Two of the most interesting console games I’ve played recently — @ShipbreakerGame and @CitizenSleeper — both carry a brutal critique of corporate hypercapitalism. It’s an interesting contrast to the purely aesthetic “corps are the baddies” motif of many cyberpunk games.
Cyberpunk2077 is a useful example — it’s a fun game and once it was fully baked I enjoyed it a lot. But its critique of the injustice inherent in the cyberpunk vision of the future is kind of… skin deep?
Like: You can choose different paths in the game. An up-and-coming corporate exec! A criminal hustler! A nomad outsider! But the distinctions are ultimately just faction-skinning, and the evil of all-powerful corporations collapses to “Suits be like THIS, runners be like THAT.”
Shipbreaker, in contrast, has a character that’s loudly anti-corporate — not unlike the vocal “Corpos suck!” folks in Cyberpunk — but the nature of the power imbalance is woven into the mechanics, rather than painted on top of it.
The “corporations have everyone by the throat” message becomes blindingly obvious not because an NPC tells you that in a bar, but because you see your own debt to the company store ticking upwards every time you miss a timed challenge.
As the game progresses you realize that being faster, accepting more risks, nailing those goals, is a one-way street: you’re penalized for failure but success just means the bar is raised. “Doing great” means company scrip to buy better tools to meet the ever-increasing demands.
Now, in the context of a console game that’s familiar and fun, mechanically speaking — heck, it’s how Tetris works. But narratively, it clicks into place as the real horror in a way that facile NPC rants and “expensive suits vs leather jackets and neon” aesthetics never does.
Citizen Sleeper is a very different game — a slower, contemplative, more RPG-like, with Disco Elysium-like dialogue trees and a deep cast of interesting NPCs. The problems you deal with are small-scale: getting meds, eluding a bounty hunter, finding a great noodle place.
The cyberpunk corporations that inhabit its world are distant but keenly felt: in one story path you befriend a dockworker who’s saving up to buy passage for his daughter on a generation ship to a promising new colony.
You babysit for him and watch as he grinds himself to the bone, missing his daughter’s now to — hopefully — secure her future by blood and sweat. When he’s screwed over by carefully-written contracts, it hits harder than any “corpos are sellouts!” rant.
Maybe that’s the difference — human stakes and real causative connections between corporate power and the blows to characters you care about, rather than simple Faction Conflict. In any case, it’s made me think a lot about the way that ideas are embodied in mechanics…
…and how the thematic posturing of a game can easily be skin-deep, weakened or even contradicted by mechanics.