Particularly within visual media, genre may be thought of as a way of looking, a kind of thematic and ideological point of view (POV) that distills the innumerable complexities of reality into narrative and aesthetic patterns that work toward imparting rhetorical stances to audiences. For example, the generic POV of the Western privileges guns and open landscapes, inviting an onslaught of cultural associations; guns and land in Westerns often produce depictions of criminality juxtaposed with honor inside ideological frameworks of freedom. While the literal POV produced through camerawork incorporates visuals (e.g. mise-en-scène, camera angles, etc.) a generic POV functions more figuratively, encompassing how generic media uses those visuals toward thematic and ideological ends. If camera POV concerns what audiences see, generic POV concerns why. The implications of what a given piece of generic media allows audiences to see and thus encourages them to think about, incidentally and implicitly directing their attention away from whatever is unseen. In this post, I explore generic POV alongside the literal POVs of two cyberpunk video games: the first-person game Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt RED, 2020) and the top-down third-person game The Ascent (Neon Giant, 2021).
The boxed-in effect of The Ascent’s top-down third-person perspective produces a visual overabundance of information that makes the game’s world claustrophobic, whereas Cyberpunk 2077’s first-person perspective—despite giving players a lesser degree of visual omnipotence— grants them a greater sense of freedom. As an example: in The Ascent, players can often see behind walls and around corners due to the top-down POV, often spotting enemies and/or loot from positions that would not be visible to their avatar. On the other hand, Cyberpunk 2077 players’ inability to see behind walls or around corners constantly generates visual suggestions of opportunity.
The overabundant visuals common to cyberpunk urbanity thus become less claustrophobic, and more inviting—what’s behind a given wall is unknown, potentially (and often) a reward or something exciting for the player to do. The divergent ways these two games illustrate players’ affordances of geographic exploration within cyberpunk cities draw attention to the “possessive individualism that motivates the main characters in cyberpunk [fiction]” (Alphin 2). Caroline Alphin’s book on neoliberalism in cyberpunk complicates the anticapitalist cultural critiques cyberpunk media is often assumed to possess; Alphin identifies the genre, when framed as a mass-market product, as a “force behind the perpetuation of neoliberal governmentalities” (2). The Ascent and Cyberpunk 2077 situate their players within similar narrative frames: players start as ‘nobodies’ within an oppressive society, ultimately embarking upon an action adventure, battling the powers that be of the socioeconomic elite, and becoming powerful individuals themselves. Both games exude the duplicity Alphin observes of the genre: thematic anxieties of capitalist dystopia, explored by audiences through main characters who embody neoliberal individualism. Though from the same genre and featuring similar gameplay centered around action and shootouts, the two games’ different camera POVs produce virtual worlds of divergent meaning, angling players’ experience of the cyberpunk generic POV toward different ideological ends.
Regarding cyberpunk virtuality in particular, Alphin points out that “…the values and discourses that permeate the informationalized reality of cyberpunk understand ‘jacking-in,’ ‘plugging-in,’ or ‘being-in’ a digital reality as a choice, and therefore, as acting through a subject’s agency and freedom” (35). Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent’s narratives framing their avatars as a mercenaries for hire presents players with gameplay loops of exploration, shooting, and looting as their job; both games provide fantasies where labor is entertaining, and where players choose to confront challenges repeatedly just by choosing to continue playing. Arguing that “the forces of armored neoliberalism have already broken into this ludic refuge [of video games]” Games of Empire asserts that “Virtual games simulate [player] identities as citizen-soldiers, free-agent workers, cyborg adventurers . . . [gameplay] shapes subjects for militarized markets, and makes becoming a neoliberal subject fun” (Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter xxviii; xxix–xxx). Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent’s mercenary avatars exemplify the “citizen-soldier” quite pointedly, illustrating not only players’ immersion in the cyberpunk genre as an act of donning a generic POV that prioritizes neoliberal individualism in order to facilitate achieving what the game considers success or victory through acts of violent gameplay.
Importantly, camera POV always mediates the generic POV in visual media, situating the genre’s narrative and aesthetic conventions within the literal framing boundaries of moving images upon a screen. Perhaps the most telling example of camera function’s relationship to neoliberalism within Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent arises through players’ ability, or lack thereof, to look upward. Within reference to the decades of preceding top-down twin-stick-shooters and dungeon-crawlers, the fact that players of The Ascent cannot look up seems an insignificant byproduct of camera perspective. However, alongside the claustrophobic effect the top-down third-person POV lends the game, there takes hold with the avatar a sense of disempowerment in that they are always looked down upon. For The Ascent, in particular, this carries a touch of irony due to that progressing through the game, as the title suggests, entails players’ moving ever upward throughout a technologized and neon-saturated megacity. The avatar, however, always remains spatially below; and players themselves remain unable to see what they are headed to next (through their ascension) until they’re looking down upon that next space, having already arrived. In effect, players’ ascent in the game is a backwards walk up a long flight of stairs, where they control their avatar from afar on the floor below. The visual omnipotence of the top-down view of The Ascent’s world undercuts the sense of individually determined freedom that neoliberal impulses arise from. Players’ ability to see not only the direction that their avatar looks, but all around them, lends the top-down third-person POV a pervasive sense of restriction rather than encouraging sense of mobility. Players see all their surrounding possibilities simultaneously, and thus the limitations of possibility altogether.
Cyberpunk 2077’s first-person POV, however, exaggerates players’ sense of possibility to the extreme. The player/avatar’s ability to look upward, especially, lends a sense of exploratory possibility and aspiration to the game, the exact emotional potential that The Ascent’s top-down third-person POV impedes. Walking the streets of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City suggests possibility to the player from all directions. Exploring alleyways and building interiors often rewards the player with opportunities, currency, or loot, and the game geographically and architecturally emphasizes verticality. The spiraled ramps of parking garages, elevators of high-rise buildings, and multi-layered highways are but a few examples of Night City’s structures that prompt players to look upward toward and subsequently desire to explore. Notably, a sense of forwardness, in Cyberpunk 2077, arises simply from movement in the direction the player/avatar is looking. While a top-down third-person POV such as The Ascent’s defines players’ motion within the confines of the world, a first-person POV provides an intuitive sense of mobility through that world, facilitating players’ exploratory impulses rather than imposing limits upon them.
The fulfillment of exploratory impulses gives rise to ludic experiences of freedom. Given that an area in Cyberpunk 2077 is gated off and/or guarded, players can safely assume themselves able to devise a method of stealthy trespassing or forced entry via combat. Virtual renditions of such spatial restriction do not inherently invite invasion, but the suggestions of the first-person POV encourage players to disregard restriction. In an open world game, like Cyberpunk 2077, players do expect to be challenged, but ultimately for their choices to be facilitated by the game’s systems for the sake of their entertainment. While The Ascent remains an entertaining game, its top-down third-person POV frames the avatar as stuck within the center of players’ screens, minimizing their perceived agency. Though both games exude the neoliberal trappings of the cyberpunk genre and gaming medium overall, attention to highly specific features such as POV unveil the consequential ramifications that divergent forms of presentation have upon generic fictions with similar thematic and ideological roots.
Works Cited
Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. New York, Routledge, 2021.
Ascent, The. Windows PC version, Neon Giant, 2021.
Cyberpunk 2077. Windows PC version, CD Projekt Red. 2020.
Dyer-Witherford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2009.