Reminds me of a book. (Gaming)

by slycrel , Tuesday, December 15, 2020, 20:48 (1225 days ago) @ Cody Miller

If I had to sum up cyberpunk it would be -- a fight for the freedom of the individual, apart from an oppressive collective, in a super-human technical setting.

For those interested in digging in more to foundational cyberpunk, I'd recommend a copy of the hacker crackdown for a real-life example of the beginnings of cyberpunk culture. Written by Bruce Sterling, a sci-fi cyberpunk author who helped define the genre. It's primarily about hacker culture, and includes stories on steve jackson games (who did the GURPS cyberpunk role-playing games), operation sundevil, the birth of the EFF and more. In the spirit of early hacker manifestos, it was released for free digitally and can still be found that way today.

Bruce Sterling does a fantastic job of discussing hacker culture and the essence of what I feel is inherently foundational cyberpunk. In some ways I feel this culture has grown/endured and become multi-faceted, and can be found in many places now -- the white and black hat conferences along with the computer security industry (hello kevin mitnick!), the "dark web", the mobile jailbreaking community... just to name a few examples.

I'm very much looking forward to this game, and am still trying to get my hands on a ps5 before I play it. Should be fun, even if it's a bit buggy. =)