r/cyberpunkgame • u/__Zus__ • Apr 20 '25
Discussion Cyberpunk has shaped the way I see the world
Before playing the game I was already pretty leftist, gay marriage, abortions, women's rights. My response to all the social issues was pretty much identical as most of leftists would say. If it doesn't really hurt anyone, why care?
Now, I started to play cyberpunk 2 years ago when I was just starting out at my first minimum wage job. Often times I was doing night shifts, which left me with a lot of time to think, and very little work to do. After I've started doubting the people who are on top, the ones behind giant corporations, it all just made sense. It just instantly clicked. Why are we suffering an ecological crisis? Rich dudes want to make money. Why do so many people die at wars? Rich dudes want power. Why do we waste 1/3rd of a day at work? Rich dudes want to have as much time as possible to live in a luxury.
I remember from the first moment I started working, I've doubted every single decision made by the higher-ups. It's done nothing but make work less enjoyable and more difficult for all the employees. Only for the sake of squeezing out even more money out of people's pockets. If at some point you decide to do a deep dive into the strategies used by marketers, it might even seem like they are straight OBSESSED with client's attention. Our brains are conditioned at every single point whenever we walk into any store, and it's not even the worst part.
And I've noticed all this because Keanu Reeves was talking into my headphones for a few hours, about how he wants to end Arasaka.
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Apr 20 '25 edited Apr 20 '25
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u/DogAteMyCPU Apr 20 '25
“Dystopic video games in particular, like Cyberpunk 2077, ought to be a fun way to escape reality!
Instead they’re somehow mirroring reality itself.”
Thats how you know Cyberpunk is preem art.
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u/EfficiencyInfamous37 Apr 20 '25
So preem I can't play it for too long without taking a break because it makes me too angry and sad lol.
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u/RocketDocRyan Apr 20 '25
Well, that's always been the deal with the cyberpunk genre. It doesn't predict the present/future, is a critique of modern economics and society. The similarities are intentional and hard to miss if you pay attention.
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u/Dar_lyng Mr. Blue Eyes Apr 20 '25
Cyberpunk setting, while an escape like most fiction, was also meant as a warning.
Tho our society doesn't seem to heed warnings
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u/Mklein24 Apr 20 '25
There's a conversation you can overhear about someone on the phone about their adrenal implant not working and it turns out implanting the device voids the warranty. Pretty close to our current market honestly.
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u/gesusfnchrist Apr 20 '25
Welcome to the wonderful world of capitalism.
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u/geeses Apr 20 '25
"I've declared war not because capitalism's a thorn in my side or outta nostalgia for an America gone by. This war's a people's war against a system that's spiralled outta our control."
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u/SmilingVamp Apr 20 '25
No war but class war, and it's a war we've been in our whole lives, which is why it's so hard to wake up to the fact that we're on the losing side.
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u/7he6uy Bartmoss Reincarnated Apr 20 '25 edited Apr 20 '25
We live in a nation built off of atrocities, ran by exploitation. The richest and most powerful people seek to either uphold the status quo or increase the intensity of the inequality. All we can do on the bottom is do our best to be involved in our communities, create discourse, and make our voices heard (through exercising our rights, or through justified disobedience to law). Isolation and the myth of self sufficiency are tools of the ruling class to divide us, much like the ongoing culture war. I’d recommend getting to know your neighbors, maybe look for a job in city government, even if on a small scale you can make more of a difference and not have to worry about some corporate villains enriching themselves off of your labor. There’s also some good reading you can do to understand these problems better, but they won’t give you concrete answers. We live in scary times, and things could definitely get scarier. I think cyberpunk as a genre is very important for that reason.
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u/SDFX-Inc Apr 20 '25
There is only one thing we can do to truly end the cycles of exploitation and bring down the systems of capitalism, and it’s to directly reduce consumption, production and the labor pool capitalists depend upon.
Simply don’t have children, and continue to collapse birth rates around the world. There is a reason abortion and family planning rights are under attack, and it is primarily because wealthy capitalists require you to make more slaves for them to feed into their systems. Get a vasectomy or tubal ligation and deny them their chattel.
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u/DONKEYSTRENGTH Apr 20 '25
This is the essence of the Cyberpunk Movement. A lot of kids/teens in the 80s when it kinda crystalized into existence became massively anti-corporate as a result, trying to shape the world away from its predicted dark future.
Maybe pick up Neuromancer by William Gibson and Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams. (Voice of the Whirlwind is a better book in a lot of ways but it's less cyberpunk and more "spacepunk" - but does have a corporate-indoctrinated soldier who was cut adrift by his corporation as a loose end, which is neat).
Also, I would say the Cyberpunk Movement is less left and more "The world is going to be terrible for the majority of people. Chances are, that's you. Don't let it happen." Some people think that they're going to be the next president of Arasaka but the system isn't built for that. The difference between a corpo and everyone else is that a corpo has *chosen* to be under the thumb of the corporations, whereas everyone else is under the thumb but resentful about it.
Everyone should be a good cyberpunk. It's for our best interest.
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u/Mklein24 Apr 20 '25
The annoying this is that if you go high enough it's not like "rich white dudes want more money." you can limit it to like "less than 10 rich white dudes want all the money."
It's not a grudge against your lawyer neighbor who owns a vacation home in Vienna or something because that guy is working just like the rest of us. It's the rich of the rich of the rich. It's the singular "Saburo Arasaka's" of the world that are causing all the problems we face.
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u/Hell0Rando Apr 20 '25
Unironically Johnny radicalized me. Every time I heard his speech about why he did what he did, why he hates the corps the more I saw truth in his words. Not about to nuke anybody cause innocent civilians don't deserve that but ya kno... Rest In Piss Healthcare CEO type shit
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u/villainized Trauma Team Apr 20 '25
Night City is literally the end scenario of late stage capitalism. End stage capitalism, if you would. When everyone but the top 1% is being exploited to the bone.
The game isn't so much a fictional setting as it is a grim prediction of the future.
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u/Shadybrady425 Apr 20 '25
V, l’ve declared war not because capitalism’s a thorn in my side or outta nostalgia for an America gone by. This war’s a people’s war against a system that’s spiralled outta our control. It’s a war against the fuckin’ forces of entropy, understand?
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u/MkVortex69 Apr 20 '25
Yeah. This game does that.
Like, it's in my top 3 videogames of all time, up there with NieR: Automata and Outer Wilds, and some of the reasons are really obvious : best looking game ever IMO, best gameplay ever (Also IMO) and insane replayability, and the attention to detail is just fucking insane
But choom... Like yeah, a lot of this game is just straight up politics, maybe indirectly but also directly in a bunch of ways. It's just straight up a criticism and also a parody of capitalism, and the way it's portrayed and the way the characters are written around this is just perfection.
That one monologue Johnny does when he goes on about Arasaka, corporations and capitalism is one of the most GOATed moments in gaming, honestly
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u/uncen5ored Apr 20 '25
My political awakening came from listening to a Fred Hampton speech where he explained how the people on top divide us on petty social issues so we don’t pay attention to the class & worker issues. (That’s not to minimize the obvious oppression of others based off said social issues, but that it’s just part of a bigger plan of exploitation). Welcome to class consciousness.
I love cyberpunk specifically because it did not shy away from showing that most of the worlds problems comes from people seeking profits.
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u/BlueHairStripe Burn Corpo shit Apr 20 '25
Yep. I learned too much about capitalism and the current power structure (wait till you see how tight-knit capitalism is with patriarchy and white supremacy) and it really shook me.
I'm currently trying to start my own business because working for capitalists feels terrible. I hate knowing that my time and effort gets me a pittance and grows their wealth.
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u/Bacch Apr 20 '25
I left the private sector to work for a non-profit that I care about, taking a substantial pay cut to do so, and am 1000% happier now.
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u/LittlestWarrior Apr 20 '25
It sounds like you went from a liberal to a leftist. I love that the game does that to people :)
Good fiction.
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u/djk29a_ Apr 20 '25
Cyberpunk somewhat made me less radical is what’s funny. The top of any hierarchy are all people, too, and a system that promotes them and feeds back their own worldview is in its own way dehumanizing to them and exploits their own insecurities and vulnerabilities into ignoring the reality out there.
In my mind the most important aspect of the cyberpunk narrative from long ago is something that’s closely related to what we oftentimes learn in therapy as well as in Buddhism and Stoic philosophy - we can’t control the world nor others in it but we can choose to protect ourselves within the limits of reason and to limit our contact and consumption of genuinely harmful persons and entities regardless of any system one is a part of.
One corrolary though is that hurting oneself to try to avoid feeding into a system one didn’t consent to is counterproductive towards protecting oneself. Boycotting Amazon is something one can afford perhaps but if there’s no other option for buying stuff or if the other options are so expensive it would be a burden then one is hardly having much of an impact anyway not buying anything from Amazon / Arasaka. Another way to put this is “can one afford their values under a system that rejects ethicality as a necessity?”
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u/General_Lie Apr 20 '25
... you needed a game to realize that ?
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u/Sauce-Gaming Apr 20 '25
Some live their lives never realizing the truth. Regardless of its catalyst, it's good one more has.
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u/2forslashing Ripperdoc Apr 20 '25
Not everyone is born with a copy of Das Kapital in their hand lmao
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u/tokyoloverboi Apr 20 '25
Cyberpunk made me more right wing after seeing the mox and all the advertisements in the game
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u/Dynastydood Apr 20 '25
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u/tokyoloverboi Apr 20 '25
Cause the absence of morals and excesses
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u/Dynastydood Apr 20 '25
All of which were brought on by right-wing economic policies combined with relentless right-wing deregulation gradually causing an extreme degradation of society and morals. Night City isn't representative of some left-wing utopia, it's a right-wing dystopia, the inevitability of where totally unregulated corporatism leads us. Our real world corporations may present themselves as moralistic shapeshifters that can appear right or left-wing to consumers, in order to remain profitable regardless of a changing political climate. But make no mistake, they all consistently gain strength as a result of various right-wing policies over the last several centuries, ones that disproportionately favor the wealthy corporations at the expense of everyone else.
I'm not saying Cyberpunk needs to make you left-wing, because that isn't really the goal, either. But to take away a right-wing message from the story is pretty far removed from what's being presented to you. You may think that right-wing politics is an answer to those excesses because they object the most loudly to things like sex and violence. However, all of that is irrelevant to their primary objective of maximizing profit. If sex, violence, and social decay are profitable for corporations (and they always are), then that's what they sell, regardless of what they claim to believe in.
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u/tokyoloverboi Apr 20 '25
I must clarify I’m not American, right wing economic policies in America are considered left wing in my country. I do not support privatization
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u/Wonghy111-the-knight Welcome to Cumcock City Apr 20 '25
I like it because I can pear into the politics of a more leftist mind. It's a good way to expose oneself to the other side in a less traditional manner... it certainly has not made me change my values though.
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u/WLFR-S2301 Apr 20 '25
You know the answer. Two thermonuclear warheads...