my problems with CP2077 (and lots of RPGs)
When Cyberpunk 2077 was announced, I was really excited. The teaser for it looked exactly like the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG that I’d like so much when I was a kid. When it came out, I tried it and it was a mess. Later, I heard they worked out lots of the problems, and I went back and I’ve been playing it. It still looks just about perfect, and gets lots of things right. It feels like a really good adaptation of Cyberpunk 2020. There are a lot of bugs and interface issues, still, but I don’t want to write about those, because it’s boring.
My problem is that the world of 2077 seems to have changed zero since 2013. From 1990 to 2013, in twenty three years: the USA collapses, space colonization (of the moon and Mars) begins in earnest, cybernetic prosthesis and mind uploading become practical, European nations collapse and reform, and powerful artificial general intelligence is developed. It’s an incredible amount of change to the world for twenty three years. Think back to 2001. How much has the world changed? Some, for sure, but really nothing like Cyberpunk proposes. That’s okay, because Cyberpunk is a game that proposes a world where everything is in a state of constant upheaval. But sixty five years later, the world hasn’t changed any further.
My problem is that CP2077 keeps reminding me of something that often bugged me about RPGs in the ’90s. Back then, I had a mailing list with some friends who were into RPGs. It was called “RPG Theory”, and that’s what we talked about. Here’s a (lightly edited) section of a post I made in August 2000, with the subject “Metaplot, Setting, Freedom, and Flavor”:
A role-playing game (RPG) is an interactive story-game created by a Game Designer, revolving mostly (although not exclusively) around the actions of Player Characters (PCs) largely told and entirely adjudicated by the Game Master (GM).
The game can be roughly defined by its theme, setting, and rules.
The game’s theme is composed of its mood, tone, and possibly an overall moral or message. The necessity of a particular mood to a game is hard to define. While slight variation is clearly possible (e.g. Vampire games centered chiefly around Humanitas or Jyhad), it may be that vast changes are not. (A Vampire game centered around fighting robots from Mars, or in the style of Paranoia.) I leave this question to the philosophers.
The games’s setting is the world in which the game takes place. This world exists in equilibrium or stasis. It is clearly not frozen in one moment, but it is frozen in one period. One can look at Casablanca and see a setting that is active, but also frozen. From the beginning to the end of the description (that is, the movie itself), the setting does not change. Only the characters change and take action.
Setting is the perogative of the Game Designer. They write the game’s chief book or books, which contain as basic description of rules and setting.
The perogative of the Player Character, chiefly and above all else, is action. Actions are easy to understand. When a PC speaks to another PC, shoots an NPC, or detonates a nucelar device, these are actions. They are undertaken by the PC as in-character (IC) tasks, generally with the implicit permission of the Game Master, which can use IC means to stop them, but will rarely rule out-of-hand that an attempt is impossible.
The perogative of the Game Master, chiefly and above all else, is motion. Motion is action taken by the setting. While the setting, as initially described, is static, during the course of the game it acts. This motion can be subtle: gangs working for the city’s mayor begin to muscle in on the PCs’ operation, which had in the Prelude (pre-game ‘time’) existed in equilibrium. It can also be drastic: all the women in America begin to grow wings. Through motion, the GM punctuates the equilibrium of the setting, communicates the theme, and forces the PCs to take action.
That is a campaign. (Or Chronicle, or Session, whatever.)
Metaplot is the superimposition of the Game Designer’s campaign onto the GM’s campaign. (The Game Designer, in his off time, presumably is able to act also as a GM.) The Game Designer’s motion must be accounted for by the Game Master, and this reduces his ability to communicate theme and act effectively. Or, at least, this is how many GMs perceive the problem. We could call the metaplot “metamotion.” (It is run by the Designer as ‘metaGM’ and stars ‘metacharacters.’)
The Golden Rule, “the GM can do whatever they want”, gives GMs the option to ignore any part of the Game Designer’s ideas. Generally this applies to setting, but it can be extended to rules, theme, and (of course) metaplot.
On the other hand, the Game Designer knows that GMs are unlikely to abandon “canon” rules. So, the Game Designer insidiously (or blithely) incorporates new metaplot into new rules, making it impossible for one to exist without the other. Or, only slightly less insidiously, they release books of metaplot which also contain useful or required information that can be discounted, which merely means that the GM will pay for material that they do want, as well as material that they do not.
The Cyberpunk RPG had its own metaplot. Books came out once in a while telling you what was new in the world. Night City is seized by the Metal Wars. Elziabeth Kress becomes President of the United States. The Fourth Corporate Wars happen. These books were generally of the “less insidious” type above: the book would tell you about how Arasaka and Militech were warring over an African land grab, and also introduce new weapons and cyberware being used there. You could use that story as a basis for your game, or you could ignore it and give the players access to the cool new tech just for fun.
Of course, as the years go by, more and more of this metaplot builds up. New books are released that build on the story of the last ten books. It’s harder and harder to carve out your game’s Night City from the currently canonical one. Cyberpunk was hardly the worst offender (if you consider this an offense) in this area. I wrote my post about White Wolf’s World of Darkness, which started off by describing the game world as a moment in time, and ended up releasing an enormous list of books detailing monumental in-game events that crowded out the Game Master’s own ideas.
Anyway, Cyberpunk 2077 feels enormously encumbered by this problem. Johnny Silverhand has been part of the Cyberpunk story since the original Cyberpunk RPG (set in 2013). His activities help define the setting, not just in the setting’s past, but in its present and future. His actions are so significant as to constrain the motion of the game.
This just becomes bizarre when we’re not thinking about the seven years from CP 2013 to CP 2020, but the 57 years from CP 2020 to CP 2077. Johnny blows up Arasaka tower in 2022, and then vanishes for fifty years. When he shows up again, nothing has changed. The world of 2077 is, I would say, literally indistinguishable from that of 2022. It’s not because Johnny isn’t there to do stuff, but because it’s not an option to really decontextualize Johnny by having the setting change out from under him.
Johnny complains about some fan of his from fifty years ago who’s living in the past, but actually nothing has changed since then. Johnny isn’t a creature of the past, he’s just as relevant in 2077 as he was in 2022. This world of constant upheaval and instability has become incredibly reliable. In sixty years, nothing really changed. The protagonist can’t really change anything, either. They’re just there to experience the show.
I wish the game had been set in 2022. They could’ve just let us play as Johnny Silverhand, carrying out the raid on Arasaka. But this would’ve given us agency over a character whose actions belong to the game designer, or maybe one of their friends in the canonical campaign of the game. They couldn’t let us have that agency, so they gave us the lesser agency of V, who lets us see that Johnny’s actions had no consequence, and neither will ours.
All of this is why I basically always throw away the setting that comes with an RPG. Anything that limits my ability to create a dynamic world of my own is antithetical to my idea of being a game master. The way that CP 2077 reflects a world defined by the game designer’s favorite NPCs and their millieu just makes me sad.