Fauxscerf
"Loving V"
Mascara drenched-tears and gunfire. In the end I just stuck the iron in my mouth, pulled the trigger.
As V and Johnny sat on the roof of Misty's Esoterica, their voices drowned-out in the noises of Night City, Cyberpunk pulls me away at last, removes us from subjectivity by panning the camera out of this digitally-stricken body and towards a wider angle of two trajectories mercifully coming to a stop - deciding they wouldn’t play the game anymore. “Cleanest, least bloody option” she said. My first-person absorption within the computer-game was hence wholly consumed, putting V in front of me in a way that felt true to the experience of playing 2077’s broken, shimmering jank, the achievement of ending one’s life making sense of both our acts of roleplaying; mine as a holistic, experiential avenue and hers as dramatic diegesis given shape through the only language video-games seem to understand well enough, that is, the accumulation - and ultimate bubbling - of violence.
Shit felt terrible, no questions about it, something of the unfinished and unachievable kind - the right kind of wrong for once, first-person shooting in the directness of your face, forever. Suicide is exhaustion given infinite form and no language to remedy it’s omnipresence - that's no easy sentiment to tease out of me and it sure as hell ain’t a virtual one but Cyberpunk did succeed and I do not mean it as just another rejection of failed ludonarrative ventures, though this particular ending does carry with it an air of disdain for your decision to not act out the blaze of glory-seeking bravado that’s meant to close out the story. But I was exhausted. The wild circle of Cyberpunk 2077 goes both ways; cornucopia as trash and trash as cornucopia. All the narrative swings and systemic inconsistencies that fed from the ugliness of the work's dangling bits and in turn shone back some of their own light to form genuinely unique video-game sequences that deserve to be examined and contextualized on their own, beyond the meme, formed a world alright. All of it was too much. I could not play a minute longer, had - many times - threatened to pull the plug on 2020's most wildly surreal corporate art experiment and so finally I did. Hit the proverbial Blackwall in a sense. The artificial prose and passes ruling on this empire of code could not - and then would not - accommodate my presence within their simulation. Doesn't matter how towering or complex, a simple data block which we fuel with credence for the time it takes to wrestle with its fictitious circuitry remains just that in spite of itself. V and I were simply tired of sharing this body - a veritable second Silverhand I had become -, me attempting to imbue her with an essence that was never really there in the first place whilst she roared and raged to stay alive for another day or another hour, to exist inside the megalopolis of the dark future whatever the cost.
In the middle of this mounting heap of conflicted desires lied an encounter producing atomic material. Proper character-moments and personal voids, dejected ones. Times like “Automatic Love” and times like Takemura. Enough of those will fry your brains out. Make sure I can never come back nor forget Night City. From my continuous first-person to theirs - a third vision, on top of that apartment complex, saying things but really saying nothing at all because nothing is left to be said. And they're just there. And then they're not. And in this split-second where the linearity of your decisions establishes itself - this shift where the verb “interact” becomes “witness” - you realize, or at least I did, that you felt (no, feel) a certain type of way about her. The choice - if ever there was one - had been made from the start; all I did was press the button in an honest mistake. Enough play, more flatline.
“And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space,
hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames.
Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now–”
Now the whole bathroom’s messed up and there’s vomit in the sink. Daddy is naked. Daddy’s blown a billion dollars down the drain in search of ray-traced fields yonder only leaving third-degree burns in his wake. This is not a video-game-centric problem but Video–games are the medium. Two years later, Phantom Liberty brings me back. V is brought forward from the dead, still fucking unstable, still drawing me in and I’m thinking to myself “Now is the moment”. Brand new chain, brand new RTX. I’m back not out of Edgerunners-fever but perhaps plain naïveté, thinking that I knew a way out. I knew, at least, of the Tower, this new epilogue that would let my V live out the rest of her days in Night City free of Silverhand’s cancerous engram, a character somewhat damaged and reformed - so I cultivated a plan. If my first journey was to be defined by the game’s egregore, then my second outing would act as its negative. Let blights and blessings wash over V in equal measures, see where the world of Cyberpunk would take me this time. A descent into roleplaying. Towards-
“A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now–”
A nowness. The septic tank of frame generation and path-tracing galore. Lights softly lashing out. A hundred paces into the grid. Immersion has always been at the heart of the 2077 project. A nowness, by which I mean the immediacy with which the game attempts to hold your attention and force you to engage with its world through the eyes of a digital construct. No computer software captures the push-and-pull of first-person like Cyberpunk which makes the failure deeper, almost more cutting. Soft games versus hard games - with 2077 in-between, attempting a hard act without the substantive arguments, building itself around a prefabricated fantasia of the subjective camera as this sort of all-encompassing dramatic cliché of immersion where the virtual gestures performed by V’s body are set and ordained through expensive cinematography instead of gameplay - draping itself in the robes of Deus Ex even as the meat falls off the bones to reveal an intense, almost angry focus on being a shooter first and foremost. It's that kind of teleguided rhythm which dictates the juiciest chunks of Cyberpunk's action-roleplay; a game that simply feels best when the gatling sings the cries of a thousand dead punk babies. And to these we add our faerie touch - a dialogue system skimming through flavour options as heavy stakes and lush set-pieces orient our gaze throughout CDPR’s theatrical exposé.
A nowness. When V shouts at the top of her lungs, when she’s desperately crawling her way out of a sky-wide hole. A nowness is when she touches another human being’s face, when she is touched and being looked at herself - which is why scenes like our confession at Clouds or Aurore’s appearance in «You Know My Name» hit such a fever. In their paranoid arousal lies a sincere expression of the hardships that come with human interaction in our day and age of disembodiment; searching for closure in a sex club, going full-on cyberpsycho, all of us, together alone. There and now. V is not, in other words, a character who expresses herself a lot through violence at the hands of the controller. In order to stab/stealth we must suppress this desire to get closer to the world she inhabits - replace it with the utility of conflict-solving, which is not to say that this violence serves no purpose. It is the sensory-deprivation chamber, the numbness you feel after sleeping the day-off; this dream that despondency fed every time you took the elevator to the 8th floor of H10 and were met with an aesthetical fart on the telly or every time the core was laid bare, exposed by bugs and cogs - because, yeah, everything feels slow, sluggish in Night City, as if the interplay between V and her numerous points of acquisition never quite met their intended target and instead underlined the facade of the whole structure in a way that feels relevant to the text, a text, not the one Cyberpunk 2077 is writing but the one written about and around it, a game that’s more than a game, filled to the brim with dead things that pretend to be alive. Anything to feel something in this place removed - so why not a shotgun blast?
A nowness without which the text of Cyberpunk would feel half-superfluous in truth. Suicide doesn’t happen without these empty pockets of play. My V needed this violence, this dishonesty, for her death to make sense of it all. But my affection only happens in the game’s jello, in this space where play's internal logic is superseded by the outbursts of tactile production riches. Sequences like the Heist or the Chimera boss-fight - one of Phantom Liberty’s many highlights -, our countless segues into the city's underbelly as societal observations games were never really well equipped to answer in the first place but which 2077 tackles with surprising softness at times, punctuations in the routine of car rides and murder contracts; the lead in a detective story that’s always about touch - whether pyrotechnical or intimate - at the end of the tunnel. A nowness - an entrapment. It’s all the same to V.
“Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of palergray.
Expanding-- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick,
the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.”
Sometimes I get so tense while playing games that I forget to breathe. My fingers tense up, just enough that the tendons jerk back a little but not enough that it actually hurts in the long run, intermittently gritted teeth ease their pressure every dozens of second or so to let me swallow a little and I lean forward from the back of my chair like anyone who’s ever lost the first two rounds in a LAN. What I am describing here is not the buildup of tension that hard games tend to inflict upon the player - there’s joy (and an exchange) happening in that trade of blows, I think. No, what this situation feels like to me is a voicelessness in the matter of the video-game. The game having and very much using its voice to suppress mine as an action that does not scream of authorial intent so much as it aims to render the player mute. This is what these worlds, in their openness, do to us. They bloat and gurgle most - if any - possibility for expression to emerge within their likeness - to impart a certain elasticity of being to the fiction and its characters. For play to go in more than one direction at a time and meet these undercurrents, make them integral parts of the text. Night City is different in that it’s aesthetically crude and conscious of what the city is to us (what drives the player to seek out its spectacle) yet, as the strongest - sometimes only - voice in play by virtue of its open-ended nature, it cannot let go of two conceptions essential to its successes ; an idea of the player as a set of neurotic impulses (which we are) drawn in parallel to its own view of itself as a space that both seeks and belies simulation. Peaceful cohabitation between Cyberpunk’s slew of systems was never on the cards and so the most salient question anyone can ask of 2077 isn’t whether it answers every political point of aesthetics that’s been ascribed - rather pointlessly - to the genre but instead see a translation of play’s tropes into an actuation of its game-world through the following question: Is Night City A Walkable Paradise?
“Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America,
and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.”
In one of my favourite early passages of Neuromancer, William Gibson describes a nowness. Through richly-textured streams of consciousness we get a glimpse of protagonist Case’s emotional ecstasy on the threshold between flesh and computer, a sort of strobe-lights reel akin to the religious experience of being visited by the Internet’s composite angel. This encounter with the world as perceived and rendered from our screens is the essence of Night City’s flash drive - that moment lived in the intersection, this longing that inhabits the mind and can only be met with an image of totality; every neon reflected in its corresponding surface, every aspect of reality densely explored by the weight of writing and asset-imprinted on the cornea itself. Baudrillard’s simulacrum realized. Night City is not a walkable paradise - it is a perceivable (video-game) one.
What I’m trying to get at is…we need an alternative. To get out of here. In this way 2077’s rendition of the "natural world" outside Night City is deeply moving to me; a barren, unstimulating expanse of polluted desert and dry grass that acts in contrast to everything else in Cyberpunk and makes itself vibrant whereas Wild Hunt's impressionistic canvases of aerial pine forests and ravaged country roads felt synthetic because, this time, there's no artifice. I drove there once in a haze. There was just too much light everywhere else. Blood spilled on halogen. Repetition, often empty conversations. An absent escape. So I just took Jackie’s ride and blasted past the Stateline, as fast as I could, because I wanted to remain in the game whilst simultaneously wanting out of it. Ditched my motorcycle and started walking, breathing a little in the shadow of wind turbines as the scenery unfolded before me. I think that’s due to this want - at least on my side - for the game world to work. Something’s leaking through the grapevine. We come back to open-worlds not because of their quality but because we believe they might one day attain the true colour of reflection and surpass their fragile status as simulated environments - hence the rise of A.I. and infinite terrain generation pushing a hollow artistic envelope. In this case a pedestrian motion invites a sort of contemplative boredom that is vital to traversal. Why else, for example, would CD Projekt RED insist on adding a fully functional metro system to Night City, years after the fact? A nowness. I value games where walking doesn’t feel redundant. I value this stride towards play outside of ravenous incentives supposed to inform the wider context of the story the game's trying to tell instead of distracting me, as something that smells like games but only binds us to physical limitations insofar as they evoke something within us. This is the heart of Cyberpunk 2077 - the thing it’s reaching for. A game trying to use the framework in order to bypass it. Unlimited budget in the service of capital’s immersive production of a nowness within which players could nest themselves. What V embodies then in my eyes is this effort to push past “the new and improved meaning vacuums, where the only thing that mattered, and the only thing that players could rely on and relate to, were their own individual experiences” created by the contemporary sandboxed open-world. Why would we wanna leave? And isn’t that wish for immersion worth examining in itself? Despite what it does to a human heart?
Night City is not strong enough to hold down the fort. But in instances like the one(s) I’ve just described it’s stumbling, perhaps half-knowingly, into player-engineered but space-emergent resonances, and the people at CDPR - for all their evident lack of swagger - know that too. This time V didn’t kill herself. She just stayed there in the heat of perpetual summer, jumping over rock geometries, listening to SAMURAI on the radio for a while, before riding back into the heart of the city one last time. I quit the game and got down to writing. There's so much more to life than this. But it’s also all there is. We're in it for the love of the game, for the slices of life - roleplaying for the briefest of moments, calling a dead friend's phone number, sharing a room with Judy for the night knowing full well the moment will pass, too. Pulling the trigger or, even, leaving Night City altogether. Whether V lives or dies and by which hands she chooses to do so matter equally because this fate is hers and hers alone, in that final pull-back of the curtains where we become mere observers of a story which - both by design and happenstance - never really belonged to us in the first place. It's impossible not to hold some regrets in departing from a perspective we willingly populated with our own thoughts and choices for so many hours yet becoming relevant to us at the exact moment agency stops being a factor. V walks - just not in the same city as us. Like this image of Reed at the end of Phantom Liberty drifting-off into the desert, towards the uncaring sun of empire. "Sand's fucking hot", V says. Burning at the proper temperature it will shrivel into new matter, becoming glass before scattering again like the ashen shards of a bygone mirror. We're always left to pick up the pieces, thinking that this time things will be different, and they never are, but we keep trying. A nowness is a phenomenon forever incomplete - affixed to the interactivity of the present, incapable of seeing beyond its own immersion. But it's also a possibility for change; this hope that, maybe one day, through the experience of others - with others - we could better understand ourselves. Walk alongside the rest of Night City. Touch the same soil as V.
A nowness–
"And somewhere he was laughing,
in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck,
tears of release streaking his face."
–Neuromancer, Chapter 3, William Gibson, 1984
Mascara drenched-tears and gunfire. In the end I just stuck the iron in my mouth, pulled the trigger.
As V and Johnny sat on the roof of Misty's Esoterica, their voices drowned-out in the noises of Night City, Cyberpunk pulls me away at last, removes us from subjectivity by panning the camera out of this digitally-stricken body and towards a wider angle of two trajectories mercifully coming to a stop - deciding they wouldn’t play the game anymore. “Cleanest, least bloody option” she said. My first-person absorption within the computer-game was hence wholly consumed, putting V in front of me in a way that felt true to the experience of playing 2077’s broken, shimmering jank, the achievement of ending one’s life making sense of both our acts of roleplaying; mine as a holistic, experiential avenue and hers as dramatic diegesis given shape through the only language video-games seem to understand well enough, that is, the accumulation - and ultimate bubbling - of violence.
Shit felt terrible, no questions about it, something of the unfinished and unachievable kind - the right kind of wrong for once, first-person shooting in the directness of your face, forever. Suicide is exhaustion given infinite form and no language to remedy it’s omnipresence - that's no easy sentiment to tease out of me and it sure as hell ain’t a virtual one but Cyberpunk did succeed and I do not mean it as just another rejection of failed ludonarrative ventures, though this particular ending does carry with it an air of disdain for your decision to not act out the blaze of glory-seeking bravado that’s meant to close out the story. But I was exhausted. The wild circle of Cyberpunk 2077 goes both ways; cornucopia as trash and trash as cornucopia. All the narrative swings and systemic inconsistencies that fed from the ugliness of the work's dangling bits and in turn shone back some of their own light to form genuinely unique video-game sequences that deserve to be examined and contextualized on their own, beyond the meme, formed a world alright. All of it was too much. I could not play a minute longer, had - many times - threatened to pull the plug on 2020's most wildly surreal corporate art experiment and so finally I did. Hit the proverbial Blackwall in a sense. The artificial prose and passes ruling on this empire of code could not - and then would not - accommodate my presence within their simulation. Doesn't matter how towering or complex, a simple data block which we fuel with credence for the time it takes to wrestle with its fictitious circuitry remains just that in spite of itself. V and I were simply tired of sharing this body - a veritable second Silverhand I had become -, me attempting to imbue her with an essence that was never really there in the first place whilst she roared and raged to stay alive for another day or another hour, to exist inside the megalopolis of the dark future whatever the cost.
In the middle of this mounting heap of conflicted desires lied an encounter producing atomic material. Proper character-moments and personal voids, dejected ones. Times like “Automatic Love” and times like Takemura. Enough of those will fry your brains out. Make sure I can never come back nor forget Night City. From my continuous first-person to theirs - a third vision, on top of that apartment complex, saying things but really saying nothing at all because nothing is left to be said. And they're just there. And then they're not. And in this split-second where the linearity of your decisions establishes itself - this shift where the verb “interact” becomes “witness” - you realize, or at least I did, that you felt (no, feel) a certain type of way about her. The choice - if ever there was one - had been made from the start; all I did was press the button in an honest mistake. Enough play, more flatline.
“And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space,
hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames.
Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
Please, he prayed, now–”
Now the whole bathroom’s messed up and there’s vomit in the sink. Daddy is naked. Daddy’s blown a billion dollars down the drain in search of ray-traced fields yonder only leaving third-degree burns in his wake. This is not a video-game-centric problem but Video–games are the medium. Two years later, Phantom Liberty brings me back. V is brought forward from the dead, still fucking unstable, still drawing me in and I’m thinking to myself “Now is the moment”. Brand new chain, brand new RTX. I’m back not out of Edgerunners-fever but perhaps plain naïveté, thinking that I knew a way out. I knew, at least, of the Tower, this new epilogue that would let my V live out the rest of her days in Night City free of Silverhand’s cancerous engram, a character somewhat damaged and reformed - so I cultivated a plan. If my first journey was to be defined by the game’s egregore, then my second outing would act as its negative. Let blights and blessings wash over V in equal measures, see where the world of Cyberpunk would take me this time. A descent into roleplaying. Towards-
“A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
Now–”
A nowness. The septic tank of frame generation and path-tracing galore. Lights softly lashing out. A hundred paces into the grid. Immersion has always been at the heart of the 2077 project. A nowness, by which I mean the immediacy with which the game attempts to hold your attention and force you to engage with its world through the eyes of a digital construct. No computer software captures the push-and-pull of first-person like Cyberpunk which makes the failure deeper, almost more cutting. Soft games versus hard games - with 2077 in-between, attempting a hard act without the substantive arguments, building itself around a prefabricated fantasia of the subjective camera as this sort of all-encompassing dramatic cliché of immersion where the virtual gestures performed by V’s body are set and ordained through expensive cinematography instead of gameplay - draping itself in the robes of Deus Ex even as the meat falls off the bones to reveal an intense, almost angry focus on being a shooter first and foremost. It's that kind of teleguided rhythm which dictates the juiciest chunks of Cyberpunk's action-roleplay; a game that simply feels best when the gatling sings the cries of a thousand dead punk babies. And to these we add our faerie touch - a dialogue system skimming through flavour options as heavy stakes and lush set-pieces orient our gaze throughout CDPR’s theatrical exposé.
A nowness. When V shouts at the top of her lungs, when she’s desperately crawling her way out of a sky-wide hole. A nowness is when she touches another human being’s face, when she is touched and being looked at herself - which is why scenes like our confession at Clouds or Aurore’s appearance in «You Know My Name» hit such a fever. In their paranoid arousal lies a sincere expression of the hardships that come with human interaction in our day and age of disembodiment; searching for closure in a sex club, going full-on cyberpsycho, all of us, together alone. There and now. V is not, in other words, a character who expresses herself a lot through violence at the hands of the controller. In order to stab/stealth we must suppress this desire to get closer to the world she inhabits - replace it with the utility of conflict-solving, which is not to say that this violence serves no purpose. It is the sensory-deprivation chamber, the numbness you feel after sleeping the day-off; this dream that despondency fed every time you took the elevator to the 8th floor of H10 and were met with an aesthetical fart on the telly or every time the core was laid bare, exposed by bugs and cogs - because, yeah, everything feels slow, sluggish in Night City, as if the interplay between V and her numerous points of acquisition never quite met their intended target and instead underlined the facade of the whole structure in a way that feels relevant to the text, a text, not the one Cyberpunk 2077 is writing but the one written about and around it, a game that’s more than a game, filled to the brim with dead things that pretend to be alive. Anything to feel something in this place removed - so why not a shotgun blast?
A nowness without which the text of Cyberpunk would feel half-superfluous in truth. Suicide doesn’t happen without these empty pockets of play. My V needed this violence, this dishonesty, for her death to make sense of it all. But my affection only happens in the game’s jello, in this space where play's internal logic is superseded by the outbursts of tactile production riches. Sequences like the Heist or the Chimera boss-fight - one of Phantom Liberty’s many highlights -, our countless segues into the city's underbelly as societal observations games were never really well equipped to answer in the first place but which 2077 tackles with surprising softness at times, punctuations in the routine of car rides and murder contracts; the lead in a detective story that’s always about touch - whether pyrotechnical or intimate - at the end of the tunnel. A nowness - an entrapment. It’s all the same to V.
“Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of palergray.
Expanding-- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick,
the unfolding of his distance less home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.”
Sometimes I get so tense while playing games that I forget to breathe. My fingers tense up, just enough that the tendons jerk back a little but not enough that it actually hurts in the long run, intermittently gritted teeth ease their pressure every dozens of second or so to let me swallow a little and I lean forward from the back of my chair like anyone who’s ever lost the first two rounds in a LAN. What I am describing here is not the buildup of tension that hard games tend to inflict upon the player - there’s joy (and an exchange) happening in that trade of blows, I think. No, what this situation feels like to me is a voicelessness in the matter of the video-game. The game having and very much using its voice to suppress mine as an action that does not scream of authorial intent so much as it aims to render the player mute. This is what these worlds, in their openness, do to us. They bloat and gurgle most - if any - possibility for expression to emerge within their likeness - to impart a certain elasticity of being to the fiction and its characters. For play to go in more than one direction at a time and meet these undercurrents, make them integral parts of the text. Night City is different in that it’s aesthetically crude and conscious of what the city is to us (what drives the player to seek out its spectacle) yet, as the strongest - sometimes only - voice in play by virtue of its open-ended nature, it cannot let go of two conceptions essential to its successes ; an idea of the player as a set of neurotic impulses (which we are) drawn in parallel to its own view of itself as a space that both seeks and belies simulation. Peaceful cohabitation between Cyberpunk’s slew of systems was never on the cards and so the most salient question anyone can ask of 2077 isn’t whether it answers every political point of aesthetics that’s been ascribed - rather pointlessly - to the genre but instead see a translation of play’s tropes into an actuation of its game-world through the following question: Is Night City A Walkable Paradise?
“Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America,
and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.”
In one of my favourite early passages of Neuromancer, William Gibson describes a nowness. Through richly-textured streams of consciousness we get a glimpse of protagonist Case’s emotional ecstasy on the threshold between flesh and computer, a sort of strobe-lights reel akin to the religious experience of being visited by the Internet’s composite angel. This encounter with the world as perceived and rendered from our screens is the essence of Night City’s flash drive - that moment lived in the intersection, this longing that inhabits the mind and can only be met with an image of totality; every neon reflected in its corresponding surface, every aspect of reality densely explored by the weight of writing and asset-imprinted on the cornea itself. Baudrillard’s simulacrum realized. Night City is not a walkable paradise - it is a perceivable (video-game) one.
What I’m trying to get at is…we need an alternative. To get out of here. In this way 2077’s rendition of the "natural world" outside Night City is deeply moving to me; a barren, unstimulating expanse of polluted desert and dry grass that acts in contrast to everything else in Cyberpunk and makes itself vibrant whereas Wild Hunt's impressionistic canvases of aerial pine forests and ravaged country roads felt synthetic because, this time, there's no artifice. I drove there once in a haze. There was just too much light everywhere else. Blood spilled on halogen. Repetition, often empty conversations. An absent escape. So I just took Jackie’s ride and blasted past the Stateline, as fast as I could, because I wanted to remain in the game whilst simultaneously wanting out of it. Ditched my motorcycle and started walking, breathing a little in the shadow of wind turbines as the scenery unfolded before me. I think that’s due to this want - at least on my side - for the game world to work. Something’s leaking through the grapevine. We come back to open-worlds not because of their quality but because we believe they might one day attain the true colour of reflection and surpass their fragile status as simulated environments - hence the rise of A.I. and infinite terrain generation pushing a hollow artistic envelope. In this case a pedestrian motion invites a sort of contemplative boredom that is vital to traversal. Why else, for example, would CD Projekt RED insist on adding a fully functional metro system to Night City, years after the fact? A nowness. I value games where walking doesn’t feel redundant. I value this stride towards play outside of ravenous incentives supposed to inform the wider context of the story the game's trying to tell instead of distracting me, as something that smells like games but only binds us to physical limitations insofar as they evoke something within us. This is the heart of Cyberpunk 2077 - the thing it’s reaching for. A game trying to use the framework in order to bypass it. Unlimited budget in the service of capital’s immersive production of a nowness within which players could nest themselves. What V embodies then in my eyes is this effort to push past “the new and improved meaning vacuums, where the only thing that mattered, and the only thing that players could rely on and relate to, were their own individual experiences” created by the contemporary sandboxed open-world. Why would we wanna leave? And isn’t that wish for immersion worth examining in itself? Despite what it does to a human heart?
Night City is not strong enough to hold down the fort. But in instances like the one(s) I’ve just described it’s stumbling, perhaps half-knowingly, into player-engineered but space-emergent resonances, and the people at CDPR - for all their evident lack of swagger - know that too. This time V didn’t kill herself. She just stayed there in the heat of perpetual summer, jumping over rock geometries, listening to SAMURAI on the radio for a while, before riding back into the heart of the city one last time. I quit the game and got down to writing. There's so much more to life than this. But it’s also all there is. We're in it for the love of the game, for the slices of life - roleplaying for the briefest of moments, calling a dead friend's phone number, sharing a room with Judy for the night knowing full well the moment will pass, too. Pulling the trigger or, even, leaving Night City altogether. Whether V lives or dies and by which hands she chooses to do so matter equally because this fate is hers and hers alone, in that final pull-back of the curtains where we become mere observers of a story which - both by design and happenstance - never really belonged to us in the first place. It's impossible not to hold some regrets in departing from a perspective we willingly populated with our own thoughts and choices for so many hours yet becoming relevant to us at the exact moment agency stops being a factor. V walks - just not in the same city as us. Like this image of Reed at the end of Phantom Liberty drifting-off into the desert, towards the uncaring sun of empire. "Sand's fucking hot", V says. Burning at the proper temperature it will shrivel into new matter, becoming glass before scattering again like the ashen shards of a bygone mirror. We're always left to pick up the pieces, thinking that this time things will be different, and they never are, but we keep trying. A nowness is a phenomenon forever incomplete - affixed to the interactivity of the present, incapable of seeing beyond its own immersion. But it's also a possibility for change; this hope that, maybe one day, through the experience of others - with others - we could better understand ourselves. Walk alongside the rest of Night City. Touch the same soil as V.
A nowness–
"And somewhere he was laughing,
in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck,
tears of release streaking his face."
–Neuromancer, Chapter 3, William Gibson, 1984
2023
A word for Guillaume Ferran's musical delicacy here: This world is full of visual wind. Pastel minerals and all that jazz. Sound quarrels with space. The stone is teeming with human voices, humane thoughts. But he brings a throughline. A clarity of purpose to the evocative building blocks of culture put in place here. Nature is not a phantasm - it is a constant object of animated dialogue. Breath after breath. All we need do is listen.
Jusant does not care for the pain of the ascension. All it sees is a dark passage - the colours held within. Good. Dwell too long and you lose sight of what truly matters: Our toil, imagined or otherwise, will always bring us closer to shape. Memory is nothing but fickle, watery matter. We bend and love leaks. The dead and the unborn watch us. Time ebbs and flows in my body - this house of all houses.
Storm gathers. This other place. This unmoored Babel. It's not coming back. Our efforts were in vain and only we remain. Waiting for rain to hit the shore - soaked by association. That kind of primeval sensation software could only recreate in the aggregate. But that's the beauty of memory. There isn't a single drop of rain in Jusant. Yet here I am.
Souvenirs d'une éclaboussure.
Jusant does not care for the pain of the ascension. All it sees is a dark passage - the colours held within. Good. Dwell too long and you lose sight of what truly matters: Our toil, imagined or otherwise, will always bring us closer to shape. Memory is nothing but fickle, watery matter. We bend and love leaks. The dead and the unborn watch us. Time ebbs and flows in my body - this house of all houses.
Storm gathers. This other place. This unmoored Babel. It's not coming back. Our efforts were in vain and only we remain. Waiting for rain to hit the shore - soaked by association. That kind of primeval sensation software could only recreate in the aggregate. But that's the beauty of memory. There isn't a single drop of rain in Jusant. Yet here I am.
Souvenirs d'une éclaboussure.
1998
After hours. I am a single line across which all other lines unfold, slick, slipping. Going so fast the strands slide through the cracks of the emulator.
2:00 am. My automobile body funnelled into video-tunnels that stretch without end to the rhythm of nu-jazz beats. A drama that plays on repeat for my Pearl Blue Soul.
Someway, somehow, R4 reminds me of a Hong Sang-soo film.
It's a senseless comparison, played-out across mediums and genres but every time I come back to these tracks it persists, blends-in along the city lights and tire marks in my rear-view mirror.
There's a tension in this philosophy of drift, the joyous longing of century's sunset, that makes me pause for thought at the end of every race. The stories are so simple, the game presented with such expert straightforwardness, as to blur the feeling itself in Camarro-yellows.
Still, where I think this iteration of Ridge Racer joins the cinema of the author is in that insistence to make flows coexist - rub emotion and expression against one another in ways most often hidden - and leave the outbursts at the edges of the screen.
The speed of Ridge Racer is the pace of life itself but for all its glamour breathlessness the moments that truly stir are those near-misses, the curves in a length of road where the vehicle goes slightly out of control and you brush past a rival. The little encounters. The seconds where the heart stops. I wish I could've held-on to your hand a horizon longer.
Type 4s and margaritas, that’s all I want for the summer.
2:00 am. My automobile body funnelled into video-tunnels that stretch without end to the rhythm of nu-jazz beats. A drama that plays on repeat for my Pearl Blue Soul.
Someway, somehow, R4 reminds me of a Hong Sang-soo film.
It's a senseless comparison, played-out across mediums and genres but every time I come back to these tracks it persists, blends-in along the city lights and tire marks in my rear-view mirror.
There's a tension in this philosophy of drift, the joyous longing of century's sunset, that makes me pause for thought at the end of every race. The stories are so simple, the game presented with such expert straightforwardness, as to blur the feeling itself in Camarro-yellows.
Still, where I think this iteration of Ridge Racer joins the cinema of the author is in that insistence to make flows coexist - rub emotion and expression against one another in ways most often hidden - and leave the outbursts at the edges of the screen.
The speed of Ridge Racer is the pace of life itself but for all its glamour breathlessness the moments that truly stir are those near-misses, the curves in a length of road where the vehicle goes slightly out of control and you brush past a rival. The little encounters. The seconds where the heart stops. I wish I could've held-on to your hand a horizon longer.
Type 4s and margaritas, that’s all I want for the summer.
SUPERHOT.
What matters is what happens between these two words.
SUPERHOT.
It wants to peel back the layers of your skull.
SUPERHOT.
Feast on my flesh until nothing remains.
.
3 thoughts on SUPER[SUPER]HOT.
Mind - Katana reveals all; the swift executions and parry-play are at the essence of what works within this new framework of roguelike repetition because it prevents the action from jerking-off in bullet-time. The staccato begins to act in service of rhythmic motions where physicality is no longer a disembodied affair of firearms and trajectories locating the feedback loop in the anonymity of manikins instead putting our ever-fragile avatar at the center of the violence in ways that renders the thrills of deletion by putting emphasis on the cut. Distances and deflections. How to bridge the gap between the two. Invoking. Channeling. SUPERHOT.
Control - Hacks.exe; they elevate the core systems without rendering the whole ugly. It’s impossible to escape the allure of the metagame. “Killheal.hack” and “Lightreflex.hack” are kings. And kings do not matter in sequences whose escalating difficulty so clearly correlates with the aesthetics of kinesthesia - strategies are established in style before substance, a perfect action-run framed in replays, so challenge is (and must remain) a modular canvas here. Strong back-half. Exhausting waves met with zen. Repress the urge to shatter - obsidian is thy weapon. Sliced rubies and broken ores. A mist of forms. I wish the experience went further. I wish I didn’t have so many choices. I wish I could look somewhere else than myself by being tied to the grazing of bullets and the compression of space. At its purest SUPERHOT triggers like a reversion of time itself; me, knowing the momentum of damage and enemies so completely that I can speedrun the game. Play it, actually, at a regular pace. Ain’t that something. A slow game, but present.
Delete - Self-vore; masturbartory reflexivity bores me. But SUPERHOT was so close. Its gradual subtraction of every expansions made to the original concept pushes past the cringe by committing to the bit. One by one actions and movement mechanics are taken away from the player, thrown into the blender. But at the end of each metatextual step of euthanasia, we’re given the option to give up. Press [E] to access the text - end the level before it's even started. The game should have left us to rot in there. Let the player figure out new ways to still assert dominance over its environment in the absence of tools to do so. The game’s not inventive enough - in both mechanics and level-design - to do that. A shame. All that’s left, then, is a language only dispensed by the screen - our usual one-way mirrors. Ten minutes of me pressing [E] to get the syllables drooling out of my mouth. Sweet nothingness lost in Amygdalatropolis. Yelling that same sentence into the void.
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
[Just a hollow sense of progression and power]
HOT.
What matters is what happens between these two words.
SUPERHOT.
It wants to peel back the layers of your skull.
SUPERHOT.
Feast on my flesh until nothing remains.
.
3 thoughts on SUPER[SUPER]HOT.
Mind - Katana reveals all; the swift executions and parry-play are at the essence of what works within this new framework of roguelike repetition because it prevents the action from jerking-off in bullet-time. The staccato begins to act in service of rhythmic motions where physicality is no longer a disembodied affair of firearms and trajectories locating the feedback loop in the anonymity of manikins instead putting our ever-fragile avatar at the center of the violence in ways that renders the thrills of deletion by putting emphasis on the cut. Distances and deflections. How to bridge the gap between the two. Invoking. Channeling. SUPERHOT.
Control - Hacks.exe; they elevate the core systems without rendering the whole ugly. It’s impossible to escape the allure of the metagame. “Killheal.hack” and “Lightreflex.hack” are kings. And kings do not matter in sequences whose escalating difficulty so clearly correlates with the aesthetics of kinesthesia - strategies are established in style before substance, a perfect action-run framed in replays, so challenge is (and must remain) a modular canvas here. Strong back-half. Exhausting waves met with zen. Repress the urge to shatter - obsidian is thy weapon. Sliced rubies and broken ores. A mist of forms. I wish the experience went further. I wish I didn’t have so many choices. I wish I could look somewhere else than myself by being tied to the grazing of bullets and the compression of space. At its purest SUPERHOT triggers like a reversion of time itself; me, knowing the momentum of damage and enemies so completely that I can speedrun the game. Play it, actually, at a regular pace. Ain’t that something. A slow game, but present.
Delete - Self-vore; masturbartory reflexivity bores me. But SUPERHOT was so close. Its gradual subtraction of every expansions made to the original concept pushes past the cringe by committing to the bit. One by one actions and movement mechanics are taken away from the player, thrown into the blender. But at the end of each metatextual step of euthanasia, we’re given the option to give up. Press [E] to access the text - end the level before it's even started. The game should have left us to rot in there. Let the player figure out new ways to still assert dominance over its environment in the absence of tools to do so. The game’s not inventive enough - in both mechanics and level-design - to do that. A shame. All that’s left, then, is a language only dispensed by the screen - our usual one-way mirrors. Ten minutes of me pressing [E] to get the syllables drooling out of my mouth. Sweet nothingness lost in Amygdalatropolis. Yelling that same sentence into the void.
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
HOT
SUPER
[Just a hollow sense of progression and power]
HOT.
2024
POOLS kinda betrays itself. Frightening sonic precision gives way to impossible spaces that revel in their own exhibition. You can't make an art installation out of the Backrooms because then it turns an eerie human-made feeling - that moment where reality sips back through us - into something safe, a thing haunted by concepts more than consciouness.
Prime example of a bitch who be doing too much.
Prime example of a bitch who be doing too much.
2001
At the hearts of these rings lies a beautiful tangent of open-endedness.
Sat somewhere between full-on simulations where grenades stick to carapaces and the toy-box arcade of closed arenas, a kill in the Silent Cartographer was never just a kill, with pillars sinking into the subterranean, tubes of halogen concrete harnessing an old mass of secrets to which we already have an answer. It's not that the history of these places is irrelevant but what more can be told, exactly? The means have been laid out in front you - a floor of rifles is coming alive. Jet-engines in direct conversation with the sand. Rocket spores prong out of lush warthogs. Every round unearthing new verbs to wield in tacticality or pure idiocy. Say what you will about its cheesy renditions but Combat Evolved still feels like the most violent Halo - perhaps the only truly violent one. When I blow up a Grunt and watch their meagre corpse flail in the air searching for purchase there's shits and giggles, yes. But they’re also so obviously there. It's not drama. Not quite. But a body is flung all the same.
Immense places in my mind.
Another souvenir; piercing the Elites’ precious metal at age nine and hearing a death rattle that sounds like the growls of puberty. Moving on, with our guns. A frumious loudness. This assault rifle was always an absurd feat of sound-design, the kind of auditory blast that only ever sounded right with a low-polygon count. Without it Combat Evolved would be more hostile - an eco-manifesto lacking the punchline - spreading the atoms of the island instead of knitting them a little closer together with each bullet salvo. It's charmingly inelegant - only useful within the logics of Halo's choreographic freedom. During a recent playthrough I found myself spending a good minute or two facing a single Elite inside the sophomore forests of the Cartographer, desperately trying to finish him off, a whole crowd of collisions standing between me and him. But this gun’s a funny thing - only inflicting meaningful damage at intimate distances - and I was happy to dance amongst the tree trunks. Its shields are a fucking pain in the way they force you to repeatedly engage until one of us gets tired of waiting and the tango ends in short, purple murder. These spaces have to be negotiated by the both of us even if their programming only serves my curiosity when the dust settles. Kinesthesia drags out these encounters - before the squeeze of level-design - tentatively pushing me to prod around their geometries in order to decipher an imaginary arc; I shoot by artistry and kill by necessity. A life-injecting headshot.
They stood no chance.
Robert McFarlane, the great nature writer of the Anthropocene, once said that "trees make meaning as well as oxygen." I think about this often. I think about it now because Halo, though it has grown progressively bleaker over Bungie’s - and now 343’s - tenure, remains an object fascinated by hypernature springing forth from its epic vistas and how one may blend themselves within their stone foliage. In industry years, Combat Evolved is a time-worn artifact. Games felt more unknowable back then. The machine will transform again and we’re never going back. But what if? And what of the technologies and the trees? The needlers and the strings? Guns make meaning as well as death. Echoes in a brutalist mausoleum. Halo has always been about grooving in the remnants of ancient engines. No one lives here anymore. Every time you choose to look at the paint too closely it dissolves before your very eyes just like any other game. But these colours are all yours and what matters is the wish - a wish to stay here forever - and how it is sustained in the countenance of air - this idea that spectacle could truly be the place.
I think about the meaning shooters impart onto us - fantasies of metal evergreens, from Jupiter to Iraq, a vehicle for violence so deeply imbedded in the sense of identity games have built for themselves that we’re bound to a compromised vision. “If only you could talk to the monsters…Now that would be something.” I think not. Silence is worth its weight in salt. Yeah, we can talk about encounter flows and how good the gun feels to shoot - reduce language to a concise excision of meaning from game verbs - but I prefer the stop-start interrogations of synergy to immediate shotgun intents. A relationship to space told through thorough imprecisions. Shits and giggles and awe - and all the wonderful, terrible things in between. And maybe the Silent Cartographer ain’t all that in the end - a Library rocks harder indeed - but it’s given me the most juice for all these years. Green guy standing between these trees and those guns. Sacrificing my little marines, seeking the grand chorus within the pulp. Now two decades later, still idling on those shores, looking ahead to Destiny. All alone.
Gun pointed at the head of the universe.
Sat somewhere between full-on simulations where grenades stick to carapaces and the toy-box arcade of closed arenas, a kill in the Silent Cartographer was never just a kill, with pillars sinking into the subterranean, tubes of halogen concrete harnessing an old mass of secrets to which we already have an answer. It's not that the history of these places is irrelevant but what more can be told, exactly? The means have been laid out in front you - a floor of rifles is coming alive. Jet-engines in direct conversation with the sand. Rocket spores prong out of lush warthogs. Every round unearthing new verbs to wield in tacticality or pure idiocy. Say what you will about its cheesy renditions but Combat Evolved still feels like the most violent Halo - perhaps the only truly violent one. When I blow up a Grunt and watch their meagre corpse flail in the air searching for purchase there's shits and giggles, yes. But they’re also so obviously there. It's not drama. Not quite. But a body is flung all the same.
Immense places in my mind.
Another souvenir; piercing the Elites’ precious metal at age nine and hearing a death rattle that sounds like the growls of puberty. Moving on, with our guns. A frumious loudness. This assault rifle was always an absurd feat of sound-design, the kind of auditory blast that only ever sounded right with a low-polygon count. Without it Combat Evolved would be more hostile - an eco-manifesto lacking the punchline - spreading the atoms of the island instead of knitting them a little closer together with each bullet salvo. It's charmingly inelegant - only useful within the logics of Halo's choreographic freedom. During a recent playthrough I found myself spending a good minute or two facing a single Elite inside the sophomore forests of the Cartographer, desperately trying to finish him off, a whole crowd of collisions standing between me and him. But this gun’s a funny thing - only inflicting meaningful damage at intimate distances - and I was happy to dance amongst the tree trunks. Its shields are a fucking pain in the way they force you to repeatedly engage until one of us gets tired of waiting and the tango ends in short, purple murder. These spaces have to be negotiated by the both of us even if their programming only serves my curiosity when the dust settles. Kinesthesia drags out these encounters - before the squeeze of level-design - tentatively pushing me to prod around their geometries in order to decipher an imaginary arc; I shoot by artistry and kill by necessity. A life-injecting headshot.
They stood no chance.
Robert McFarlane, the great nature writer of the Anthropocene, once said that "trees make meaning as well as oxygen." I think about this often. I think about it now because Halo, though it has grown progressively bleaker over Bungie’s - and now 343’s - tenure, remains an object fascinated by hypernature springing forth from its epic vistas and how one may blend themselves within their stone foliage. In industry years, Combat Evolved is a time-worn artifact. Games felt more unknowable back then. The machine will transform again and we’re never going back. But what if? And what of the technologies and the trees? The needlers and the strings? Guns make meaning as well as death. Echoes in a brutalist mausoleum. Halo has always been about grooving in the remnants of ancient engines. No one lives here anymore. Every time you choose to look at the paint too closely it dissolves before your very eyes just like any other game. But these colours are all yours and what matters is the wish - a wish to stay here forever - and how it is sustained in the countenance of air - this idea that spectacle could truly be the place.
I think about the meaning shooters impart onto us - fantasies of metal evergreens, from Jupiter to Iraq, a vehicle for violence so deeply imbedded in the sense of identity games have built for themselves that we’re bound to a compromised vision. “If only you could talk to the monsters…Now that would be something.” I think not. Silence is worth its weight in salt. Yeah, we can talk about encounter flows and how good the gun feels to shoot - reduce language to a concise excision of meaning from game verbs - but I prefer the stop-start interrogations of synergy to immediate shotgun intents. A relationship to space told through thorough imprecisions. Shits and giggles and awe - and all the wonderful, terrible things in between. And maybe the Silent Cartographer ain’t all that in the end - a Library rocks harder indeed - but it’s given me the most juice for all these years. Green guy standing between these trees and those guns. Sacrificing my little marines, seeking the grand chorus within the pulp. Now two decades later, still idling on those shores, looking ahead to Destiny. All alone.
Gun pointed at the head of the universe.
At times, Into The Light feels almost pornographic in its deluge, showering us with rewards and explosions like the good puppies that we are - seemingly fated to drown in this bottomless loot pool brimming with returning fan-favourites and collector's items now shaded in precious gold and retrofitted with killer double-perks. Onslaught is an absolute banger, while Pantheon acts as the kind of pyrotechnical freak circus you can only cook at the top of your game - because make no mistake, Destiny in its present state is Bungie at the peak of their game. Both of these additions speak their respective truths :
One, nobody does a horde mode like Bungie. And two, no first-person shooter will ever work the very concept of boss fight within subjective/narrative confines like this franchise has for the past decade, times and again, by imagining new ways for a Tall Guy™ to interact with our faces. Whatever happens next to Destiny won't suck it all away into singularity, at least not until the servers run rout and we all smash our computers to smithereens.
Dream's end in a month's time.
I think it's cause for some last rites and celebrations.
One, nobody does a horde mode like Bungie. And two, no first-person shooter will ever work the very concept of boss fight within subjective/narrative confines like this franchise has for the past decade, times and again, by imagining new ways for a Tall Guy™ to interact with our faces. Whatever happens next to Destiny won't suck it all away into singularity, at least not until the servers run rout and we all smash our computers to smithereens.
Dream's end in a month's time.
I think it's cause for some last rites and celebrations.