Now that Cyberpunk 2077 is mostly patched and the controversy about the game's (lack of) functionality has subsided, it seems to be a decent game. In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 is a beautifully designed, rich, creative future world which incorporates many cultural influences.
Or is it an intricately designed mess of racial stereotypes and techno-orientalism?
The game, set in a future city in California "Night City", allows your character, the mercenary known as "V" to explore this open world as you try to deal with the aftermath of a failed heist and get ahold of a chip which enables immortality. Though your character is highly customizable, the default form seen in advertisements and trailers as well as the game cover is, of course, a white man (occasionally a white woman). Starting out, you have a Hispanic sidekick/friend, Jackie, who seems pretty culturally vague though he frequently peppers in Spanglish slang and speaks with a slight Cholo accent. Oh, but Jackie quickly dies a violent death to catalyze your own character development.
Night City, like much of the cyberpunk genre, tries to reflect globalization and cultural exchange in its world, depicting a variety of cultural influences and people of various ethnicities. I argue, however, that the multicultural image Cyberpunk 2077 tries to cultivate simply ends up falling into old racial tropes and into aesthetics of techno-orientalism.
Night City via CYBERPUNK 2077 - All Trailers 2012-2020 (in chronological order)
Techno-orientalism, as described by Roh, Huang, and Nui, is "the phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse” (Roh et al 2). It is frequently seen in the spec-fiction and scifi genres where Eastern aesthetics and characters are used in ways which evoke Western fears of Eastern dominance and old Orientalist attitudes detailed in Said's iconic framework. In the seminal cyberpunk work Bladerunner, the city is modeled on a bastardized future Tokyo though it is absent of any Asians-- or POC in general for that matter. In this new videogame, however, there are plenty of POC depicted-- just not flatteringly.
Dex DeShawn, notorious "fixer" (smuggler, black market specialist, information broker) as depicted in the game trailer.
The world of Night City is orientalized with its East Asian style influences like signage, architecture, and décor. Many images of the city are similar to Bladerunner at first glance due to the large neon and video adverts and signs depicting Asian people and words. These influences, the bread and butter of cyberpunk aesthetics, likely come from ambivalence, reflecting (racist and colonialist) fears as well as hopes/positive reactions to this perceived hyper-industrial, hyper-technological Asian future.
But Cyberpunk 2077 actually revolutionizes the genre by turning techno-Orientalism out onto non-Asian Others as well! Chicano/a/e and Black American as well as Haitian immigrant cultures are also used in this place of multicultural misrecognition to invoke fear of racial others in a globalized future. Ironically, in the midst of all this cultural diversity, ideas of a West and of white hegemony are still reinforced. To again quote Huang et al, “...while Orientalism defines a modern West by producing an oppositional and premodern East, techno-Orientalism symmetrically and yet contradictorily completes this project by creating a collusive, futurized Asia to further affirm the West’s centrality” (Huang et al, 7). Moreover, the way the exploration of virtual space functions both as the player in Night City and as the character in the cyberspace within that universe (in VR clubs and minigames) perpetuates a colonial mindset of cultural discovery. It almost feels like a multicultural punch-card filled with sensational experiences, all there for you to collect, all there for your pleasure. You are fundamentally operating in the game as a colonist no matter what the phenotype of your character is in your playthrough. Wendy Chun connects Orientalism and colonialism with "constructions of cyberspace, demonstrating how 'the narratives of cyberspace, since their literary inception, have depended on Orientalism for their own disorienting orientation'" (44, Gunkel).
In this world of racial others fit for your conquest, here are just a few examples of Cyberpunk's racialized depictions. There are racialized gangs (to be fair, ethnic and racial gangs are a recurring phenomenon in real life, but this is a fantastic future world; why fall into tired stereotypes?) which include the Valentinos, a Chicanx gang living in the industrial sector "Santo Domingo". This gang's aesthetic seems to draw from the Bloods and other street cultures. It replicates stereotypes of lawlessness, lack of empathy, machismo, unemployed-ness, etc in every single depiction of a Chicane or Latine character in the game.
Then there are the Voodoo Boys, the elusive hacker gang made up of Haitian immigrants. According to a narrator in a trailer I watched, "For them, Pacifica's just Haiti 2.0, their own island, cut off from the rest of the city". They enforce stereotypes of clannishness and associate Hatians with scary mysterious magic while painting them as an unassimilable foreign other. In fact, this gang betrays the player in the game after working together, showing that these Black foreigners are not to be trusted.
Next, there's the Tyger Claws, a generically East Asian gang which takes influence from the Triad and Yakuza. Its members often use katanas instead of guns. They are also said to trade in black market tech and sex-- common negative perceptions of East Asians with deep roots in US imperialism.
Though game director (white) Adam Badowski said that they hired consultants and drew from their "multicultural" workforce to depict these cultures "sensitively", I don't see how this work could have possibly been very extensive or thoughtful given the images that made their way into the game. Plus, from all the names and photos of developers on the game that I could see, there was a clear majority white men (this is common in gaming, but still). Badowski even went as far as to unironically say "…really just anything that you find in the game that could be construed as racist or offensive in any way. Those are all glitches, for sure". This obvious attempt to deny culpability sounds so ridiculous that I am quite surprised someone would think that could work at all.
All in all, this game is a crystal clear example of techno-Orientalism with its future narratives and reverse-colonization adjacent anxieties. There are plenty more disturbingly racist and orientalist elements of this videogame to speak of, but I think I have said enough here.
Sources
Roh, David S., et al. “Technologizing Orientalism.” Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, Rutgers University Press, 2015, pp. 1–19.
Gunkel, David J. Gaming the System Deconstructing Video Games, Games Studies, and Virtual Worlds. Indiana University Press, 2018.
McKeand, Kirk. “Cyberpunk 2077 DEVS Hired Consultants to Sensitively Depict Gang Members of Various Cultures.” TheGamer, 18 Sept. 2020, https://www.thegamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-consultants-gang-members-cultures/.
Yang, George. “Orientalism, 'Cyberpunk 2077,' and Yellow Peril in Science Fiction.” Wired, Conde Nast, 8 Dec. 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/orientalism-cyberpunk-2077-yellow-peril-science-fiction/.
Cox, Matt. “Cyberpunk 2077's E3 Demo Leans on Unimaginative Stereotypes.” Rock Paper Shotgun, Rock Paper Shotgun, 12 June 2019, https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/cyberpunk-2077s-e3-demo-has-weak-gunplay-and-unimaginative-stereotypes.
Kaplowitz, Jeremy. “CD Projekt Red Clarifies That Any Racist Content Found in Cyberpunk Is Probably Just a Glitch.” Hard Drive, 17 Mar. 2021, https://hard-drive.net/cd-projekt-red-clarifies-that-any-racist-content-found-in-cyberpunk-is-probably-just-a-glitch/.
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