Daily Archives: July 15, 2017

During my conversation with Mike Pondsmith, two people ask him to sign artwork from the Cyberpunk pen and paper game that he created. He tells me it never stops being weird, the fact that people want his autograph, but he gets it. Cyberpunk is cool, its rebellion, its sticking an augmented finger to the system. And its not just an aesthetic.

At core, unless you have the meaning behind the black leather and the neon, you lose what cyberpunk is. Thats the problem with getting Cyberpunk made as a videogame; people dont get it. They think its about action heroes quipping as they take down corporations. Over the years, Pondsmith has made deals with companies to bring Cyberpunk to PC but says hes glad that those deals crashed because now the real deal has arrived. CD Projekt Red, the studio behind The Witcher and upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, get it. Theyre actual fans and they know stuff about Cyberpunk that Ive forgotten.

The futures looking bright then, even through the obligatory shades.

If I could have one person running an RPG campaign for me and my friends, itd be Mike Pondsmith. Hes been living and breathing this stuff for years, and hes a born storyteller. At one point, I mentioned that Id been told he owned a lot of guns and he explained that he liked to fire guns because its important to know how they feel when figuring out combat mechanics. The guns, like the many books that he owns, are part of a library of information to be translated into world-building and systemic game design.

But theyre also weapons, and theyre not the only ones in the Pondsmith home.

I wanted a house that was hard to find. On the web and in life, I dont like to be traceable, so I wanted a place that people couldnt look up very easily. Its in the woods, you wont find it on Google Streetview, and nobody has any reason to come by unless they know Im there.

One day I looked out of the window early in the morning and there was this guy out front. I kept an eye on him and he wasnt moving. I didnt know him so I figure he has no good reason to be here, so I got hold of a katana

Wed been talking for long enough at this point that the casual katana barely registered. Of course Mike Pondsmith would have a katana close at hand in case of intruders, I thought. The day I met him he had a Millennium Falcon stud through his ear. The day before there had been another favoured pop culture reference hanging from the lobe. Like Cyberpunk itself, Pondsmith is nerdy as heck but shot through with a slightly unhinged sense of cool that he carries well, even though his particular cool is either very forward-looking or a couple of decades out of date. In conversation, hes part professor, part excitable enthusiast. He laughs a lot, often at his own lines, but is serious and sincere behind that.

Hed be a great person to have around an RPG table so, yeah, if I could have one person running an RPG campaign for me and my friends, itd be Mike Pondsmith. But if I had to fight one RPG designer with a katana, it would be just about anybody else.

I didnt have to use it but I was prepared to, he says when I ask how the encounter ended. He had just got back from a tour in Afghanistan and had somehow managed to look me up online and wanted to tell me how he and some of the other guys had played Cyberpunk out there, and how much it meant to him.

One of the stories I shared with Pondsmith was far more mundane but it helped me to get to the heart of what Cyberpunk means to him. We met at Gamelab in Barcelona and a couple of weeks earlier, right before E3, my phone had died. I had to buy a replacement in the airport before the flight out to Los Angeles and anyone who has been on the verge of a long trip and finds themselves suddenly without their most-treasured gadget can no doubt sympathise. Without it, I didnt have access to maps, hotel details, contact numbers and emails for appointments, or even the boarding pass for my flight. Its only when Im suddenly without a phone that I realise how much I need it.

I mentioned this to Pondsmith as we were talking about anxieties around reliance on technology and I used my former phone as a convenient example.

But what did you do? He asked.

I bought a new phone. I had to.

Thats cyberpunk. Its not just about the tech, its about the ubiquity of the tech. If augmentations are rare, if they make the people who have them special, thats not cyberpunk. It has to be street level. It has to be everywhere and available to almost everyone.

The phone anecdote might have triggered this central idea about cyberpunk, but before we dug into body horror, the ubiquity of tech, and real world social and political parallels, we spent some time discussing exactly what CD Projekt Red are doing with Pondsmiths fictional future, and how hes contributing to the game.

What happened was, around four years ago they called us up and Id never heard of them. I was imagining a tiny studio out in Poland that had done very little, and then I looked at The Witcher 2 and thought, Wow. This is good. This is really good. So I flew out to see them and realised they were genuine fans of Cyberpunk. What they didnt realise is that Ive worked in design on the videogame side as well as tabletop

At the beginning of the project, I talked to them a lot, every week. For a long time they didnt realise Id worked in digital, but Ive been doing pen and paper for 20 years and digital for fifteen. When I was explaining Cyberpunk to them, I was explaining the mechanics in a way that they understood and that helped them to realise I could contribute more to the actual design.

Now I do a lot more meta-talk to the whole team, to make sure that they get the gag and they know what the touchstones are. From there I got involved more in actual gameplay mechanics; what can we get away with. We had a discussion at one point, for example, about flying cars. I have them in cyberpunk because they are a fast and efficient way of getting characters from one end of a ruined city to another. And trauma teams are there because we dont have clerics.

But what happens to these things in a digital, three- dimensional environment. Flying cars are cool but theyre not there for flying car gun fights. Its not their place in the world. Theyre a convenience in the design and like so many things in Cyberpunk they have a mechanical function rather than just being there because theyre cool.

So a lot of the conversations weve had on the team are not can we do this? We can do just about anything. Instead, its me explaining why I did it in pen and paper, and then we figure out if we need it again, and whether it serves a different purpose in a videogame. I know why flying cars are there in the original but thats not necessarily the same functionality we need in 2077. Everything is taken apart in terms of what it does to the game, how it differs from tabletop, and getting the right feel.

It was news to me that Pondsmith was having this kind of input on Cyberpunk 2077, alongside his work on a new iteration of the tabletop game. The new pen and paper version, coincidentally codenamed Cyberpunk Red before any contact with CD Projekt Red had occurred, will be set in 2020, decades earlier in the timeframe. Because the two games are in the same continuity, theres a back and forth about narrative aspects that need to match in a credible way. Pondsmith has had to tell the 2077 devs that certain characters they might want to use will be dead and forgotten by the time their story begins, although he smiles, saying I do have ways to bring some of them back.

But the tone and meaning of Cyberpunk 2077 is harder to capture than the specifics of individual characters.

One of the things I love about cyberpunk as a genre is that there is a romanticism to it. Theres a sincerity. Even now, cities are romantic. Me and my wife were staring out over the chasm of the city one night and seeing the neon and hearing the sirens, and when youre there, youre aware of this whole manic aspect living underneath you. The addition of these new technologies just gives it a bigger impact.

Its about more than big guns and leather jackets. Walter Jon Williams wrote the book that really got me into this, Hardwired. Its total whack-out fable of doomed romance against desperate stupid odds. You know its not going to work but you really hope that it does, and thats what cyberpunk is all about.

Its constantly evolving though, as a genre and I dont feel any ownership of it. Take Ghost in the Shell. The new movie is not Standalone Complex, which is not the original Ghost in the Shell. Then theres something like Appleseed, which is what we will get if we manage to survive whats going on in Ghost. Theyre different kinds of cyberpunk a lot of the Japanese works have made me feel more about what defines it. Believable technology and a callous universe of people more powerful than you who are so powerful theyre faceless. Its about fighting for your piece of ground so you can have a life. Cyberpunk heroes arent trying to save the world, theyre trying to save themselves.

Im interested in the idea of faceless villains, though Im not entirely sure villains is the right word. Pondsmith uses Blade Runner as an example.

We never see the face of power in Blade Runner. Instead, we see an errand boy, Gaff, but we never see the top level. And Deckard doesnt think about what hes doing, he doesnt really question it. Some power that is tells him to kill replicants, who might well essentially be people, but the whole point when he leaves with Rachel is that he doesnt save the replicants. He saves Rachel and goes away. Thats not a heros tale. Thats somebody saving his skin and the skin of someone he cares about, but its very cyberpunk. That idea of feeling that the chance that we have with each other, and the chance of a better life, is worth incurring the wrath of these unseen and mighty powers.

But Blade Runners cyberpunk isnt Pondsmiths Cyberpunk. He likes Blade Runner though, which is more than can be said for a lot of the sci-fi movies we end up discussing. He likes internal consistency, particularly when it comes to tech and the ideas behind that tech, and its something he thinks writers often sacrifice for a thematic punch, or to move a plot. When it comes to games, hes critical of Deus Ex, though not so much because of any specific aspect, but rather, I think, because its worryingly close to the game Cyberpunk might have become in the wrong hands.

I like a lot of the things that are going on there but the main characters are special because of the technology so its very far from street-level cyberpunk. The tech shouldnt make you a hero, it should just be a part of ordinary life.

This bring us back to my dead phone and the ubiquity of technologies that were so recently unimaginably powerful.

If you lose your phone, or it dies, then you just replace it. Pondsmith says, waving around his own smartphone, which is currently pinging him real-time information about seismic activity somewhere in South America. Im plugged into the planet with this thing. Thats how amazing it is, but the tech is everywhere. It took me about an hour at most to re-establish everything that had been on my old phone on this one when I bought it. Information and preferences are easily transferable.

I think theres a deeper issue though: even if I can replace the phone, I dont control the networks and the satellites that allow the phone to operate. So much of the power isnt in the phone, its in the access that the phone has, and that is not replaceable. Not by me at any rate. If my provider cuts me off from data and telecommunications networks, I own a very expensive brick that can play match-3 games.

Think of it in the context of net neutrality, which is really about corporations not wanting people to have access to other people. Within six to eight years of net neutrality crashing and burning, if that happens, well end up with an alternate net. You might not be able to build it yourself, but somebody will create it and provide ways for you to access it. The upshot of the ubiquity isnt just that you can buy a thing or access it through official channels, its that when those official channels are taken away, or censored or throttled or controlled, somebody will always replace them. People will make alternate forms. It even happens with currency. Look at Bitcoin; its money that the government doesnt necessarily control.

To build his vision of the future, Pondsmith has absorbed knowledge about technology, futurism, politics, social trends, fashion, geology, and just about any other topic you might care to mention. A designers library, he says, should be deep and broad.

Were just having two new bookcases into the bedroom, which will mean every wall contains books, and thats on top of an entire room devoted to books downstairs, and the ones stored in the office. Its paleontology, a hobby of mine, to human history and everything in between. Part of the reading is building knowledge, but its about trying to get a sense of the zeitgeist: what is going on, what is visible, what will give us certain outcomes.

I asked if finding the zeitgeist had become easier now that theres so much data to dig through, or if all the noise made finding a clear signal harder than it had been in the eighties, before information clogged the air that we breathe.

What you have to do is go outside your bubbles. The more dataflow you can stand in, the more you can learn. I hit reddit and twitter, and do a lot of lurking. There are only three places where I let people know who I am, mainly so that I can get a reaction from fans and people who are interested in our work. I can learn a lot by going to a store, looking at the magazines people are reading. I can learn a million things by visiting a toy store. These are the ideas the next generation will grow up with.

The internet is important too, of course. I spend a lot of time trawling for information, checking things and going down rabbit holes. But you expose yourself to a lot of terrible things as well as wonderful things out there. I had a really nice young woman who was my social media person and she almost had a breakdown dealing with it. The biggest advantage you can have out there is to be unflappable. That helps. The most horrible voices are usually the loudest because they have no other place to yell.

All of that noise, the yelling and the disenfranchisement included, often seems symptomatic of a peculiarly modern mania. Does Cyberpunk have to reflect the times we live in, and the geopolitical changes from one edition to the next?

Cyberpunk Red has an entire bunch of sections that say 2020 is closer than you think. I talk about ramifications of what we are doing now. This is my sons reality and future, and unless we start straightening our shit out, its not going to be pretty. There is a strong political undercurrent in Cyberpunk, but the biggest message is simple: if you want a future you have to take it into your own hands and realise that nobody else will build it for you. That may involve political action, hacking, or picking up a gun. But the future doesnt come out how you want it unless you make that change.

Another central tenet of Cyberpunk, Pondsmith tells me, is that even if a cause is doomed, you need to fight for it. Indeed, the Cyberpunk world is full of people striking against what they see as misuse and abuse of power, whether in the form of ecoterrorism or anti-corp hacks and assaults. The line between freedom fighter, survivor and terrorist is blurred.

There are some eerie parallels in things Ive written about terrorist attacks and situations in the real world, but if you follow the trends as you write about the future youre probably going to end up a place that is sometimes painfully familiar. But Cyberpunk is a parallel future rather than a prediction of our future. Terrorism comes about when you have people who want to fight someone but dont have the means to fight them except through these acts. These situations arent new they could reflect 19th century India, mid-20th century Europe or 21st century America.

But whether these futures are parallel or predictive, Pondsmith doesnt think were far from our very own cyberpunk lifestyle.

The thing of it for me is that it all boils down to people and how they use tech. It boils down to tool-use and that is the extension that makes us kind of meta-creatures. You remember things on a much larger level because you have memory devices. At any minute you can get a story and translate it into five languages, then throw graphics behind it. You have access to these insane tools.

Part of whats happening now is that these tools are becoming accessible to more and more people; across history, powerful creative tools have been the promise of the very few, like the printing press and even paper and ink. Benjamin Franklin said the power of the press belongs to those who own one. Well, a whole lot of us own things more powerful than the printing press now.

But how far away is a device transmitting information and providing access to tools from actual body augmentation?

Body horror creates an interesting cultural sliding point. Once we get over the body horror aspect though, well be happy to have it all built-in as long as, once again, its easy to repair or replace. One of the things about the cyberpunk culture is that were not going to get man-machines because we want to turn ourselves into robots; not in terms of jumping fifty feet in the air or punching through a wall. Itll happen because we want more choices, more knowledge and more access.

So no bionic arms then?

I didnt say that, but I certainly wouldnt be first in line. My kids might though. The idea that Im going to cut my arm off all the way to the elbow and replace it with metal is he shudders. But the tipping point is already gone. Old people have artificial hips, my mother had surgery to remove cataracts and now her vision is better than it was before the cataracts.

Eventually the transgressive nature will be reduced. An entire new thing right now is 3d printing to build prostheses for kids that lack limbs. Well, somebody who has a silver-chrome cyberlimb like [Cyberpunk character] Johnny Silverhand might tempt some kid who isnt missing a limb to have their hand removed just so they can have a better one. Like Johnnys. At some point, when that process is easy to do, it wont seem like such a big deal.

Pondsmith introduces me to Aimee Mullins, through the medium of a TED talk rather than in person. Ill leave you with that excellent talk, but first a word about a familiar character.

I think Geralt is a little bit cyberpunk and I hope we can sneak something in 2077 that relates to him without the fans immediately catching on. He does what he needs to do, he doesnt necessarily get any joy out of it he just makes sure that what needs to go down does go down. Its a combination of fatalism and romanticism. Thats cyberpunk.

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Cyberpunks creator on helping CD Projekt Red stay true to ...

Tabletop game Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith has jumped into CD Projekt REDs development of their upcoming game Cyberpunk 2077 to give his thoughts on the game. However, unlike the apparent bitterness of Andrezj Sapkowski, author of the Witcher books, Pondsmith appears to have given his approval to the Cyberpunk 2077 game.

Pondsmith has been working closely with CDPR in order to make the game as authentic as possible, but hes also gone on record saying that he cant give away too many details otherwise a big Polish man will kill him (his words, not mine).

As it takes place in a city, rather than a fantasy world, the original game on the tabletop had a number of odd career choices: you had classes like journalist, rock star, manager, and more. The Cyberpunk creator has said that all of those sorts of classes will be available in the game, and that they will also include a few surprises for players.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been in development ever since 2012 when its trailer first came out, but we havent heard much more about it after CD Projekt REDs other series, the Witcher series, started to get really popular (especially with The Wild Hunt, which came out to critical acclaim). Now that The Witcher is done, CD Projekt RED can focus on Cyberpunk.

Even though we havent really gotten any information about Cyberpunk 2077 from CD Projekt RED, the studio has announced that the game will likely be out sometime before 2019, which means we may get it sometime in the latter part of this year, or well be getting it sometime in 2018.

In the meantime, we can at least take comfort in knowing that if the Cyberpunk creator himself is fine with it, the game will hopefully be pleasing to a lot of fans of the tabletop game. And, with CD Projekt REDs normal seal of quality, the game may even be better than The Witcher.

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Cyberpunk Creator Gives His Own Thoughts On Cyberpunk 2077 ...

Following on from the wild success of The Witcher 3 isnt going to be easy but with Cyberpunk 2077, we think CD Projekt Red might have a pretty good shot at it. In this new IP theyre moving from the gritty, high fantasy world of the Continent to the gritty, science fiction word of a neon cyberpunk metropolis.

This game looks like its going to offer a significant aesthetic refresh from The Witcher 3, but hopefully without abandoning everything we loved about it in terms of gameplay, themes and tone. Of course, at the moment we dont know all that much about Cyberpunk 2077.

The internet is crawling with news and rumors, though, so weve collected everything that's been said about the game here for your convenience and we'll be constantly updating this page as more details emerge.

After an extremely short title reveal trailer, in 2013 we were treated to a more than two minute long teaser trailer although it didn't reveal much about what will be in the actual game.

It did, however, capture Cyberpunk's futuristic setting incredibly well and let us know that when it comes we can expect something dark, dangerous and visually stunning. At the end it also looks like we get a look at the Braindance technology discussed further down.

In the games official teaser trailer its stated that the game will be coming when its ready. But for now it appears that CD Projekt Red is hoping that will be sometime in early 2019.

In an investor call in early 2016 it was suggested that Cyberpunk 2077 would be released before June 2019. It was also said in this call that CD Projekt Red is planning to release two new triple A RPGs before 2021.

It was later clarified in forums that Cyberpunk 2077 would be the first of these games to arrive and work on the second would not start before Cyberpunk 2077 was finished.

Considering The Witcher 3 took around three and a half years to develop, a 2019 release doesnt seem unmanageable for the studio.

As well as a deadline theyve no doubt set for themselves, the studio also has a deadline from the Polish government.

In December of last year they were given a grant of more than $5 million from the government to research new game techniques related to multiplayer, animation and city creation. The sizable sum came with a project deadline attached and if it does relate to Cyberpunk 2077 itll mean the game really does have to be released in 2019. The government said so, which ironically isnt particularly Cyberpunk.

Its going to be bigger than The Witcher 3

It would have been a pretty safe guess to say that Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be a big game, but in an interview with MCV in 2015 visual effects artist Jose Teixeira said its going to be far, far bigger than anything the studio has ever done.

In fact, he said that The Witcher 3 was being treated as a learning experience and that they could do better. To do better, the studio has doubled in size with studio head Adam Badowski saying that after The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 needs to be even better, even bigger, even more revolutionary than what had originally been planned.

Youll be travelling on more advanced tech than boats and horses

So, we know the game map is going to be intimidatingly big. How will we get around it, then? Well fortunately, moving out of the high fantasy realm gives CD Projekt Red a little more freedom when it comes to creating vehicles.

Dont expect horses and basic boats here a job listing for a Senior Vehicle Artist for the studio said theyd be expected to work on incredibly complex vehicles, planes, bikes, robots and mechanics.

Itll have a big single player story

We dont imagine well shock many people when we say this but Cyberpunk 2077 will take place in the year 2077.

Specifically CD Projekt Red has confirmed itll be set in a place called Night City. Night Citys streets will be huge, filthy, and invested with drug problems. As youd expect from the Cyberpunk genre, therell be a huge wealth gap, where the rich and corporations preside over poverty-stricken citizens, many of whom are driven into gangs.

Desperate for escape, many of the poor residents of Night City turn to an addictive escape known as Braindance which for just a few hours allows them to feel physically and mentally like theyre someone (anyone) else.

According to CD Projekt Red theyre digital recordings of a persons experience. The viewer can stream a braindance directly into his neural system via special brain augmentations, called a BD player. Braindances allow the viewer to experience all brain processes registered, including emotions, muscle movements and all stimuli perceived by the recording person.

Braindance experiences that place you in the lives of the rich and glamorous are naturally sold by corporations. However, much darker and illegal Braindances that can turn those using them into bloodthirsty killers are also distributed on the black market.

In this incredibly dark world youll play a young man thats been raised in the lowest section of society but wants to make something of himself and rise out of the gutter. Like most Cyberpunk protagonists we imagine hell be something of an anti-hero and find himself embroiled in the criminal underworld, manipulated and forced into difficult situations. How Braindances will be used by or on the protagonist is unclear.

The game will be an RPG like The Witcher 3 and videogame character progression will fit in well to Cyberpunks world of physical and mental augmentations.

Its based on the Cyberpunk board games, the creator of which, Mike Pondsmith, has been working closely with the development team to ensure it stays true to the source material and doesnt lose the Cyberpunk at its core.

This contrasts with the studio's relationship with the author of the Witcher novels, Andrzej Sapkowski, who has always been ambivalent about the games.

But there will be multiplayer elements

It was confirmed years ago that the game would have multiplayer elements but what exactly theyll be is unclear. It was said, though, that the game would mainly focus on single player.

Considering some of the grant CD Projekt Red received from the Polish government was to go towards creating new techniques that included multiplayer experiences were expecting something exciting and refreshing.

Combat inspired by the original tabletop RPG

We know that the designer of the tabletop RPG Cybperunk on which Cyberpunk 2077 is based is heavily involved in the creation of the game. We hope his involvement extends to the game's combat because the combat system he created in his own game was fairly revolutionary for the tabletop genre.

Rather than involving drawn out and long turns, it was fast, brutal, gritty and overall perfectly suited to the spirit of Cyberpunk.

A big part of Cyberpunk combat involves upgrading your body with new abilities and robotics which would be perfectly in line with a video game character development system like those created by CD Projekt Red.

In Pondsmith's game bodily enhancement has to be carefully considered it's a balancing act where every benefit has a drawback. When a player makes robotic additions to themselves they reduce their humanity and empathy leading to an uncontrollable state of cyberpsychosis. This has the potential to be a really interesting system if it's adapted for the game and could be used in a similar manner to excessive consumption of combat-enhancing potions in The Witcher.

Keep checking back here for all the latest Cyberpunk 2077 news

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Cyberpunk 2077 release date, trailer and news | TechRadar - TechRadar

In the relatively near future, artificial intelligences have completely transcended human understanding, so much so that they can barely comprehend our existence. Thats the background of Zachary Masons new literary cyberpunk thriller Void Star, which examines the line between a hyper-connected society and the vast intelligences that lurk just out of sight.

Mason sketches out a fantastic, yet plausible future world. AIs are commonplace, the super-wealthy have the ability to prolong their lifespan well into their hundreds, and weaponized drones patrol the skies. To explore this world, Mason weaves the lives three characters together. Irina Sunden is a freelance contractor with a brain implant that gives her perfect recall and the ability to interface with AIs. Her abilities attract the attention of a super-wealthy businessman named James Cromwell, who pursues her after she discovers a secret that hes been pursuing.

Then theres Kern, a street fighter who is tasked with stealing an unusual cellphone and begins receiving instructions from a mysterious woman named Akima on the other end of the line. She provides him with a quest that will help give his empty life some meaning. Finally, theres Thales, a son of a Brazilian politician who was given an implant to help keep him alive after surviving an attack that killed his father. There are complications, though: he has gaps in his memory after the attack, and he keeps encountering Akima, who keeps asking him how much he remembers. But running in the background of all their lives is a super-powerful AI that has its own particular agenda, orchestrating their movements and the world around them.

Irina, Kern, and Thales are driven by their own respective paths that take them around the world. Irina wants to exact revenge, Kern needs a quest, and Thales just wants answers. As the novel progresses, they each intersect with one another, coming together into an impressive finale. Mason conveys their stories and the world they inhabit with his elegant and descriptive prose, and short, rapid-fire chapters. His writing is at times verbose, and might put off impatient readers, but its wonderfully engaging, and brings his vivid world to life with sentences like:

Vast and sheer, the glass facades of downtowns canyons, reflecting the blue of the evening, enclosing him like a trap.

Mason uses the novel to explore the nature of AI and the flow of information in an interconnected world. Here, thousands of generations of artificial intelligence have crafted their successors, leaving humanity unable to really understand how they function. Comparisons to the world of William Gibsons Neuromancer and The Matrix are appropriate, but Masons book is a bit more nuanced. Its characters arent driven toward a typical science fictional goal, such as uniting fractured parts of a super-powerful AI, or taking down a billionaire with aspirations of living forever. Mason feels more interested in the journey, examining how people interact with the technology around their lives and how it actually plays a role in the larger world.

the novel is full of elegant prose that enhances Masons vivid world

And what a world it is. Mason loads up with plenty of engrossing details that flesh out his future, from the mundanity of roadside construction (She sees hard-haste workmen supervising a segment drone the size of a van, dodecapodal and safety yellow, its humble forward appendages pulling fiber-optic cables up through the incisions in the asphalt of the street, all under the eye of a trio of cops.) to the exciting, as Irina hiring a security contractor to escort her. (If I fire a shot, or shots are fired around me, then reinforcements come at a run armed drones arrive in under one minute, and a squad in five, and if at that point theres still a problem, then, well, the escalation is ridiculous, but Parthenon isnt in the business of losing fights.)

Through Void Star, Mason examines our largely superficial relationship with the ever-growing ecosystem of technology that surrounds us. Its something that just exists, its own force of nature in the world. How much does the average user understand whats going on in their phones? Even characters equipped with brain implants like Thales and Irina hardly comprehend the digital world around them.

Void Star plays a delicate balancing act between cyberpunk thriller and literary fiction, spinning out a story that includes both introspection about our relationship with the digital world and fight scenes with armored soldiers. Mason is interested in how his characters understand and interpret the virtual world around us, and the growing gap as it advances far beyond our comprehension, even as we depend on it more than ever.

Photography by Andrew Liptak / The Verge

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Void Star is a beautiful novel about connections in our cybernetic future - The Verge

Thirty years on from the release ofRobocop, applied futurist Tom Cheesewright notes thatthe films vision of cyborgsecurity and the privatisation of public life has become a startling reality

Talk to people about cyborgs, and even 30 years on from its arrival in cinemas, RoboCop remains a common point of reference.

Strutting the streets of Detroit in his shiny metal hide, Officer Murphys robotic reincarnation really stuck in peoples minds, as did the rest of Paul Verhoevens vision: rampant consumerism and the privatisation of public life.

But how does this vision stack up against todays reality? Is it already here, yet to come, or perhaps totally unfeasible?

If you want to know about the privatisation of public life, and particularly public spaces, ask any skateboarder.Large swathes of our cities have been turned over to private property developers, and are now policed as such.

Try to skate in the wrong place, and you might not get a warning shot from an over-zealous cyborg. But you could beshut down by a security guard on a Segway.

Theres no physical fusion of biology and technology here, but Id argue its still a cyborg.

The sci-fi vision of cyborgs as machine and human in the same body were driven by the technology of the Cold War era, when the term was coined.

Scientists knew that the human bodys frailty was a weakness in environments like outer space or a nuclear fallout zone, but our minds outstripped the power of any computer.

If we could find a way to closely connect the human mind to physical might, the result might be unstoppable.

The physical might of machines hasnt moved on that far, but computers are now much closer to human capabilities.

Weve also developed much better interfaces between the two.

The result is computers we can control with a single spoken command, phones that respond to the slightest touch or swipe, and self-balancing scooters that only require us to lean in the direction we want to go.

We are all cyborgs now. We just dont recognise it. In our minds, all cyborgs look like RoboCop.

This more subtle blending of human and machine represents the future of security today.

Researchers around the world continue to develop exoskeletons for the human body to enhance our physical strength.

Imagine citiessurveilled by roaming drones its already happening in Dubai.

But why put a human in harms way when they could be sat in the safety of a control room, remotely piloting a drone?

This is increasingly the reality of modern warfare, and witha long tradition of military technology making its way into law enforcement, it wont be long until these techniques are implemented on our streets.

Imagine citiessurveilled by roaming drones its already happening in Dubai. There wont be one operator for each drone; maybe one for everyfive or every10.

Most of the time they will be entirely autonomous, roaming the streets, taking pictures, and answering questions. Only when there are criminals to be caught will the humans take over.

This fits with the changing picture of work in a broader sense.

Replacing humans takes real artificial intelligence, something that is a little way off.

RoboCops world showed us what might happen if automation and globalisation arent countered

But with some intelligent automation as software companies are now calling it a much smaller amountof humans can achieve a lot more.

Science fiction is an important part of imagining the world we might one day live-in, and considering the risks and opportunities.

RoboCops world showed us what might happen if the effects of automation and globalisation arent countered.

Rising violent crime follows a growing gap between rich and poor as robots take more and more work something the Sutton Trust warned about just last week.

The technology may be more subtle and sophisticated than the clunking armour of 1980s imagination. But the issues driving tomorrows security challenges remain very real.

Tom Cheesewright runs Book of the Future.com, where he uses his knowledge to give a view of the future

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RoboCop at 30: how its cyberpunk vision of the future became a reality - iNews

Most games that are played on tabletops run a fairly simple group of classes, from warrior to barbarian to paladin to cleric to thief. The Cyberpunk 2077 classes, however, are going to be a little bit different. Based off the tabletop game Cyberpunk 2020, classes in the game include journalist, executive, rock star, and more.

Considering Cyberpunk takes place on a futuristic Earth, you can only expect that there are going to be other things you can do besides run around with a sword; plus, its the future. While you can run around with a gun and fight crazy robots or gangs in the streets of the games main city, you can also do stuff behind the scenes.

CD Projekt RED and Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith spent at least a week going over the games various classes and how they could be implemented into the game. Pondsmith himself has said that fans may be surprised at how all of those classes are going to be worked in, and that CD Projekt RED has been able to tweak them in a rather interesting way.

Since its not based on a book like CD Projekt REDs Witcher games were, well likely be playing a more conventional RPG game where we make a character, pick a class, and work our way through the story from there. Whatever will happen in the plot, however, remains to be seen, as CD Projekt RED has so far been mum on details.

The various Cyberpunk 2077 classes, in addition to things like journalist, executive, and rock star, also include things like cop, fixer, techie, netrunner, and nomad, so depending on what class you pick you could have any number of different experiences throughout the game.

Theres almost no telling when Cyberpunk 2077 will release, but hopefully well get some more information about it soon.

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Cyberpunk 2077 Classes Are Unconventional, Include Journalist, Executive - SegmentNext