I think I’m getting tired of cyberpunk.

I’ve been deep into the cyberpunk genre since at least high school, reading, watching, and playing everything I could find. It was science fiction that actually resonated with me; computers and body modification and AI all seemed much more pressing, more real than space travel and distant planets, let alone magic and wizards and vampires. When I played Cyberpunk 2020, something I started doing at about 16 years old, I embraced the dystopia of the setting and leaned into the idea that a better way to play the game was a grittier, grimier way to play the game. Even as I lightened up a bit about black market modifiers and blunt trauma damage, the game was an inherently grim one. One of my gaming friends in college reflected on a Cyberpunk game we played where his character was killed at the hands of another PC, the second of a series of exchanges that killed half the party in the span of two sessions. It was actually a great ending for how much intrigue had built up between the characters, but it could still be summed up in three words:

“The future sucks.”

Those are the watchwords of not just Cyberpunk 2020, but arguably the entire genre. Neuromancer is not a book about a hero who changes the world, it’s about a character who, through acting in his own self-interest, releases one of the biggest existential threats the world has yet seen and then nothing happens. William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, George Alec Effinger and other preeminent cyberpunk authors were at their best when writing characters who accepted the worlds around them even as the readers were drawn in to how alien yet upsettingly familiar they were. Good cyberpunk made you think because, like all good science fiction, it was the issues of the present cast upon a vision of the future. The problem is that those visions of the future are here, and yeah, the future sucks.

It’s an interesting time to get tired of cyberpunk; there isn’t a better time to be a fan of the Cyberpunk RPG than right now. And don’t get me wrong, seeing a setting I was enraptured by 22 years ago rendered in 4K with ray tracing is something of a dream. I’ve played through Cyberpunk 2077 several times now, gotten most of the endings, tried all three lifepaths. And the game is interesting: As a story it’s great cyberpunk, a protagonist’s decline and fall mirrored by the decline and fall of the celebrity terrorist in their head. All of the endings are pitch perfect noir, no real happy ending to be seen. The gameplay, though, is different. Inevitably you get to the end of the game and are walking death; whether you’re brainhacking, shooting, or disemboweling with mantis blades, the game devolves into power fantasy and stays that way up until the moment you trigger the endgame. It’s an appropriate match for a TTRPG setting that brought us 30mm man-portable rifles and gatling shotguns and full-conversion cyborgs, but it’s an odd match to the genre. Cyberpunk 2077 managed to provide both power fantasy and noir nihilism; I’m discovering I want neither.

I’ve never been much for power fantasy, but I’m getting tired of the hard-boiled fatalism and grim looks into the human condition, too. As it turns out, it’s not empowering to play at ‘the future sucks’ while you have to look out your window and contemplate the same. If I want to have any escapism in my gaming, I need to step a bit further afield with what I’m doing. Escapism as a concept is central to the appeal of roleplaying games, but it’s also hard to pin down because it’s so different for so many people. Cyberpunk can provide escapism, but so can horror; it’s just going to look different than a typical fantasy or space opera game’s version of escapism would. The key is letting a player be somewhere other than reality, and how they want to do that is going to vary significantly from person to person.

Let me start off by saying that my own tiring of cyberpunk doesn’t have much to do with the genre’s evolution or lack thereof; if anything, the fact that cyberpunk RPGs are rooted in tropes from the 80s helps them be more, not less, escapist works. Designers attempting to make more evolved, more topical cyberpunk works (like Hard Wired Island, at least as far as promo is concerned) have ended up not only not interesting me but outright alienating me; playing pretend with ‘fighting the power’ in a way that evokes the real world is depressing, and framing it in a genre like cyberpunk where there weren’t supposed to be any ‘good endings’ is worse. Putting the cyberpunk framing aside, I think my own aversion to ‘fight the power’ narratives is a great place to start talking about escapism. Why isn’t a game framed around real-world power struggles escapist? Well, those struggles are real, and even if the designer has no real grounding in political theory they should be able to arrive at some fundamental understanding of why the world doesn’t work that way. And indeed, that’s what most games with some attempt at grounded political objectives feel like: A crash course in understanding why nothing happening in the game could ever happen in real life. I already know that there’s no meaningful political change coming from these games, so even play-acting that just feels…hollow. Depressing.

Escapism truly comes from fantastical opportunity. For me, one of the genres which presents so much of this (even if outside observers disagree) is post-apocalyptic fiction. Especially if you are in a position where you must ingest and assess the tragedies and iniquities of the modern world on a daily basis, the idea of erasing everything and starting again is so incredibly interesting. And it’s worth noting here: This is escapism. Being interested in the idea of blowing everything up and starting over is very, very (very very) different from trying to actualize that. We’re here in the fictional world, we’re playing. And yeah, playing at remaking civilization, getting by on grit and old-world knowledge…that’s fun. Instead of making you face grim reality, it opens up thought-provoking questions. What would you do? What would you change? How would life be different?

It kind of goes without saying that those threads run straight through fantasy and a lot of science fiction. Space opera has much less allegorical relevance than it did in the 1960s, but it’s an intriguing refuge for those who are dismayed at living in a world where it feels like there’s so little left to explore. Magic is fictional empowerment, on one side feeding power fantasies while on the other making demands of you to put a stake in the ground around what sort of character your, well, character has. At least, when *I* want magic in my escape it makes demands on you. The inherent issues with ‘shoot lightning out of your hands’ or ‘fly a spaceship around the galaxy’ is that the fantasy is kind of unmoored from anything. This viewpoint probably explains why I was so drawn to cyberpunk when I was younger; it’s easy to feel grounded in a setting that is itself grounded to the projections and anxieties of the real world. There is a more obvious ‘why’ to the ‘what’ of giant guns, cybernetic enhancements, and vectored thrust vehicles. It’s an interesting tightrope for an escapist fantasy to walk: real enough to let you identify with it, not so real it depresses you in the process.

As I’ve grown older I’ve simultaneously demanded less ‘grounding’ from my escapism as well as changed my perspective of what ‘grounded’ actually is. Less grounding isn’t no grounding, mind you; I’ve changed from my college days where I infamously said ‘no magic’ as a GM but I’m still going to look side-eyed at the patent nonsense of the ill-explained and oddly non-diegetic D&D magic system. My group even got me to play a Jedi in a Force and Destiny game, though there I railed so hard against the nonsensical absolutism of Dark and Light that the GM just went with it and let me play a Bendu. Even so. Set the magic, supernatural, or straight-up superhuman in a setting where it is consistent and it matters, and then I can escape.

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This may be the obvious play, but it still applies here. In The Matrix, Agent Smith gets a series of monologues while he’s trying to mentally break Morpheus. At one point, he says that The Matrix was originally set up as a paradise, but it failed because the human mind couldn’t make sense of such a world. Now I’m not going to go the direction of Agent Smith about humans and suffering, but the broader idea does make sense to me. Even in our fantasies, even in these games that we’re playing for fun, our ability to imagine things and places we couldn’t dream of in real life are still grounded to our understanding of the world. We have evolved such finely tuned mental responses like ‘accomplishment’ and ‘satisfaction’ to help us put in the work in a hard world that we lucked into evolving in. Our play works best when it feels like our work, as dour as that may seem.

But that’s the beauty of gaming: We can escape. We may want to be faced with big problems to match our big settings, but the imagination truly knows no bound when it comes to where we can envision ourselves. We do want to be grounded; we want to feel like we’re accomplishing something, not just shooting lightning out of our hands into a narrative vacuum. But as I learned when I was younger, grounding need not mean making things harder, sucking the power fantasy out of the room, and reminding everyone of the real world. There is of course room for the grim and gritty, but there’s also room for the soaring over-the-top. Where people want to go in their escapes will always be different, but gaming has a way of inspiring the imagination. After all, the only thing that is truly needed for escapism is a vision of the world you’re escaping into.

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