Night City
Game
Documents about Night City
Article
How Latinidad and Border Politics Construct Cyberpunk 2077
Luke Hernandez's paper argues that Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020) helps define the cyberpunk genre's aesthetic through the visual and narrative linking of Latinx people with tragedy, border violence, and surveillance.
- The paper argues that Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020) helps define the cyberpunk genre's aesthetic by linking Latinx people visually and narratively with tragedy, border violence, and surveillance.
- Drawing on dark play theory, the author contends the game reinforces 'borderveillant' logics: media that sustains border surveillance infrastructure rooted in racial capitalism.
- The author applies Molina-Guzmán's concept of symbolic colonization to argue the game homogenizes diverse Latin American cultures into a single, consumable 'Hispanic' category.
DiGRASep 2024
Article
Ludic Prognostication: Games as Sites for Simulating the Future
Ludic Prognostication argues that video games are well suited to simulating possible futures, and that their rule-bound, systemic structure allows players to experience speculative worlds rather than simply observe them.
- The article argues that video games are well suited to simulating possible futures because their rule-bound, systemic structure lets players experience speculative worlds rather than merely observe them.
- All three analysed games (Detroit: Become Human, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Cyberpunk 2077) depict dystopian futures in which technology amplifies existing inequalities rather than producing utopian outcomes.
- Surveillance, economic disparity, and exploitation persist or take new forms in these games despite technological advancement, and their geographies are read as plausible models of socio-political trajectories.
gamevironmentsJul 2022