Cyberpunk 2077 receives too much grief for its rejection of the mainstream state of affairs, making it quite punk. IMHO.
The crux of the story, the full arc and conclusion of your character, is that you are a nobody who seeks to become an influencer, comes to believe that you have a big role to play in world events, but ultimately even your greatest possible achievements amount to being either inconsequential or the result of manipulations of ever more powerful forces. You start a nobody, and you die a nobody. The game's NPCs spend a fair amount of time reflecting on valuing the relationships of the present and honoring the memory of those lost; even throughout the side quests. (One of my favourites involving a misunderstanding arising from seeking to be accepted and pursuing plastic surgery, only to discover that the partner loves who they are and not what they look like).
And yes, there are the pervasive themes of the commodification of the human body, the objectification of not only the physical but the emotional experience as well. Human limbs are bought and sold, whole body replacements are common, memories are recorded and shared, a recording of the end of life is itself a hot commodity.
The game is thick with themes that condemn our indifferent, plastic and superficial culture.
Sorry to gatekeep but corporate produced anything cannot be punk. At most, they can serve as a rent seeker for passing along punk to the masses but that's not even what Cyberpunk 2077 is. This is 100% corporate, focus grouped, committee approved, beige trying too hard to be punk. Which is fine if taken for what it really is but what it really is, which isn't punk.
Calling something corporate is far too vague for any sort of meaningful qualification. Neuromancer was published by Ace a subsidiary of Penguin - thus making it the product of the corporate machine.
I will whole hardily agree that corporations manage to water down a lot of interesting things to drive mass market appeal but building something interesting within a corporation doesn't negate its message. We live in a world where 90%[1] of genuine political discussion happens hosted by either Google, Facebook or Reddit - those are our forums for discussion in the modern world.
I'd also just briefly disagree with litmus testing and gatekeeping as generally useful concepts - in almost all the cases they're applied they're used to try and reduce a complex spectrum discussion into a binary choice (aka capital punishment, weed legalization, abortion legality) and they add nothing of value - merely providing an easier tool to help clump a wide discussion into the theming of Us vs. Them.
1. I have no facts for this but I think it's a reasonable ballpark.
Try to gatekeep all you want; but punks failed to defend their anti-corporate credibility and not only tolerated, but embraced corporate appropriation of their culture. They rode out punk's credibility while riding on boards from Zumies, wearing Hot Topic, and listening to Sum 41 .
CDPR is about as authentic as you'll find in high-budget video game development; and as I enjoy high-fidelity entertainment, as well as Pondsmith's take on Cyberpunk, I quite enjoyed CP2077.
It's tragic that you refer (erroneously) to "punks" so firmly in the past tense, while awarding credibility to a company best known for its exploitative overtime practices. How's the view from Arasaka Tower?
It's best known for its award-winning games and its digital distribution network.
The alleged egregious overtime was acknowledged as a voluntary undertaking by several team members, and it seems as though the journalists didn't bother to investigate into the allegations they received from a couple of complainers and opted to report them at face value. The subsequent response from the company affirmed my understanding, where they publicly apologized for bugs, reported to shareholders about their efforts to correct internal development processes, and so forth.
As though working an extra 8h a week during the final months before a hard deadline is either unheard of or intolerable. There was no exodus of talent from CDPR.
Yes. When a movement whose entire thesis is "fuck the establishment" gets co-opted by the establishment, it becomes invalid as a movement, a hollow and pathetic shell of itself. Punk is anti-society, anti-religion, anti-government, anti-authority, anti-conformity, anti everything, even anti-music to a degree. Its relevance died as soon as the last punk lived past 30 and it became old people music. Just another style to buy at Hot Topic.
Then there is no punk now. Every inch of life within society has been co-opted by moneymen.
You, by living in society, are not punk. The novels you label as punk are not punk because they are made for profit, advertised to appease and sedate a sense of counterculture, and bought with money made from corporate work.
Chan manifestos are the only thing that might qualify.
The crux of the story, the full arc and conclusion of your character, is that you are a nobody who seeks to become an influencer, comes to believe that you have a big role to play in world events, but ultimately even your greatest possible achievements amount to being either inconsequential or the result of manipulations of ever more powerful forces. You start a nobody, and you die a nobody. The game's NPCs spend a fair amount of time reflecting on valuing the relationships of the present and honoring the memory of those lost; even throughout the side quests. (One of my favourites involving a misunderstanding arising from seeking to be accepted and pursuing plastic surgery, only to discover that the partner loves who they are and not what they look like).
And yes, there are the pervasive themes of the commodification of the human body, the objectification of not only the physical but the emotional experience as well. Human limbs are bought and sold, whole body replacements are common, memories are recorded and shared, a recording of the end of life is itself a hot commodity.
The game is thick with themes that condemn our indifferent, plastic and superficial culture.