Dismembered Androids, Turing Catastrophes, and Corporate Machines
Don Everhart, Nate Schmidt, Christian Haines
“Indie cyberpunk” should sound a bit redundant. In the media landscape of 2020, however, cyberpunk might be most closely identified with large studio productions (you know who we’re talking about). That’s not exactly… punk rock. Or maybe it is, if you’re Malcolm McLaren. Anyway, this is the Gamers with Glasses spotlight on some independently made and produced cyberpunk games from the last few years. We expect to run a few of these pieces, so stay tuned, as we see what some game designers are doing with a fusion of DIY, the mass distribution of game-making tools, and a lot of punk attitude.
LOCALHOST (Aether Interactive, 2017)
LOCALHOST is a thematically dense game in a small package. While its designers accomplish that density partly through recognizable shorthand, in the shape of ethical dilemmas that accompany the Turing test, it’s an impressive density nonetheless. The player takes the role of a low-level technician who receives instructions from their boss via text messages. Their job is to erase a few hard drives so that those drives can be reused. While the corporate line is that technicians shouldn’t speak to whatever is on a drive, the player has no choice but to do so. The drives are locked by whatever they contain, making them impossible to wipe without permission. So the player character has to place each drive into the dismembered android body that’s at hand in order to interface with whatever they hold. The trouble, of course, is that speaking with whatever those drives contain might persuade you to preserve that drive at the cost of your job.
The boss is distant, even if they control whether or not the player-character keeps their job. Immediately in front of the player are four personalities, which variously claim relationships to humanity or to the personality who previously inhabited the android body. It’s possible to play as a bit of a sleuth, trying to figure out who’s telling the truth. Or the player can role-play as an altruist, trying to do what they can to preserve the personalities on each drive. The player can also be a ruthless cog in the corporate machine, gaining the trust of the drives, having them release their protections, and deleting them. It’s a lot of choice and role-playing to squeeze into a small package. In the course of a twenty minute playthrough (or a few such playthroughs), Aether Interactive portrays a range of thoughts on embodiment, consciousness, alienated labor, and exploitation. All of those themes are endemic to cyberpunk, but it's rare that they are presented with this much focus.
Condor (Connor Sherlock, 2014)
Playing some indie games can feel like picking up a demo recording or surfing Soundcloud. In the case of Condor, it’s like finding a synth-heavy demo recorded in a bedroom, consisting of a single, spaced out, hour-long set of droning loops. That actually describes its soundtrack fairly well. And like its soundtrack’s loops, which occasionally add another track of sound over those drones, there’s some minimal sense of forward momentum in the game. It’s all built on familiar gameplay architectures and aesthetics - the player can run along, jump up to, and hover between the ledges of towering, rectangular skyscrapers and skinny pipes. The frame, as described outside the game and on Condor’s store page, sets up the story as a hacker run that requires players to get to a series of locations. In gameplay, this manifests as a challenge to move from point A to point B, with some floaty first-person platforming in between. Making it to one of the goal platforms results in the display of a short poem on screen. It’s minimalistic. Like a lot of musical demos, the details don’t matter so much as the central ideas.
It’s refreshing to see the ideas of cyberpunk action gameplay stripped down. Connor Sherlock invites players to simply engage in the kind of freedom of movement that Christian described in his Ghostrunner review. Unlike Ghostrunner’s enemies and numerous hazards, however, the canyons and hallways of Condor are empty. The player can see moving shapes that imply flying cars in the spaces below and between buildings, but there’s nothing like that in the middle spaces through which they run. Those spaces seem to be right in between traffic and security, allowing for a high-wire act through a crisply high-altitude cityscape. Falling is the only danger, and the sparse environment is the only puzzle. The simplicity of Condor’s style and its reliance on a CMYK color scheme also cuts away some of the xenophobic or appropriative imagery that is common to the genre. It’s just the thing for a quick hit of a midnight run in a steeply urban setting.
file://maniac (Born Frustrated, 2019)
What’s the “fourth wall” in a video game? Any game with a third-person view that can pan in a circle could, after all, theoretically allow your character to look you in the eye, as if they were getting ready to address you. But they’re not, are they? We know this. Eye contact with an avatar is usually an accident—a moment that, unless it’s far on the wrong side of the uncanny valley or otherwise memeable, goes unnoticed. In games, in other words, the fourth wall isn’t necessarily the wall of address, but the wall of infrastructure that gets disrupted by a glitch. The game hides that it consists of millions and millions of little zeroes and ones – “turtles all the way down,” to borrow an expression. To be reminded of this is usually perceived as an interruption.
file://maniac, a game whose name you can’t type without automatically creating a link, breaks this fourth wall of games by forcing you to dig into its guts and alter the content of the game’s files in order to progress. Its status as cyberpunk rests not just in its bleak, techno-noir pixel art aesthetic, but in its insistence on blurring the artificial line between the game and the rest of the files on your computer—the game inserts itself into the ordinary life of your computer like an artificial bionic limb. This is a point-and-click game where a good half of the pointing and clicking takes place in File Explorer. Come to think of it, how do I know I ever stopped playing file://maniac? Like the French portrait artist Claude Cahun said in 1930: “Behind the mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.”
For more critical takes on cyberpunk, check out Christian Haines’s guide to the genre, “Technical and Crude,” and Don Everhart’s essay on surveillance and prisons in Deus Ex: A Criminal Past.
