i have been thinking about EXAPUNKS still, and how it emotionally connected with me a little better than a lot of classic cyberpunk stuff, despite not really being a Serious Narrative Game so much (soft spoilers but the ending is essentially the ending you'd give it if you were telling it as a spooky campfire story lmao)
in its world establishing sequence, it has you, the player character, try to scrape together money for life-saving medication by typing out the text from some rich asshole's receipt so it can be digitized, for a nickel. this is a job i have literally done in real life without any embellishment whatsoever, down to the exact payment i received. jobs very much like this are keeping me afloat while i make hoptix.
compare this to traditional cyberpunk, which tends to have what you could describe as a cautionary angle, a warning of what may come to pass, or you could also describe as a fear of poverty (and often, of poor people). but as some people have observed, we're already living in a cyberpunk dystopia, we just didn't get the neon, and fear of something which has already come to pass isn't actually useful anymore.
EXAPUNKS' setting is one where people are poor, and dying, and begging for corporations' scraps so they can try to pay for medicine. a world where people you know just disappear sometimes. and it immediately establishes you, the player character, as one of them, not as an above-it-all action movie hero navigating a world with a huge and growing poverty class to watch out for. and it does so using literal, actual real life scenes without any exaggeration. its setting, then, doesn't ask "what if this happens?", it asks "what if you could do something about it?"
and i've been thinking about it and feeling like maybe that's simply more useful. what good is telling us that it would be bad if gofundme were the largest healthcare company? yeah obviously that would be bad! and it is! it seems more helpful at this point to try to establish hope for the future. and that hope can come in all sorts of forms, and one of them might as well be "what if you could cut capitalism down with a cyber sword and there was a lot of neon around so it looked cool"
