The usual suspects of indie TTRPG Twitter are doing "Some Thought Criminals (we never name any names) are Doing Cyberpunk Wrong because No True Cyberpunk is ever about anything except multi-marginalised people with no money at all desperately trying to survive The Man" again, by which standard I guess most of my Twitter TL is a cyberpunk lyric game and all such designers should conclude their work is fucking done, right?

The thing about sneering that cyberpunk games that offer ways to make in-character money Aren't Twue Cyberpunk is that it posits cyberpunk as a genre where the impoverished but plucky win against authoritarianism, corporate power, alienation and immiseration solely because Friendship Is Magic; fairy stories in which deadly earnest Ana Mardoll uwu vibes defeat capitalism.

✨We found the ethical consumption under capitalism, you guys, you just weren't punk enough in your cyber for it, you ideologically unsound reactionaries!✨

Good grief, yes, there are critiques to be made of the prevalence of cyberpunk games which cast you as the fucking cops. But "oh yeah if your characters (seek to) make money it's No True Cyberpunk" just sweepingly discards the entire moral question that underlies the now-trite soundbite of "ethical consumption under capitalism": how do we navigate the fact that we live embedded in a system with no unstained choices; where staying alive necessitates choices between flavours of complicity, not complicity or Not Complicity; that money is, yes, a thing we pursue — whether we'd like to or not, and that money — bloodstained, complicit, capitalist money — is the only thing that empowers you beyond bare subsistence survival to even attempt to make any difference to the world?

"Well I want my cyberpunk to have the moral complexity of a Saturday morning cartoon, actually" is valid. You're allowed to want that. Please shut the fuck up with demanding every cyberpunk TTRPG has to be exactly that or be condemned as Ideologically Suspect, you censorious shits.

And if your reaction is "well that's not what that criticism MEANT when it said that," gosh, you know what? I think you can actually predict exactly what my unimpressed response might be to "oh you're supposed to infer something you don't find objectionable instead of reading the actual words!"


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