Play Punk

One of the things I've wanted to try for a while is to work on a short series of articles that talks about different ways to play games. The Play* series (for lack of a better name) is basically a super-short look at genres, styles, or methods that encapsulates my findings when I've been playing and designing games. It's shorter than my usual posts, but I'm hoping to make it more pointed and vivid.

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One of the games that I've been looking forward to is the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, which promises to be an exciting adventure to say the least.

I started my experiences with the roleplaying hobby largely with Shadowrun, and that cyberpunk essence, and punk essence, is something that often draws me to the games that I've been playing more as I've developed my tastes and preferences: a game like Degenesis, or even something like Warhammer 40,000 through the right lens can take on the elements of punk (Necromunda, anyone?).

Cyberpunk 2077 trailer

But what does it mean to play punk? William Gibson, one of the patriarchs of cyberpunk, came out against Cyberpunk 2077's cyberpunk credentials, saying that it looks more like 80's retrofuturism instead of true cyberpunk, and there are a few points to be had there.

Cyberpunk 2077 looks like it's going to be colorful and high-octane. It certainly does look more like a futuristic Grand Theft Auto than something that would be more traditionally associated with cyberpunk, like the Deus Ex series, but there's a core part of the "punk" style that I think we can see in the narrator's voice-over.

The narrator describes Night City as a city of dreams, and that is what fits the core of the punk manifesto.

Playing punk isn't about the victory, it's about the struggle. The punk movement was never really about reaching a certain end goal, because it was about avoiding complacency, sacrificing comfort for the sake of improving the future.
This anti-authoritarianism and the direct confrontation of power comes in the form of a willingness to accept loss, danger, and iconoclasm.

Playing in a *punk setting involves moving away from comfort and tradition. If we use examples like Rowan, Rook, and Decard's excellent Spire (affiliate link), we can see examples of worlds where the underlying core theme is resistance: the desire of freedom from arbitrary authority.

Games are a pathway to meaning, as is any form of storytelling. Something like Wolfenstein, for instance, fits into the punk ethos (especially in its recent modern reboot) by showing us an act of resisting authority and pushing the boundaries of what is socially normative; in fact, the most recent installment of Wolfenstein centered on aspects of the punk and other counter-culture movements in an alternate past.

And I think that there's an important, incredible value to this. There is a temptation among some to use games as escapism, or as heavy-hitting moral hammers trying to drive a particular point home. However, if we look at the trappings of the punk genres, we can see a picture that is willing to embrace the good with the bad: it doesn't paint illusory images of white-knight heroes who can do no wrong going to do battle with dreadful foes representing incarnate evil.

Instead, it forces us to confront our realities and our lifestyles. Playing punk isn't about living below the poverty level in cities where it never stops raining. Playing punk means looking at things from different perspectives; identifying where the power in our lives is, and deciding whether or not it is right for it to be there.