5 years of indie production has sorta shaken us loose of that.
And ALL modern-ish RPGs of the 1980s and 1990s had big weapons tables with illustrations, so you could really pick the perfect gun for your character (or see you couldn’t afford it and suddenly have a campaign goal to get $$$ and buy the Big Gun)

Josh: I agree that Pondsmith was exceptional at the time for balancing the rush of firepower with those warnings about the grim reality

Evan: He spent a lot of time on military bases and, later, in West Oakland. He had no illusions about what bullets could do to the human body, and outright rejects the “Hit Points” alibi offered by D&D and other wargames.
(Thank you so much everyone! I also want to commend Katherine and Sam for an excellent parallel game presentation. Politics of simulation and reality infuse cyberpunk-in-game discussions.)

Katherine: Thank you for signal boosting, Evan! Sam and I were chatting on discord about how helpful we found your paper. We also love that Pondsmith studied at UC Davis

Show more
Show less