Mike Pondsmith: Cyberpunk is Full of Politics
In 1988, Mike Pondsmith created the pen&paper base for Cyberpunk 2077, and in his latest interview for Video Games Chronicle told us why there is no escaping from politics, corporations, and difficult questions in the Cyberpunk universe.
Mike Pondsmith, creator of Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPGs, the prototype for CD Projekt Red's work, has just been interviewed by Video Games Chronicle and has no hesitation in admitting that Cyberpunk is full of politics. As well as everything else around us.
“It’s not politics in terms of right or left, or even conservative versus liberal… everything is political. Human beings are political. First we got food, then we got prostitution, then we got politics. And we might have gotten politics before prostitution, but I’m not sure."
According to Pondsmith, technology is a very good tool for balancing power - it allows to gain independence. Example? YouTube. However, it also has controversial aspect, such as diminishing privacy and "corporations following us everywhere."
"A big part of what Cyberpunk talks about is the disparities of power and how technology readdresses that. Technology has created levellers. I don’t have to go to some network to get a TV show made. [...] Suddenly I can do radical, interesting and heavily political things because technology is my enabler. I tell people that Cyberpunk is a warning not, ‘hey, this is going to be great,’” he said. “We are getting technologies now that are outstanding, things that I thought would be way out of our reach before 2020. For example, we have a group of people who are going to be featured in our next edition and they have cyberware hooked up. They’ve got cyber arms and legs and they look like characters from Cyberpunk. We have that capability. So if we have that, what are we going to do with it? How are we going to make the world work? How are we going to make sure that the right people use that technology responsibly? Do we really want corporations structuring how our lives work?"
According to the creator, the role of the game is to ask questions about technology and how the world should use it. So what can Cyberpunk 2077 teach us? It seems that if we follow technological progress blindly, we have a rather bleak future ahead of us.
