![]() ![]() It is muddled to its core even its words don’t work together. ![]() Why this mix, specifically? Why any of these choices? I spend a lot of time talking to the madam of the Seamstresses’ Union, a thick-bodied woman named Kubota, who is not just Japanese, but Afro-Japanese. In the same game I attend a Catholic funeral, avoid a Scientology-like cult, bust through gutterpunk junkies lost in neurochip drug dreams, watch an elf stripper-sway on stage like her close counterpart in Warcraft and haggle with a Korean lady-arms-dealer. This frenetic circus does not hold aesthetically or narratively. Each time I halt at a new narrative element to think on its references to five other sources in wider culture, I am jolted out of the illusion that this world is internally consistent and self-contained. The net result of all this fusion is confusion. The simulation breaks I am left on the outside of the narrative, peering in. He’s pulling the strings of his puppets on stage. When the hairline cracks in the illusion show, you see the creator’s presence, his too-heavy hand, right outside the frame. In a successful fictional world, the author is invisible. The arbitrary cross-pollination of genres, the narrative busywork, the lukewarm writing: these barricades kept me from feeling psychically connected to the characters and from entering their complex universe. I was jolted out of any illusion of being part of the world of Shadowrun Returns in part because its artifice was so evident at each turn. I believe in the illusion that I am the protagonist. ![]() Gibson describes the transition as “mainlining,” and it is imagined as pleasurable, exactly like a drug.) Crucial to that feeling, then, as now, was the whole seamless illusion that I am in the story, that I am living in it, that I am made manifest in this new space. (In cyberpunk, generally, the promise of hacking into cyberspace, the Wired, the Matrix, is that your body is left behind as your mind dissolves into the digital fluid of a million other minds, and your simulation dances in virtual reality. My nostalgia for old games is rooted in a singular longing: to reclaim a sensation of losing myself in a fictional world, a sensation comparable to Case’s dissolving into the worldwide network. In Neuromancer, Henry Dorsett Case is a struggling mercenary hacker who would “jack into” cyberspace where his consciousness could fly through all the world’s data. I chose a decker, which means I have a chance to plug into the wired and skate along neon towers of data suspended in black space. Of the archetypes offered, I can choose between a decker (hacker), a combat mage, a rigger, a physical adept, a street samurai or a shaman. My anti-hero’s mission is to solve the murder of a friend, Sam Watts. In the campaign, “Dead Man’s Switch,” I play a shadowrunner, a gun-for-hire in 2054 Seattle. Jake Armitage is here, along with deckers and street samurai with cybernetic arms, all working in the long shadow of megacorporations and their arcologies. Organ traders run a brisk business in the traffic of heart, liver and limb. But the world’s existence depends most heavily on the black fire vision of William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Pattern Recognition, and other seminal novels. Respects are paid to Ghost in the Shell, Series Experiments Lain, System Shock and Deus Ex. ![]() The Shadowrun world is a profane stew of genres: dystopian cyberspace littered with fantasy’s stock central cast: Orks, Trolls, Elves, Dwarves. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |