University of Liège

The Evolution of Cyberpunk Realia in Video Games

This paper traces how cyberpunk imagery in video games has shaped players' understanding of technology and society over roughly four decades, drawing on a corpus of more than one hundred titles spanning from the early 1980s to 2021.

• The paper's central argument is that the cyberpunk imaginary has become part of the shared background of human understanding, so games no longer need to laboriously justify their fictional technologies.
• Analysis of a corpus of more than 100 titles from the early 1980s to 2021 shows that games have shifted from heavy in-game and manual explanation of speculative technology (as in Neuromancer and Snatcher in the late 1980s) to presenting advanced technology with little or no explanation.
• The authors attribute this counter-intuitive shift to the ubiquity of the web, smartphones, and connected devices, along with a broader xenoencyclopedic knowledge built up through decades of literary, cinematic, and game works.