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Mr_Cyberpunk
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Post by Mr_Cyberpunk »

Yeah its a pitfall that a lot of cyberpunk media take.

A list of anything i can think of that could be considered related to Cyberpunk:

Metropolis - Cyberpunk/Dystopia
Neuromancer - Cyberpunk
Johnny Mnemonic - Cyberpunk
Blade Runner - Cyberpunk
Omikron - Post-Cyberpunk/Fantasy Cyberpunk/Sci Fi
The fifth element - Post-Cyberpunk
Deus Ex - Semi-Cyberpunk/Post-cyberpunk (on account of the political stuff mixed with distopia)
Theif - Steampunk
Deus Ex IWar - Sci Fi (no trace of cyberpunk)
System Shock 1 and 2 - Old School Sci Fi
Tron - Old School Sci Fi
Neocron - Cyberpunk
The Matrix - Post-Cyberpunk/Sci Fi
The rest of the Matrix Movies - Crap based on the bible/Sci Fi/Maya 6.0 Tech Demo :P
Beneath a Steel Sky - Cyberpunk and really good cyberpunk might i add
Syndicate - Cyberpunk all the way! some trace of Post-Cyberpunk
Ghost in a Shell - Cyberpunk/Post-Cyberpunk but very very boring
The Mean Streets games - (there are about 6) Dark Scifi/Cyberpunk (better known as the Tex Murphy series)
Equilibrium - Dystopia
1984 - Dystopia
The Terminator series - Cyberpunk !!!! yes truely i mean it!
Blade Trilogy - Fantasy Cyberpunk (vampires and shit with a big black guy in a big jacket and glasses... wait a min? he looks a little like black JC!)
Vampire Bloodlines - Fantasy Cyberpunk (more vampires. Blah!)
Hackers - Hacker Culture (not cyberpunk.. though they make several refs)
GURPS Cyberpunk and Illuminati - Cyberpunk/Post-Cyberpunk VERY VERY FUN!
Cyberpunk 2020 - Cyberpunk havent played but heard its one kickarse PnP RPG
Super Mario Bros the Movie - Cyberpunk! WTF! yes you heard me.. in a strange way it takes a lot of reference from Cyberpunk and dystopia. I loved that film.

if i missed anything add it to the list. but these are any media that can be considered remotely Cyberpunk. or have traces of cyberpunk
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Post by that guy »

Steampunk :P. I love that term. Did you just make it up?

Is beneath a steel sky a tex murphy game? If so awesome, and there are other tex murphy games. If not then tex murphy games are very cyberpunk.

Equilibrium was an awesome movie

lol @ hackers. Funny, funny movie
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Post by Jonas »

Couple of things here I must comment on.
Mr_Cyberpunk wrote:Ghost in a Shell - Cyberpunk/Post-Cyberpunk but very very boring
Not really, just very philosophical and intellectual and with a great emphasis on aesthetics rather than action. GitS is so good because it uses its setting and story to discuss a traditional sci-fi subject: Artificial Intelligence. But if you think it's boring because the action scenes take up less than 10% of the movie, that's your call.
Vampire Bloodlines - Fantasy Cyberpunk (more vampires. Blah!)
I wouldn't call it fantasy, it has vampires and werewolves and that's it. It's more like Horror Cyberpunk or Gothic Cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk 2020 - Cyberpunk havent played but heard its one kickarse PnP RPG
Yes, it is.
that guy wrote:Steampunk. I love that term. Did you just make it up?
No, it's an actual litterary term. It's used for industrial settings with cogs and air ships and other mechanical stuff. Arcanum is an excellent example of Steampunk.
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Post by Mr_Cyberpunk »

I wish i had made up steampunk ;)

Steampunk is increadibly old. It has existed even before the 20th century, Jules Vern (I can't spell his name) was the first to create a Steampunk theme. (20,000 Leagues under the sea was the first I think)

Metropolis was the first Cyberpunk film as it was more about cybernettics than about Industrialisation like most Steampunk media is. Also that Metropolis was made just before world war 2 by a bunch of mid-facism germans, thus cyberpunk was born... lol! In fact the film was actually a favoruite of hitler.. WTF! I read that somewhere too. Metropolis was about how Marxism has really let down the lower class and that cybernetics would one day take over the world. This was truely the first cyberpunk thing ever.

Steampunk is when you take something of historical signficance and you add new technologies, like an Alternate history if you would. You can have steam punk in Post 21st century too.

I sent metche once a list of the types of cyberpunk, they aren't offical but Its what I think in terms of style:
See I've analysed cyberpunk and figured it can be classified into various colours... aka. Environments and Feelings

Blue (similar to the old WGibson books like Neuromancer. Mostly political, grungy, technological dependancy and depression.)

Green (Hackers, Matrix style, Dark Scifi as it is also known as. Green is mostly based around hacker culture than on actual cyberpunk. Dark Scifi also falls into this as Green cyberpunk is somewhat mysterious but at the same time scary..)

Purple (Purple is when cyberpunk is more Post-Cyberpunk or Fantasy-Cyberpunk.. In that it is over optimistic, it uses bright colours. Good example is The 5th Element, Deus Ex Invisible War..)

Red (Red is the funnest of them all, again similar to the WGibson stuff but also the largest used cyberpunk as it entirely consists of Rebellion, Criminality.. It is a period of anarchy, with hoares and pimps roaming the streets. Red is also breaching on Post-Apocolyptic given that there are close resemblances. Red can also be known for Asian cyberpunk, particularly when dealing with the Triads)

Orange (Orange is a great cyberpunk setting, it is when there are practically no resources left, full technological dependancy and that there is very little hope for survival, mostly that people profiteer on things. Orange is scrap lands and wastelands, most of the dry kinds. Usually set either on earth when most humans have been wiped out by global warming or war, the other situation is in Space.

Black (black is mostly Fanatasy Cyberpunk like a Gothic sense, the game Vampire: Bloodlines is a good example as it features hacking and cyberpunk styled clothing and storyline..)

finally Brown or Bronze (which is SteamPunk, when you add a similar style of cyberpunk into the past it becomes SteamPunk.. essentially its old stories and environments with some cool new Tech!)

I say that Orange is by far the best colour.. But Deus ex uses too much blue
Gothic Cyberpunk is a shady area. I later said to metche that there was a such thing as White cyberpunk, which is like playing god similar to Omikron. but thats like 1 game... Its more about spirital journey in white.

For some reason Ghost in a Machine just didn't impress me as much as I thought it would, for some reason a lot of anime tends to be the same though, very very dull until towards the end. Others though can be friggn awsome.

It'd be funny to say the least if someone had made a version of Deus ex set in the 18th century when the illuminati first started. You wouldn't change much thats for sure. But'd be funny to see JC with odd looking specs.

You can cross cyberpunk and steampunk together, I've done it plenty of times on numerious projects. It's very fun to do that. Some would say though that it comes too close to Fantasy Cyberpunk. (fantasy cyberpunk is when you have monsters and swords and stuff with a cyberpunk theme, eg. Final Fantasy 7 is an awsome example)
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Post by Mr_Cyberpunk »

Continuing the topic just a little:

there are 3 types of cyberpunk

Dark (classic) Cyberpunk - Known as Cyberpunk, its that sorta grungy evil world built on hacking and illegal activities. WGibson stuff. (this was what the 1989 revolution was about that killed cyberpunk as a lifestyle)

Post Cyberpunk - its more political, more optimitic, rather than being technologically dependant people are living more healthier lives, less dependant on tech.(post cyberpunk never became a lifestyle, but I think im the only person alive that follows it as a lifestyle. Very casual looks, you can still dress geeky so long as you got your laptop handy and some cool shades.) Post Cyberpunk is what we call Postmodern Cyberpunk where its more similar to todays lifestyle, WGibson has recently started writing this way.

Fantasy Cyberpunk - Big Swords, Big Hair and monsters. usually urban jungle stuff with monsters and mechs running about the place. Fun stuff indeed.
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Post by Dragon »

ok i definitly need to hack in here as this somehow disturbs me. wtf punk?!

i am somebody interested in sci-fi setups (and can't stand fantasy ones), and somehow many of the stuff mentioned you slap 'punk' (beeing it now cyber-punk or steam-punk or wtf else) sticker on it. this somehow disturbs me.

for me things like cyberpunk had been the opposite of sci-fi (in the sense i use the term), beeing more like fanatasy with technologically stuff around.

deus-ex for me is sci-fi pure, no cyberpunk or similar. so why 'punk' everywhere?
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Post by Jonas »

Actually cyberpunk is a subgenre of sci-fi. I don't think it should've ever been proclaimed to be a genre in its own right, because maybe it wouldn't have stagnated in litterature the way it did if people didn't deliberately try to make their books follow the rules of Neuromancer.

I want to enter this discussion, but I'm pretty tired and I don't feel like thinking too much about anything. Suffice it to say, I think the genre would've been able to evolve and grow more freely if it hadn't actually been a genre. Today, I think it exists mostly as a number of elements in certain sci-fi stories. Like Deus Ex. Physical augmentation is the main element of cyberpunk, and combined with the dystopian setting (which doesn't necessarily make it cyberpunk, but which is often a part of a cyberpunk story) and the hacking and other less significant parts of the game, Deus Ex falls largely into the cyberpunk category. There's even an homage to William Gibson, creator of cyberpunk, in the Versalife data entry facility in Hong Kong.

When Mr_Cyberpunk starts defining all these sub-genres in Cyberpunk, I can't help but laugh a little, because it seems silly to me to have that many categories for such a small genre. Either genres should be rather broad (thus encompassing everything under the Cyberpunk term and not going into any more detail) or they shouldn't really be defined in terms of categories, rather than fleshed out on a case by case basis. For example, I described Bloodlines as horror or gothic cyberpunk - thereby, I wasn't defining that as a genre, I was just pinning a customized description on that one game.

Anything else seems redundant for such a limited genre :)
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Post by Mr_Cyberpunk »

You are right about it being a small genre, I refer to the style that is used, the feelings involved. because you can sense similarity. The style not genre... they are essentially all the same, just with different feelings.


-to dragon-
Deus ex is in no way a SciFi.. where the heck did you get that from? its not like your in space or anything. No, its more dystopian like Brave new world or something. Dystopia is a genre which I would kinda classify Deus Ex as if youre picky about the whole Cyberpunk thing. Also 1984 was Dystopian.
----

What went wrong with cyberpunk was that it was too damn hard to break away from the typical pitfall of gibsons and sterlings works. Deus Ex also suffers from that same pitfall, but its post-cyberpunk elements was what made it great. (the political post-modern side of the game)

I understand that the word Punk gets thrown around a lot. CP is a typical sterotype of the 1980s when punks were actually cool... I don't think im a punk at all and i certainly dont look like one. Post Cyberpunk is the only actual literature that moved on from neuromancer, but unfortunately isn't popular enough to move anywhere. Also that too many cyberpunk things are associated to Hacking which is looked down on by todays society.

Post Cyberpunk is brilliant cause it is much like today's society, except more fun and optimistic. (the fith element is by far the biggest that stands out) Post Cyberpunk is about saving the world, or about making it a better place. Also only the colour system was my idea, the other subgenre are from cyberpunk websites, so I'm not crazy.
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Post by Dragon »

Mr_Cyberpunk wrote:Deus ex is in no way a SciFi.. where the heck did you get that from? its not like your in space or anything.
uhm... bullshit. sorry to say this but it depends though on what you call sci-fi. i know a lot of people have different opinions on that one and the one you mentioned i totally disagree with.

science-fiction is about exactly that: scientifical fiction. this means you take the world like it is today (or in the future if you want to) and take a physical/scientifical property that is NOT possible today but you assume it is. now you develop the world how it would look like with that physical property beeing valid.

this has nothing to do with space stuff and alike. star-trek is as much a sci-fi as DSV-9 is (the submarine) or nano-technik (deus-ex or cp). cp does like deus-ex take on the physical property of nano-technical implants, but cp got it's own name, like jonas said.
Also that too many cyberpunk things are associated to Hacking which is looked down on by todays society.
the problem with 'hacking' is another one. your CP stories did cause (besides others) the mix-up we have today. a hacker is a programmer, who 'hacks' on his keyboard programs. a cracker is one who breaks into foreign systems and steas/manipulates informations. somewhere along the way the two terms got mixed up and now hackers (beeing the good guys) are now considered the bad ones.
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Post by Jonas »

Dragon wrote:cp does like deus-ex take on the physical property of nano-technical implants, but cp got it's own name, like jonas said.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that. Cyberpunk is a genre (or rather: a subgenre), and Deus Ex is largely a part of that genre. The genre is basically defined by William Gibson's novel (which is why it kinda stagnated and died as an individual genre, because it had such a narrow and specific definition that it left very little room for change). It takes place in a dystopian or dystopianish world, its central theme is bodily intrusion (physical augmentation, be it with nanites, electronics, crude mechanics or whatever), and believe it or not: It basically must take place in a near-present setting, otherwise it moves too far away from Neuromancer and falls under some other subgenre of sci-fi.

No wonder it no longer exists as a real genre of litterature. Parts of it still thrive in other - more visual - media, specifically movies and computer games. And there are plenty of books with cyberpunk elements, but since the genre is defined so narrowly, there aren't a lot of stories anymore that can be defined exclusively as cyberpunk. Deus Ex is probably one of the things that come the closest to being pure cyberpunk. Really, it has everything the genre requires :)

[EDIT]

I think I just sabotaged myself in this post. What I really want to convey is that there are no individual elements that can be described as belonging to the cyberpunk genre. Cyberpunk is a genre defined by a specific set of elements from other genres, mainly sci-fi. Therefore, these same elements can be found in plenty of other genres, but they can only be described as cyberpunk if they have a LOT of them. A sci-fi with hacking in it is not necessarily cyberpunk. Nor is a movie where a character has been physically altered necessarily cyberpunk - otherwise most pirate movies would be defined as cyberpunk on account of wooden legs and hooks for hands ;)

But Deus Ex has it all. A dark near-future, physical augmentation (no less than two different kinds!), hacking, large faceless corporations (a very central theme in cyberpunk), sinister conspiracies in the upper level of society, plenty of underground and more or less anarchistic organizations, and even a level sent in an oriental metropolis! All the indicators are there, Deus Ex IS cyberpunk. And it's even better than William Gibson's Neuromancer if you ask me - and I like Neuromancer a lot.
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Post by Mr_Cyberpunk »

I agree entirely with Jonas, he is right on the ball with that post.

If cyberpunk is to survive as a subgenre it needs to begin moving away from Neuromancer and the Gibson way of things. The problem lies when you can't define it as being cyberpunk anymore. As what Dragon said "Its like a SciFi"
but that simply isn't the case here, Jonas pointed out the big Cyberpunk becons in the game. The style or feelings in the game are based on Cyberpunk too (as by my colour system for figuring out what message they are giving out)

Cyberpunk is entirely based on both Postmodernism and Science Fiction with a lot of reference to Dystopia. Again I will state the genre is simply to be Anti-marxist by suggesting that everyone is going to get screwed if we live in a cyberpunk world. Most of this comes from Metropolis and became somewhat of a base for Cyberpunk. Sci Fi has also been known to have a similar tie to Metropolis, Star Wars probably the best known. Lucas used metropolis for figuring out how to make this sorta class conflict in his movies that shows rather well... a little too well in the prequels. As well he used the robot from metropolis for C3PO.


Dragon. its good to see you know the difference between a hacker and cracker, but I just call them hackers because people watch too much of the news so I have to call them that.

A true hacker is someone with the ability to do almost everything and anything with their computer. I say George Bush Sr got the wrong people in the raids, considering we've got such a big cracker problem.
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Post by Mr_Cyberpunk »

Ok now here is my evidence that I am not crazy...

Post Cyberpunk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcyberpunk

(Dark or Classic) Cyberpunk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk

Cyberprep which is optimistic Cyberpunk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberprep

Steam Punk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk

Bio Punk is just stupid!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biopunk

Cypher Punk - somewhat related to cyberpunk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk

Technocracy - Which sums up Deus Ex quite well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
A technocratic government that is ruled by technology, usually a powerful, central artificial intelligence. Basically where sentient robots/computers/cyborgs rule over mankind and are using humans as servitors or, less realistically, as an natural power source and/or organic memory storage. The most famous example is in The Matrix, although the average person in the series doesn't actually know their "real" government is a technocracy.
Essentially the ending of Deus Ex...

Shadow Run - The first Cyberpunk-urban Fantasy RPG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun

also Shadow Run was the first Fantasy Cyberpunk game, so it truely does exist. Im not crazy! And note that it wasn't just literally. Those wiki guides are awsome.
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Post by Dragon »

i hope you don't hate me now but in that situation i just have my own opinion which seems to not align with those of jonas, mr_cyberpunk or others, but i somehow feel the urge to go after that.

i feel totally unconfortable to put anything into the same bucket putting a label 'cyberpunk' upon it. what i don't like on the sci-fi is that most people simply stick to 1 way of sci-fi (label it cyberpunk for the sake of this post) and then try to squeeze the rest into that bucket. i admit here in public that i have not read the books you all refer too (which bears a certain risk running up a wall here) but for me as somebody studying physics besides informatics the big interest in sci-fi is the gambling with physical reality, not apocalyptic scenarios. i don't know why most future setups always have to be apocalyptic. it's way too easy to see through such stories and are not that interesting for me (i stress, for me, doesn't have to be anybody).

i somehow simply miss the other 99% of sci-fi, and for me deus-ex did cross the border over from what you call cyberpunk (and in that regard i am not fond of wikipedia, it's good in general but allows certain people to simply 'publish' some opinion not beeing provable) to a sci-fi story where your mind counts.

i also don't like that once you have conspiracy, hacking and bio-mods in it you are suddenly cyberpunk. i mean even star-trek had conspiracies, bio-mods (borg) and hacking (in a more subtle form) but that's not cyberpunk (if i recall that post from mr_cyberpunk correctly, state so if wrong).

it maybe be really me but that classification somehow annoys me. :?
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Post by Jonas »

I don't understand why you have a problem with us calling DX cyberpunk. Cyberpunk IS sci-fi, just a very specific form of sci-fi, and you must admit the world of Deus Ex was dystopic. It's not apocalyptic, the developers themselves stated that DX takes place 10 minutes before the apocalypse, but just because judgement day hasn't arrived yet, it can still easily be dystopian.

The first author to really use a dystopian setting was Johnathan Swift with Gulliver's Travels (or whatever the original English title was). He used a story about some very unpleasant places to comment on the problems of the current society without running into censorship problems. But the dystopias in that book weren't what you would describe as "apocalyptic", they were just distinctly sub-optimal.

So even if there's still a bit of hope left, it can still be a dystopia, and I would definitely classify Deus Ex' settings that way.

And I thought I told you: Cyberpunk must take place in a near-future setting, that's why Star Trek is just plain old sci-fi ;)

But if you don't like it that most people categorize Deus Ex as cyberpunk, then... don't listen. Nobody says you must agree, so long as you have enough good arguments to keep yourself convinced :)
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Post by Dragon »

Jonas wrote:But if you don't like it that most people categorize Deus Ex as cyberpunk, then... don't listen. Nobody says you must agree, so long as you have enough good arguments to keep yourself convinced :)
:lol: ... as long as nobody gets the idea to label my story 'cyberpunk' i don't care... otherwise i need to kill somebody ;)

it's mostly just too restrictive for me. science-fiction for me is such a wide and interesting field, and there comes this cyberpunk that like restricts it to death. i might exagerate, but deus-ex for me is so wide and open that it simply can not fit into a narrow bucket that (as far as i understand it) cyberpunk does provide.
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