Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Cyberpunk 2077, Apr 2022

This article employs the logic of discursive transgression to address critical readings of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 which argue for the game to be a genre failure. The narrative- and worldbuilding-focused criticism of the game, prominent in its reviews, can be seen as fuelled by Cyberpunk 2077’s fallibility with regard to the functions of a literary formula and the interaction with the discursive expectations of the audience. By erasing, diminishing or mishandling themes central to current cultural and public debates, the game creates a near future vision in which they are deprived of relevance. As the article argues, the negative reception of that vision results in a transgressive revelation of discursive premises which become consolidated upon the confrontation with their disappearance. Thus, the game’s genre failure enables reflection on the significance of preconceptions in critical reception.

This article proposes ludonarrative harmonies as an empirical approach for game analysis, using Cyberpunk 2077 as a case study. This approach scrutinizes the dynamic relationship between story and play elements in a game, as the relationship changes dynamically during gameplay between consonance and dissonance. In this article, consonance is defined as the degree of cohesion between ludic and narrative elements in a game, whereas dissonance would describe a counterpoint, be it conflictive, complementary or otherwise furthering the aesthetic experience. Incoherence between story and play is described here as ludonarrative cacophony. Although inspired by Hocking’s posit of ludonarrative dissonance, this approach uses dissonance to describe a dynamic between elements, rather than qualifying the gameplay experience as antagonistic to the critic’s sensibilities. The intention is to provide a tool to identify general patterns in the relationship between a game’s ludic and narrative components.

The article proposes and discusses the term of ‘ludotopian dissonance’ in reference to flawed open-world design in computer role-playing games (cRPGs). Much like ludonarrative dissonance, this concept shall address a paradox of narrative credibility – this time, however, narrowed to the gameworld itself rather than to gameplay or storyline. This case study of Cyberpunk 2077’s world-building is supplemented with reflection upon the idea of openness or ‘openworldlness’ (‘what makes a given imaginary world truly open? Is it possible? Or is it viable for video games?’), as well as with research on explorable imaginary worlds (predominantly from the angle of transmedial narratology and interdisciplinary world-building studies). The aim of the article is to reiterate the necessity of design worlds that do not only serve as a container for storytelling, but also provide the players with an inhabitable, performative ludotopia which does not produce any dissonances between the credible storyworld and incredulous gameworld.

This article presents an analysis and interpretation of the Cyberpunk 2077 digital game in the perspective of contemporary reflection on cyberpunk as a cultural formation. The main hypothesis is that the game offers a narration that immerses players in the experience of psychosis and the fear of otherness. The article focuses on the phenomenon of psychosis as a dominant element of the game narrative. Methodologically, the text is embedded within hermeneutics positioned at the intersection of literary, philosophical and game studies discourse. Clinical descriptions and psychological works on the phenomenon of psychosis were used to ground this reflection. Critical reading of the narrativized fear of the other in Cyberpunk 2077 shows that the game nostalgically returns to the phobias projected by the cyberpunk cultural formation in the previous century.

This article introduces multiverse ethnography as a systematic team-based qualitative method for studying the mechanical, structural and experiential properties of video games and other technological artefacts. Instead of applying the ethnographic method to produce a single in-depth account, multiverse ethnography includes multiple researchers carrying out coordinated synergetic ethnographic work on the same research object, thus producing a multiverse of interpretations and perspectives. To test the method, 41 scholars carried out a multiverse ethnography on two video games, Cyberpunk 2077 and Among Us. Explorative thematic findings regarding both titles are reported and methodological implications of multiverse ethnography are discussed.

With increasing technological capabilities, video games provide ever more expansive virtual worlds for players to explore. Designers employ various mechanics and level design principles to encourage such exploration. However, what motivates people to explore in virtual environments, and which approaches are successful, is not yet clearly established. Methods for measuring player experience often take place retroactively after a play session, relying on recall, and are thus prone to missing less salient events and their motivations. Journaling events as they occur allow promises to be a suitable method of collecting data, but presents a challenge in aggregating data points due to their freeform nature. This makes it difficult to identify overarching patterns of exploration behaviour. We present an exploratory study in devising a journaling protocol for gathering information during gameplay sessions, focused on documenting moments of exploration in a manner that balances ease of data capture and data evaluation. We describe our efforts in prototyping this journaling method and how we used it to analyse Cyberpunk 2077 and several other game designs. Our results show that exploration occurs in a pattern of event → expectation → resolution. The motivation to explore depends on the expectations that a game raises through its marketing and design. At the same time, exploratory behaviour going unrewarded by the game quickly reduces the desire to explore. When recording instances of exploration, the addition of emotion words is essential in order to properly contextualize the information. This article lays the foundation for documenting exploration in games, as well as other emotional or behavioural constructs that require in-the-moment data collection.