re: Cyberpunk 2077 Review Thread (Current Metacritic: 90 on PC) - Added PS5, PS4 Notes

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It all starts with character customization. You’ll pick a background for V -- nomad, street rat or corporate shill -- and then dive into an incredibly robust character editor, save for one feature. While you’re able to alter V’s appearance down to the freckles, nails and genitals, there are only two options when it comes to gender identity and voice acting: male or female. There’s no option for V to be nonbinary, responding to “they” or “them,” and this is an oversight in a work of speculative fiction. Nonbinary pronouns are common in mainstream consciousness even today, and it’s stubborn (at best) to imagine a future with cellular head implants, but without a more comprehensive understanding of gender identity.

This choice is especially egregious because Cyberpunk 2077 fetishizes ideas of gender fluidity elsewhere, namely in NPCs and advertisements. One common in-game ad features a feminine model with an obvious, large penis tucked into her leotard, standing next to the slogan, “Mix it up.” The poster is bright yellow and plastered all around Night City, despite the fact that developers at CD Projekt RED are aware that many fans find it exploitative and transphobic. Every time I see it in-game, I’m reminded of the studio’s easy dismissal of these concerns, and it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

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In my 40-plus hours in Night City, I never met a single character of any significance whom the game made clear was trans, and one of the only queer-coded characters I encountered was an extremely unsavory cybernetic surgeon who does extremely unsavory things. I did spot a trans flag on one character’s vehicle, though that hardly counts as positive trans representation and doesn’t even necessarily mean the character is trans. It felt more like a way for Cyberpunk 2077’s creators to say they had included positive trans representation without actually putting thought into it or making trans people a visible part of the makeup of Night City.

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It’s a relief not to be in the all-white world of The Witcher 3, and there’s a realistic range of languages, body types, skin colors, gender presentations, and sexualities. The snippets of all this that we saw pre-release made many potential players, myself included, anxious about how these identities would be deployed in the game. Much of it seemed offensive or trope-y, the surface appearance of diversity without much thought or sensitivity behind it. As a white, queer trans man, I can only speak to some of the portrayals from my experience, and there’s plenty of the game I haven’t seen yet. But so far, all the game’s representation, the kinds of things many of us rightly demand from video games, feels employed more for color in the game’s futuristic world, or because it’s been used in cyberpunk media before. The world is heavily influenced by Japanese culture, because cyberpunk works do that. There are queer people because everyone in the game’s world indulges their sexual desires to their fullest. There are trans people because everyone’s modifying their bodies in all kinds of ways. The world’s diversity doesn’t feel forced, but race, queerness, or transness don’t feel like topics the developers are interested in specifically addressing or exploring. Similar to how I felt about The Last of Us 2, Cyberpunk’s diversity is more visible than we’ve seen in many big-budget games before, but it doesn’t feel like it matters.

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