Cyberpunk 2077 launched as a damaged recreation. However as somebody who was going via the early work of gender transition throughout a world-stopping pandemic on the time, it in some way made sense that the big-budget, mega-popular online game everybody was so hyped about was additionally falling the fuck aside.
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Most nights through the warmth of the pandemic for me would finish the identical, particularly earlier than I began hormone remedy: I’d drink myself to sleep, often waking up with the solar obvious via the window of my toilet, the place I’d ended up in some unspecified time in the future within the night. I’d simply lay there, staring on the ceiling earlier than lastly pulling myself as much as look within the mirror, the ache of which was all the time a trial.
Peeling myself away from the mirror these mornings (which have been typically if truth be told afternoons, or evenings), I’d mosey over to my pc to play a distracting online game. Cyberpunk’s disastrous launch state was alluring. I had sufficient of seeing the catastrophe of myself within the mirror, sufficient of seeing the catastrophe of the world exterior, so why not go try one thing else busted to make me really feel slightly higher about this fucked-up world, and my place in it?
Screenshot: CD Projekt Pink / Kotaku
A damaged girl taking part in a damaged recreation
I selected the Corpo lifepath for my first V. You start that chapter throwing up in a sink earlier than looking at your self within the mirror…besides after I performed Cyberpunk in its early, beyond-broken state, myself a broken-down trans girl attempting to make this mess of a recreation run on my poor GTX 1060, it was like looking at my very own face within the mirror: a fucking catastrophe. Half the textures loaded, the sport stuttered continually. This preliminary opening state, each narratively and technically, was the other of escapism. It was a mirrored image of how loosely held collectively my life felt.
Enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 in its launch state was an expertise in concord with gender dysphoria, which for some trans individuals is a situation that’ll spontaneously ebb to the purpose that it feels prefer it was by no means current within the first place. It would mislead you, creating an phantasm that the life you’re dwelling is ok, is sweet sufficient. Gender dysphoria will shrink till it’s simply tough edges of discomfort you may excuse away as one thing else. You simply get used to it. Till you may’t.
Like a violent glitch that spontaneously sends your automobile flying midway throughout Evening Metropolis and buries V into the aspect of a constructing, you’ll catch your self within the mirror or discover one thing about your physique and understand it’s not high-quality, and that some combination of the software program and {hardware} that’s “you” is just not taking part in properly, is crashing to desktop once more. Or in my case, the beer-bottle-littered flooring.
However for me at the least, the sport was secure sufficient, typically sufficient that I might proceed to play it—similar to I did with my life previous to popping out. I might proceed to play it. When the sport would do bizarre shit, like having an odd graphical glitch obscure my imaginative and prescient anytime I exited a automobile, I might simply reboot, or roll again to a earlier save that wasn’t too distant. I’d do related issues with my very own life earlier than transition: Dysphoria would rear its head and I’d simply give attention to the instances I loved my identification and life. My very own reboot course of.
One way or the other Cyberpunk simply continued to make it private, this time with the precise narrative expertise I encountered beneath all these glitches in its matrix.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Pink / Kotaku
An undesirable visitor in my head
After the early mission “The Heist” kicks issues off, the sport’s story takes the strangest of turns. Right here, V awakens from a mission gone fallacious to search out out she’s not alone in her head. In Cyberpunk 2077, that extra psychological assemble is a messed-up former rockstar from whom the world has moved on, zealous in his views on society and fully keen to danger his life for them. It was the sort of particular person I knew properly; it was the sort of particular person I actually had been earlier than popping out, having traveled the nation and different elements of the world taking part in metallic music in venue after venue, night time after night time.
That additional particular person, that assemble, wished to take over my mind and push me out, turning me into nothing greater than a loud-ass strolling stereotype. It was what I had to withstand. Am I speaking in regards to the recreation or about how exhausting it was to lastly come out and override my very own fake assemble? In all probability each.
At any time when a good friend would ask me what I considered Cyberpunk 2077, I’d give some variation of the identical reply: “It’s a damaged recreation a couple of damaged world the place I’m a trans girl with the consciousness of a self-destructive male rockstar caught in her head and she or he has to take tablets to make him go away.” Anybody to whom I’d’ve mentioned this already knew I used to be trans and knew about my earlier life as a touring metallic guitarist. There’d often be a collective second of silence and an voiceless, “oh…” in response.
The state of the sport and the disastrous state of affairs my V discovered herself in from the start mirrored my life…after which the Johnny Silverhand flashbacks solely doubled down on the parallels. The opening moments of “Love Like Fireplace,” through which you first expertise this determine now driving shotgun in your mind via Johnny’s reminiscences of being backstage at a small membership earlier than happening, jogged my memory vividly of numerous nights I’d lived via myself, and the way in which the sport framed Johnny’s expertise there was primarily how I’d felt for 30 years of my life: that I’m not me. That I’m simply going via the motions—the script.
’I’m right here to say goodbye to all of you’
Within the first flashback the place you “play as” Johnny Silverhand, you’re not the particular person you’re controlling. That’s a heavy a part of the narrative: You’re not you. And the place are you not you? Within the again rooms of a membership, the sort of place I’ve been my entire life, notably throughout a concentrated variety of years in my twenties when it was all however my full-time job to be in such locations.
I moved Johnny towards the stage, the identical approach I moved myself towards one every night time in my earlier life, when there may as properly have been a W key I used to be urgent. And it was a smaller venue, the varieties I’d play on tour—random, no-name locations, only a stage with amps, drums, musicians, the scent of booze, cigarettes, weed, loud voices, even louder guitars, and the strangest fucking individuals you’ll ever meet. I wasn’t simply immersed within the recreation; this was mainly a reminiscence from my very own life.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Pink / Kotaku
When Johnny says into the mic, “I’m right here to say goodbye,” it jogged my memory of the final present I performed earlier than quitting tour life. And simply as that night time ended violently for Johnny, so did my very own last present throughout that chapter. Stuffed with rage in regards to the music trade and my place in it, I threw my guitar in opposition to the wall and stop the band a couple of brief days later.
My departure meant the loss of life of the band, an costly, bold undertaking. “So that you’re simply going to fucking burn this all down?” a bandmate requested me after I stop. Yeah. Just like the Arasaka Towers, I did.
However in 2020 these reminiscences have been almost 4 years previous. I had come out as a lady, prepared to start out medical transition, and was dwelling my life anew. And like Johnny glitching himself into existence to hang-out V, so did my former life bedevil me. For the primary 12 months and a half of transition it was a trial to even contact a guitar. To take action would simply summon my very own Johnny Silverhand, interrupting me and fucking with my sense of actuality and identification. And like V, I had a option to make.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Pink / Kotaku
Been good to know ya
Cyberpunk 2077’s narrative was typically fantastical sufficient that I might separate it from my very own life and simply eat it as a chunk of science-fiction media. However each interplay with Johnny Silverhand made it too exhausting to disregard the apparent query I’d been wrestling with and would proceed to wrestle with: Do I select hostility or grace when confronted with points of my life that make me uncomfortable? Do I study to make peace with this undesirable “different” self, or do I inform him to fuck off? Do I give in and simply let this different identification take the wheel? Or do I simply eat tablets, take blockers, and see what occurs?
In that first Cyberpunk playthrough, I selected to let Johnny go off with Alt into the void of the online, the identical as how I selected to lastly let go of my previous self after years of attempting to make it work, of promising myself it’d be high-quality. V initially thought she might simply let him have her physique, till she realized she couldn’t. It’s exhausting to observe that last second with Johnny, the place she simply lets him go, falling away to an unsure future on her personal. I cry each time. However I needed to do it.
CD Projekt Pink / Redacted
I made the identical selection with my very own false assemble, the rockerboy I left behind.
