Wot I Think: State of Mind

For me, cyberpunk fiction has two tropes which shape pretty much everything about its stories. Firstly, the protagonist is always on some kind of fake quest, trying to discover something about their world; they then instead end up discovering their own values, history, past; their very self. Secondly, robots, AIs, cybernetic hybrids etc are almost always revealed to have some fundamental humanity that none of us can reasonably deny. Think Deckard and, latterly, Ryan Gosling’s K in the Blade Runner films. They set out to investigate androids and their dreams, and discover instead the reality of themselves. Deckard might be an android. It’s ambiguous, but that ambiguity doesn’t matter because no one who sees the films could deny his intrinsic humanity. Identity and emergent humanity loop into one another and you end up with a great story.

Doing these tropes justice is what makes great cyberpunk. It’s what connects 2001: a Space Odyssey with games like Deus Ex, and makes for a meaningful commentary on issues like posthumanism. State of Mind is a beautifully crafted cyberpunk game, with an immersive and interesting world that’s second to none, but it ultimately fails at doing cyberpunk fiction well.

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