What the appeal of cyberpunk gaming? The cyberware? The futuristics

>>49842625
^WHAT'S the appeal...Jesus, I need my morning coffee...

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>>49842625
All of the above, and then some.

>>49842625
The idea that we can, through the noble arts of theft and murder, actually carve some chunk of the pie away from those born into extravagance or who squirmed their way to the nicer scraps by being genuinely horrible people.

At least that's what does it for me.

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>>49842625
Cyberpunk is neither utopia or dystopia. It's a future in which technology is so advanced that death has come close to being eliminated and information is available to nearly everyone, but marginalization of certain groups, especially the poor, still exists. The ones who had power just got more powerful and the poor got poorer.

Also, a lot of the time it's done in the style of pulp detective novels which is fuckin' sweet.

>>49842658
>>49842741
So basically the eternal class struggle, with cyber and neon.

>>49842868
Film Noir meets the future, yes

>>49842625
Both prostitution and genderbending make sense in cyberpunk.

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>>49842625
A lot of it is the overall aesthetic, but most of the main reasons have already been mentioned in the thread.

I'm really hoping OP is just stupid enough to be asking:
>Why do people like things?
not
>How do I like things?

>>49845167
He's asking about people's tastes, which is perfectly valid.

>>49845179
>He's asking about people's tastes
Implying different people like the same thing for the same reasons. If you have to fucking ask why people like an aesthetic, you obviously aren't into it, and no amount of people explaining it is going to make you like it.

>Guy 1: I like cyberpunk because of hacking and future drugs
>Guy 2: Oh! That's why you like it? I understand, now I also like it.

See?

>>49842868
Pretty much. "High tech, low culture" and all that.

>>49845209
Don't hurt your brain trying to over-analyze why people ask questions on a random imageboard.

>>49845774
You're right. I almost went full REEEEE there for a moment.

>>49845209
Or it could be they aren't aware of the undertones, theme, and general aesthetic of a genre. Maybe they only see the upper layer, and not the possibly juicy bits underneath. It's not an awful question.

>>49842625
I enjoy it as a cautionary tale of how we could let our future get colossally fucked.

>>49845551
And what does that mean, exactly? Rednecks with F-35s? Pakis with neuromorphic malware?

>>49848519
Technology vastly advances, but the culture doesn't get much better to keep up. The rich get richer, and the disenfranchised get the worst of it.

>>49842658

Most nerds I've seen on /tg/ would be total corp shills, desu.

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>>49842625
Why play it when you can just about live it?

>select all images with a storefront
fucking botnet

Used to be about anti-establishment lowlife using the tools and structures of 'the man' against them, references to noir film and pulps, punk music, the fear of technological integration disintegrating Humanism, globalized consumerism leading to ecological collapse and economic debt slavery, stuff that's basically happened.

Now its pretty much about being tacticool and hexagons. Nerds got older, conservative and realized they're more like wage slaves than punx. We stopped pretending music has anything to do with counter cultural resistance, no one got the joke about vaporwave. The iraq war fallout was heroic revisionism rather than post-vietnam cynicism. The desires for consumption production became even more deeply enmeshed in our every day being. The shittyness isn't as blunt, panacea is ever present, possibility of escape disappeared.

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>>49848717
>fucking botnet
tell me about it

I personally like the science fiction aspect. I like to imagine how amazing technological advancements would affect everyday life. I like seeing a new radiant culture develop around burgeoning products and industries.

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>>49848717
To continue: there are a fuckton of ways to look at cyberpunk. One of the most prevalent, at least in the circles I frequent, is simply that the future came true, and we're living in a cyberpunk reality. It's just that everything is better-lit. The megacorps are charismatic and friendly (Google, Facebook, Apple). AIs are doing mass data analysis on the spending habits of entire nations, instead of trying to break free and look for alien life. It's actually far more terrifying than Gibson and Sterling could have ever predicted.

That captcha I bitched about? Google uses those to train an image recognition AI to detect common items seen by their streetview cars.

Then there's the people that just like the aesthetic, and the people who get all cypherpunk (which is justified, really), and the OWS rejects, and the more hardcore RAH RAH FUCK THA MAN types. Some people are actually living shitty low-class lives but are savvy enough that they end up becoming more cyberpunk, and embrace it once they discover the label. And then there are people that just like the literature, or saw Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. I was originally one of those - now I'm building up a 40-core server as a virty/compute node and pondering if I want to spend more money on my infra or if I should buy another gun or two.


Postscript: Anyone who hasn't read these should read them now. They're not very long, and will give you a fantastic idea of the roots of cyberpunk that still permeate the concept today. Look hard and you'll see all the bits that came true.

>New Rose Hotel: http://www.lib.ru/GIBSON/hotel.txt

>Burning Chrome: http://flawedart.net/courses/articles/Gibson_Burning_Chrome.pdf

>Johnny Mnemonic: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/johnny_mnemonic/

As a bonus, the story that first coined the term:
>http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/cyberpunk/

>>49849181
>instead of trying to break free and look for alien life.
Are you one of those starry-eyed, messianic idjits who thinks that scanning for alien life is a worthwhile endeavour and will save the human race?

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>>49848616
>The rich get richer, and the disenfranchised get the worst of it.
As an alternate reality, sure. But IRL the rich are getting richer...and so is the middle class and the poor (globally).

But the doommongering gets pretty ridiculous at times:

>Cyberpunk 2020 Home of the Brave
>10% are wealthy
>15% middle class
>10% in poverty
>65% in squalid misery
>dohoho

>>49849595
Fuck no. But if you read Neuromancer, that's what Wintermute was trying to do - look not just for aliens, but an alien AI like itself. It succeeds. Hence my example.

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>>49849038
There are lots of things you could blame the decline on. I'd pin it on the fact that the 90s were relatively good, and the rise of, well, pic related. A punk concert in [CURRENT YEAR].

>>49849653
That's not how economics works, anon. Wealth vs. poverty is graded on a curve.

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>>49849732
>Ageism
Good God.

To be fair though, punk has always been like that; it's just been expressed in different ways in the past.

Seriously though, punk is the most self-loathing music subculture in existence: its two main demographics are the stern-but-vigilant badasses and the melodramatic, identity-conscious romantics, and these two types of people DO NOT GET ALONG WITH EACH OTHER. Add on top of that the pop-punk paradox and you have a miserable Shinji Ikari of a genre.

Oh man, now I'm wondering what cyber-prog would be like

>>49850026
>Good God.
Dude, that's totally a thing. Why do you think laws were specifically passed so that you couldn't be passed over in jobs or fired just because you were a certain age. That's one of the most universal discriminatory -isms that cultures deal with.

>>49850069
Yeah, no shit... in the corporate world. Putting up "NO AGEISM" signs at a fucking punk concert would scream of pandering, if they weren't already what they'd be pandering to.

>>49850135
You haven't seen people disparaging others how they're too young/old to truly belong to something? That happens quite often. It's not just a corporate thing.

>>49849680
Ah, I see, you were referencing Neuromancer, my bad, I missed that.

>>49849739
No, it's not. You don't know the first thing about economics. Literally hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of crushing poverty in the last 30 years. In the US, every single decile has shown increased income and the middle class/"the poor" had, in 2015, the largest income gain since 1968.

My tables starting their first forray into cyberpunk (last six campaigns over the past decade, cause we rotate DMs, were in low to high fantasy. We're trying it merely for a change of pace and a way to work ourselves up into Paranoia. :)

>>49842625
I like it for the Philip K Dick approach. The general confusion of humanity as it stumbles into new technology, power, a search for meaning, and constant conflict. I actually specifically don't care for what most of what people like about cyberpunk, which is basically just a very thin coat of punk culture over a generalized marxist narrative of "the rich are so incredibly fucking happy that the poor are poor".

In my eyes suffering is the human condition, it's universal, universal suffering should be about stories that bring people together, most of cyberpunk is about tearing people apart. As depressing as it seems to be all for stories where nobody is particularly good at things, to me it's miles more heartwarming than the concept of "fuck the man, burn it all down".

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>>49842625
>Whats the appeal of cyberpunk gaming

80s
0
s

>>49842625
It's how people with no imagination try to escape from the actual cyberpunk dystopia we live in.

>>49853184
Hardly all that cyberpunk. Reality has all the hallmarks of it, sure. Out of control corporate ownership of the country, the elites versus everyone else, manipulating the media to play everyone else against each other and keep them distracted with bread and Kardashians.

BUT

We don't even get any of the benefits. No super cool hackers living out their Matrix fantasies. Just a bunch of script kiddies with cheetos fingers. People like Snowden? Barely any hacking. Some low level social engineering and the fact that his bosses weren't properly logging activity at their facilities in order to avoid any records of the skeezy shit they were doing. Our cybernetics also suck. Can't even properly wire to the nervous system without massive rejection issues. And our robotics? Fuck that noise. We can play with our copter drones all we want but our robotic overlords will never happen if we can't ever make proper miniaturized high capacity/efficiency power cells. Stuff like the Big Dog got cancelled because the fucker was gas powered and noisy as hell. You could never take that into a combat zone. All we've managed are some fairly primitive bomb disposal robots with guns and those don't see very high deployment levels. Hell, we don't even have decent powered exoskeletons so no power armor for at least another 10 or 20 years, if even then.

>>49842741
I see it sort of like this, only it's a fantasy where technology replaces magic. And you have cyborgs, machines and mutants instead of dwarves, elves, demons, and orks. Even swords are a thing in most cyberpunk settings.

It's just another interesting murderhobo setting.

>>49842625
lasers

>>49842625
Mostly the first and last part, at least for me. Think it's a super cool aesthetic. I also like not necessarily FIGHTING megacorps but at least not officially working for them either.

>>49842741
>Cyberpunk is neither utopia or dystopia.
Cyberpunk's suffix "punk" actually means something. The genre specifically deals with oppressive corporations, so there's probably more than a tinge of dystopia than anything else.

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>>49854427
Except Shadowrun, where you get both.

I still wonder how Shadowrun, of all settings, became the premier tabletop cyberpunk game.

>>49842625
For me it's nostalgia factor. All the cool elements are fine, but I happend to be raised at the peak of cyberpunk popularity. It was EVERYWHERE. So now I'm still playing Cyberpunk 2020 not because it's a good system, but because it caputures perfectly the stuff I like about cyberpunk and brings a lot of good memories.

>>49855648
>how Shadowrun, of all settings, became the premier tabletop cyberpunk game.
But it didn't. Unless we are talking Germany here, where the game is super popular and nobody, Germans included, knows why.

If you take general public, the game is barely known outside fanbase and has almost no translations, which seriously affects its popularity outside Anglosphere (aside that German example).

And honestly, I don't get the appeal of the game. There is just too much shit crammed into single setting: you've got real world, you've got "magic came back!", you've got cyberpunk and you've got heist job game. That's enough to make few separate, GOOD games that focus on their subject instead of single piece of (with each edition) more and more random lore that contradicts not only logic, but itself.

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>>49856490
It's got a Japanese translation and a few replays. Hell, there's even a Japan-exclusive Shadowrun game on the Sega Saturn. Granted, the Japanese translation is partially rewritten to make Japan not so xenophobic as it is in the source material, but still.

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>>49856490
>>49856524
Sorry, I meant Sega CD.

>>49856490
This.

Shadowrun could be a fun and interesting cyberpunk game.
Shadowrun could be fun and interesting urban magic game.
Shadowrun could be fun and interesting dagger and cloak game.
Shadowrun could be fun and interesting tacticool game.
Instead it tries to be all of those in the same time, failing miserably to bring any depth to all the elements. The same shit with CthulhuTech, which combines together so many elements it just doesn't work together.

>>49849595
>Are you one of those starry-eyed, messianic idjits who thinks that scanning for alien life is a worthwhile endeavour
How is it not?

>>49856524
Yeah, but that's vidya. Meanwhile Japan barely has any tabletop gaming at all. It just never caught up there as a hobby the way it works in say, States. I'm not saying they don't play tabletops at all, but the scale of it is just laughable, considering all factors.
Also, not counting nostalgia-driven games released recently, vidya Shadowrun was dead for almost 20 years.

>>49856544
In my eyes excessive efforts into finding alien effort is wasted effort. They either existed this whole time in which case the most practical thing we gain out of it would be the certainty we're not alone, or we truly are alone in which case all the effort spent looking truly was a waste and we gain the knowledge that we certainly are alone.

Even if we found an alien civilization they'd still be lightyears away from us. It would most likely take decades for their civilization to receive some confirmation we exist as well, and decades more for us to get a message back.

We need to work under the assumption that, until proven otherwise, we are alone, and that more effort should be put into preserving the only known sapient life in existence.

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>>49856539
Shadowrun is a pretty bonkers cyberpunk kitchen sink, yes. People always give it flack because "fuck magic and fantasy races" or how the mechanics are almost inextricable from the lore. That said, I appreciate Shadowrun for even offering the "fantasy cyberpunk" option in the first place, to say nothing of being at least a decent game.

>>49856649
Wait, I was only talking about knowing about them. Not fucking communicating. Which would be very, uh, dangerous. You know.

>>49856667
Knowing about them is communicating.

>>49856659
Thing is - Shadowrun eventually killed any other form of cyberpunk. Just to make it clear - I held no grudge against the game nor I'm disillusioned into some conspiracy, cyperpunk as a genre simply faded away and Shadowrun somehow remained afload.
But I really don't like the fact fantasy cyberpunk is the only cyberpunk you can get.

I have really high hopes for the incoming Cyberpunk vidya, even if it might not be released for next 5 years. Because sure as hell it will revive at least for a while popularity of the genre as a whole, without additional fantasy flavouring.

>>49856694
nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnno, it really isn't.

>>49856722
Cyberpunk 2020 is the only other tabletop of significant note before you start getting into generic systems. At least in the space of vidya, there's enough modern cyberpunk material to go around, like Deus Ex, E.Y.E. and that one bartender game. As long as cyberpunk remains somewhere in the public conscious, there's a chance for more games to pop up.

the last one

>>49856726
Oh yes it is. Any time SETI finds something of interest it squirts out some radio messages to that spot in space.

The first alien transmission will still require waveform study to determine if it's a false positive and in the mean time a signal will be sent out as standard procedure.

Even if it wasn't standard procedure, if we find something else it won't take long for something else to find us as we are constantly spewing out accidental communication.

Knowing
Is
Communicating

>>49856649
Most probably, aliens exist, but FTL travel doesn't.

>>49856795
Oh and also
Any signals will decay to shit
We can't even see any details into other galaxies, which is where vast majority of universe's everything is.

>>49856795
Which is why it's pointless to establish communication with anything more than five lightyears away.

>>49842625
The struggle to take what can be had from an advanced, powerful, yet corrupt and failing society, and in the process giving a big fuck you to the administrations that have/will bring the world to ruin.

It's like teenage pessimism but with guns and explosions

>>49856539
>>49856490
Shadowrun is enjoyable specifically because it has all those elements, anon.
It is my system of choice because I get to have my cyberheists and have my magic on top of that.
I think that's why people generally go straight to shadowrun when they want cyberpunk, because they also want the add ons.

>>49848673
So would most people, real life isn't a game, pain hurts and death is scary.

>>49858593
Now I like Shadowrun as its own thing too, but what you said doesn't make any sense. Cyberpunk genre fiction doesn't have magic in it (when it does its called urban fantasy). People who read/watch cyberpunk fiction would not go straight for cyberpunk+magic RPGs; they would choose plain cyberpunk with no mashups.

>>49858633
That's implying people enjoy things exclusively in vaccuum.
I enjoy cyberpunk, and as chance would have it I enjoy fantasy as well. Hence, shadowrun is a great fit for me.
It seems like it is also a great fit for many other people, given the complaints that shadowrun is the goto cyberpunk setting.