Postcyberpunk, This it covers things well. Options

[sunnyside]

It's a term that I've been seeing cropping up here and there increasingly. And I think it does a decent job of describing where I think SR has gone.

You can poke around
http://slashdot.org/features/99/10/08/2123255.shtml
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcyberpunk
If you'd like

Basically the differences are.

* Postcyberpunk tends to deal with characters who are more involved with society. <Cyberpunk chars tended to stand out with their pink mohawks and whatnot and often be downright anti social. PCP chars blend in.>

* Protagonists of postcyberpunk are more often young urban professionals with more social status. <The old school punks lived out of coffin motels or in crappy apartments. How many of our runners are living it up?>

* In cyberpunk, the alienating effect of new technology is emphasised, whereas in postcyberpunk, "technology is society". <I don't even try explaining the idea of technoshock to the younger set anymore>

* Includes a sense of humor, as opposed to the frequently hardboiled nature of cyberpunk.


Thoughts?

[Blade]

Pretty spot on, even though I like to play Shadowrun cyberpunk from time to time, complete with rockerboys (my last character is one) and pink mohawks.

[Wesley Street]

You missed an important bit with your first point:

Postcyberpunk tends to deal with characters who are more involved with society, and act to defend an existing social order or create a better society.

Cyberpunk was essentially about survival in the face of hopelessness. Post-cyberpunk is about making things even a wee bit better through the distribution of knowledge to the masses. In cyberpunk, only the elite and underground few have computers and are at war with one another. In post-cyberpunk, everyone has access to information. In cyberpunk, information technology is treated like a form of magic. In post-cyberpunk, information technology is part of the everyday landscape.

That wiki article gives a good example of post-cyberpunk: Ghost in the Shell. Though dystopian, the boot heel that crushes the masses is ignorance, fear and greedy politics rather than a faceless corporation / the cops / the government.

[Backgammon]

Cyberpunk was about the fears that grew out of the 70s and 80s.

Thirty years later, we have new fears. Cyberpunk had to evolve, and post-Cyberpunk is what we have. I mean, it used to be whacked out to think about a corporate suit walking down the street apparently talking out loud to nobody, because he was in fact talking into his internal headphone. Today people routinely talk out loud to apparently nobody because they're talking into diminutive Bluetooth earpieces.

Shadowrun, as a published game, would be a failure if it clung to cyberpunk. People wouldn't see the point of it (save for us hardcore nuts). I think Shadowrun does well in keeping with the postCyberpunk curb, even leading it IMO.

[TKDNinjaInBlack]

Although the setting has mostly gone postcyberpunk to keep up with the zeitgeist of the SF Cyberpunk evolution, the core ideas remain largely cyberpunk. Our characters aren't trying to change the world, but just get by from run to run, and maybe, when they hit that "filled cup of wealth" phase, retire and remain untraceable. Unless of course you are running a campaign to spread the wealth of injustices to an ignorant population, we are still more or less playing a cyberpunk game in a postcyberpunk realm.

[CanRay]

Good example of Post-Cyberpunk is the Graphic Novel series "Transmetropolitan".

Check it out, lots of good things to steal from it as well.

My group is doing a Post-Cyberpunk thing in a Cyberpunk Universe right now. They're still in a decaying, dreary enviroment, but it's being encroached upon by the "Shiny Happy People" that broadcast SINs and are slaves with their digital chains weightless against them.

And they're doing an altruistic thing ($Diety chips are actually a Winternight-Remnants plot! I'll let you guys guess what it is.).

Sure, they're only doing it because of the money, but they're also doing it for the right reasons...

"A Paris Hilton Clone just ambushed us with a TABLE!"

[sunnyside]

Just because it bears mentioning. You can get issue number 1 of Transmet for free at
http://www.dccomics.com/graphic_novels/?gn=1719

As you know, the first try is always free...

[Lionhearted]

sadly one try is all that is needed to get you hooked

[Wesley Street]

Volumes One through Six of Transmet are good. Felt like, with the second half, Warren Ellis' experiment in "decompression" in comics story telling (lengthening scenes to last several pages a la manga) was a bit of a rip-off. 2020 Visions by Jamie Delano did it better but it's out of print.

[It trolls!]

I consider myself to be one of the "younger crowd" being born in '83 and never really having experienced many of the fears that influenced the genre of cyberpunk.
My problem is, I never really "got" cyberpunk. mostly because it's most defining trait to me is the latent technophobia. It always struck me as highly reactionary. And well, nowadays many of the major cyberpunk works could be relabeled steampunk because of their visions of "future" computer technology having been paced by actual development to the point where it strikes me as outright ridiculous.
I reread the Sprawl-trilogy some time ago and it felt similar to Jules Verne (only that I wouldn't compare Gibson and Verne on the artistic level).
Visions of what might be but has been long outdated by time.

[Glyph]

I think Shadowrun has adapted so well to post-cyberpunk because it really only had a toe or two in the cyberpunk pool to begin with. You'll always have the purists who think the setting should either be a group of stone-cold professional criminals, or an assortment of losers who rail against the system but are powerless in the end.

Shadowrun does have a thin veneer of grit, realism, and professionalism, but it actually is more about a romanticized, action-movie version of semi-good-guy criminals fighting 'the man" than it is about cyberpunk. And that's good, because honestly, I have a hard time taking the goofy metaplot seriously.

Shadowrun has thrived where other cyberpunk games have failed because it is more than mere cyberpunk. In the sense of asking how the world would adjust to the sudden appearance of things previously considered myths and legends, Shadowrun predated Laurel K. Hamilton and those who came after her. The transhumanist theme is running strong, and Magic only provides one more avenue for it to take. I honestly prefer a vision of a dark, uncertain but not uniformly bleak future to the defeatist cynicism of cyberpunk games (the books are less so - cyberpunk novels often are about the protagonists changing the world for the better).

[sunnyside]

Actually I agree with Glyph. I got into SR in 2nd edition. And one thing I liked about it over CP2020 is that Shadowrun "made sense". In CP2020 the corps were stupid oppresive, they'd do ridiculous stuff with no regard for the bottom line.

A lot of CP2020 doesn't fit together. SR basically fit together from the start. The world, crazy as it was, made sense.


And really it's only a small fraction of SR games at any point that did pink mohawk style.

[Ravor]

I'm sorry, but you lost me when you said that the Sixth World "made sense", I'm sorry, but half-horror or not, there is no fragging way that the Great Ghost Dance redrew the map.

[Glyph]

Sure, the metaplot is goofy, and I admitted as much, but I do think Shadowrun tacks to the right side of the line between making a dark, dangerous future, and making a distopia that is hopeless beyond logic or reason. History is full of empires falling, corrupt institutions being overthrown, and ordinary people making an extraordinary difference.

Sometimes Shadowrun can veer a bit too close to cyberpunk, with power players and organizations that are railroading plot devices rather than realistic antagonists. But at least Shadowrun has things like Mothers of Metahumans.

[Ravor]

History is also full of oppressed masses who are either unwilling or unable to achieve freedom, and revolts against corrupt institutions only resulting in the new Masters being just as bad or worse than the old Masters.

Personally I like the Universal Brotherhood far more than Mothers of Metahumans. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

[MYST1C]

And one thing I liked about it over CP2020 is that Shadowrun "made sense".
[...]
A lot of CP2020 doesn't fit together. SR basically fit together from the start. The world, crazy as it was, made sense.

Funny - to me the world of CP2020 has always made more sense: no millions of Native Americans appearing over night, no tiny countries with bubble economies jumping out of the box...
Politically and economically CP2020 had the more coherent world, IMHO. Then again, SR is definitely the more fun game.

[Glyph]

History is also full of oppressed masses who are either unwilling or unable to achieve freedom, and revolts against corrupt institutions only resulting in the new Masters being just as bad or worse than the old Masters.

Personally I like the Universal Brotherhood far more than Mothers of Metahumans. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/cyber.gif)

My point was the Shadowrun has both of them. I don't mind the dark stuff, and I don't mind a dystopian feel to the game. I don't like it when it's nothing but doom and gloom. PC's should have to face cruel odds, unpalatable choices, and situations where there is no easy resolution. But they should still be able to win the occasional victory, or make a difference somewhere.

[sunnyside]

I'm sorry, but you lost me when you said that the Sixth World "made sense", I'm sorry, but half-horror or not, there is no fragging way that the Great Ghost Dance redrew the map.

Cyberpunk already had suspension of disbelief in the form of believing in the future you ride virtual sharks on the internet to hack things. Or that "wire reflexes" will in any way work in 50 years.

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. In CP2020, I forget if it was an adventure module or something, some old artwork has been discovered and the big bad corporation wants to destroy it. You know, because it's art. And so your punk wants to go save it.

In SR a corp would be interested in grabbing any ancient artwork to sell it (or maybe it'd be magical, something like that).

Stuff like that.


SR just throws magic into the mix.

But within that context it rolls with it. Great Dragon awakening into a new world? Do an interview, figure out to ask about the distribution rights, do a cable show. Get rich, build a fortune, run for President. That sort of stuff was a breath of fresh air after time with the cancer causing game where we'd delt with dragons supposedly just as old and smart who just sat on gold (and since the GM was running them no smarter tactically than a person, dumber even as a PC would have at least set up traps and stuff).

[hobgoblin]

heh, while diamond age may be a good book, the writing is as dry as tinder more often then not...

as for cyberpunk vs postcyberpunk, i think the opening of the slashdot text, with its warning about label-mongering, says it best...

i keep wanting to ask some reviewer or similar if they have some kind of checklist for putting a work of art into one box vs another, or if they just make stuff up as they go along.

[Ravor]

Where-as I find the idea of NAN, the Tirs, a Dragon actually winning a national election, Free SINs for all after Crash 2.0, Technos going from hated "X-Men" to fairly accepted in the span of a year, ect, FAR more silly than the idea that some corp middleman would want to use company resources to destroy some artwork that offended him.

[shuya]

while shadowrun has very obvious roots in cyberpunk, to me the major theme of the game, and perhaps one of the less-discussed in a purely philosophical-thematic sense, has always been transhumanism. many of the complaints i've heard from lots and lots and lots of CP-fans about shadowrun is that it's "CP with tolkien," i.e. they focus too much on the fantasy origins of the "other half" of the shadowrun world, while ignoring its basis as a leap forward in genetics and a new type of human who is in some sort of developmental symbiosis with the ever-changing nature of the world.

SR is cool (and perhaps somewhat unique) because of the way it combines many different aspects of transhumanist thought - spontaneous environmental evolution (i.e. The Awakening), cybernetic augmentation, the growing importance of computers and information as a new paradigm for human societies (the techno-literati hacker class, basically), and then SR4's expounding of these concepts, especially with the blurring of the awakening/information age (technomancers) and the introduction of gene- and nano-tech in Augmentation.

while the giant mishmash of themes may at times make Shadowrun seem like an unwieldy universe, it does leave SR open for a "slipstream" fiction style of storytelling, moreso than traditional fantasy or traditional cyberpunk narratives.

[hobgoblin]

Where-as I find the idea of NAN, the Tirs,

israel?

a Dragon actually winning a national election,

heh, thank the players for that (iirc, there was mail in vote cards at the back of a book around the time)

Free SINs for all after Crash 2.0,

heh, may not the be smartest, but it was the fastest solution for getting back to something close to status quo...

Technos going from hated "X-Men" to fairly accepted in the span of a year,

media blitz by a megacorp and a AI? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

hell, check present day usa election. even in nations where one cant vote, the coverage is somewhat heavy imo...

ect, FAR more silly than the idea that some corp middleman would want to use company resources to destroy some artwork that offended him.

i say potato, you say potato (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Wesley Street]

I say "taters." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[HappyDaze]

israel?

Israel didn't pop up near as fast as the Tir and with as little outside help. Had the Tir developed more slowly and 'naturally' I'd have liked it a lot better, especially if it had begun it's life hostile to the NAN and getting heavy support from the USA/UCAS during formation.

[psychophipps]

Israel didn't pop up near as fast as the Tir and with as little outside help. Had the Tir developed more slowly and 'naturally' I'd have liked it a lot better, especially if it had begun it's life hostile to the NAN and getting heavy support from the USA/UCAS during formation.

Besides, Israel is still here via blood, sweat and tears. Tir is still there...umm...because all the non-elves decided to just leave...or something?