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.

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While navigating Tsushima island, players occasionally come across serene vistas and are given the option to sit before them and compose a haiku. When players choose to do so, Jin sets his swords down before himself and kneels, observing the landscape. The screen then displays an idea for players to “reflect on”; this will serve as the guiding theme for the haiku. Players’ normal freedom of movement is restricted—in these moments of haiku composition, they control only the camera, observing elements of nature to glean inspiration. Adhering to the 5-7-5 syllable structure, the game presents players with three options for each of the poem’s three lines. So, players aren’t themselves writing the haiku as much as structuring it from predetermined phrases.

In the above example video, of the many possible combinations, I constructed this haiku based around the theme of “strength:”

The final defense
Death’s call is sharp and biting
I yearn for guidance

‘Jogaku Haiku,’ found in northern Kamiagata

At this point, I must address that Tsushima’s haiku aren’t great—but that doesn’t mean that they’re not meaningful. I recommend Ian Walker’s excellent interview^[3] with haiku expert Jim Kacian regarding Tsushima’s poetic shortcomings. Kacian points out that because Tsushima offers players variation, its haiku often come out discordant and unfocused, fulfilling the 5-7-5 structure and adhering to a given theme, but rarely if ever presenting haiku that are artful beyond “the most superficial and populist sense.” I think the haiku I put together above exemplifies this well enough: while there’s a sense of foreboding, the ties between the three lines seem tenuous. The blanks can more or less be filled in by the context of their being themed around strength, but none of these lines meaningfully or directly engage with one another—at least not with the degree of nuance and poetic prowess that a critic like Kacian would expect. But the meaning that I as a player (taking on the role of Jin Sakai) draw from the poem is contextualized by other elements of the game and its narrative.

The opportunity to craft this particular haiku does not appear until later in the game, when things are most dire: terrible betrayals and tragic murders have transpired. The player finds themselves geographically isolated as the war effort has driven them to the wintry north into territory overrun by Mongol forces, and Jin as a character has become psychologically distant from an uncle who, throughout much of the game, served as a mentor. While, in isolation, the above haiku isn’t much to speak of, each line reflects experiences that the player has through Jin as their avatar. From here on, I’ll be referencing my personal interpretations of the game’s story. While all players of Tsushima meet the same characters and fight the same battles, the ambiguity of the haiku will undoubtedly evoke different meanings for different players. So, the haiku’s first line, “The final defense” most obviously reminds me of the ongoing war, as in the moment I composed the haiku the game’s plot was building toward a final confrontation with its antagonist. The line “Death’s call is sharp and biting” evoked the wintry climate featured throughout this portion of the game, as well as the game’s heightened difficulty at this point, as the Mongol forces confront the player with greater numbers, more heavily armored and armed than ever before. And finally, “I yearn for guidance” refers to Jin’s sense of directionlessness after ideologically conflicting with his uncle about tactics and the defense of Tsushima island’s people—at this point in the game Jin and the player alike are unsure of if Tsushima island can, in fact, be successfully defended.

The video linked earlier shows the different choices that I could have made while constructing this haiku. For example, the first line could have read “Falling forever,” connoting a greater sense of hopelessness than my eventual choice of “The final defense” which, while still dire, makes successfully resisting the invasion sound more like a serious possibility. Likewise, the middle line could have been “The mind recalls the teachings.” That line may have better fit into the idea of Jin being distant from his familial mentor, flowing more effectively into the final line of “I yearn for guidance.” However, I preferred the middle line as “Death’s call is sharp and biting” because the roughness of the transition into “I yearn for guidance” reflects a greater sense of desperation. This way, instead of the haiku illustrating Jin’s conflict with his uncle, it focuses on the dangers of the war with the Mongols itself, concluding with an admission that Jin needs guidance in some form to navigate the war.

With all of that said, there remains one other essential contextualization of Tsushima’s haiku: spatiality. As a video game, Tsushima’s audience has an interesting relationship with space. Players aren’t reading descriptions of Japanese forests, or viewing carefully orchestrated cinematography that utilizes tree trunks to create a sense of depth—players are walking through the forest themselves, circling trees and seeing the grass rustle underfoot as they choose to steer off of the beaten path.

In their 2009 book The Spatial Turn, Barney Warf and Santa Arias compiled essays which explores a recent cross disciplinary shift within the humanities, a turning of attention to “a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought of social relations, but is intimately involved in their construction.”^[4] The game mechanics behind Tsushima’s haiku participate in this reframing of human presence within the landscape. As I’ve described, players come across opportunities to compose haiku while roaming the island. In that alone, there resides an interesting association between the composition of poetry and moments of discovery. But, more important, during the process of choosing the poem’s three lines, the options are anchored to points of the landscape; the player chooses each line by turning the camera toward it, and by extension the object that backgrounds it. In the earlier video example, “The final defense” was situated upon a rock standing sturdily among ocean waves; “Death’s call is sharp and biting” was situated upon Jin’s swords; “I yearn for guidance was situated” upon a mountaintop temple. Alternative lines, such as “Falling forever” and “The mind recalls the teachings” were respectively situated among the stormy sky and Jin’s head. The example video’s fixation on Jin’s swords and body is actually an exception—most of the game’s haiku focus exclusively on natural environments. These moments where Jin, as a character, reflects upon his situation within the war, double as opportunities for the player to reflect upon their overall experience with the game. The primary way that this occurs is by foregrounding visual elements of the game that players often take for granted.

Ambushing Mongol forces in forests and riding on horseback from fortress to fortress across the land, players of Tsushima see thousands of trees. During the action, players’ eyes are constantly drawn to Jin’s body, his blades, and the Mongol bodies they battle against through Jin as their avatar. While the backdrops of Tsushima are consistently beautiful, they’re seldom the focus. During instances of haiku composition, however, the camera is displaced from Jin, focusing often on trees and waterfalls, spotlighting the exquisite visual detail modern video games are capable of. The game’s haiku not only reflect Jin and the players’ personal journey through the game’s spaces and narratives, but also draw close attention to elements of the landscape that generally go overlooked. Although Ghost of Tsushima’s poetry is not particularly artful in the conventional sense, it provides noteworthy moments of meditation to break up the action. Given the game’s popularity, it has surely introduced a new generation of players to the haiku as a poetic form.

For those interested, here’s a compilation of many other haiku found throughout the game:

^[1] https://gamerant.com/ghost-tsushima-6-5-million-sales-march-2021/

^[2] https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/03/05/ghost-of-tsushima-developers-named-official-tourism-ambassadors

^[3] https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/07/i-asked-an-expert-to-read-my-ghost-of-tsushima-haiku-he-wasnt-impressed/amp/

^[4] Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 2009, p. 1.

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