This past week, we got a closer look at Cyberpunk 2077 through an extended livestream. There was a lot to unpack there, from the announcement of a new anime to an in-depth focus on the game's mechanics. That said, the same criticisms that have come with every new morsel about this thing began to rear their head. Why is CD Projekt Red dealing so much in racial stereotypes? Why couldn't they be bothered to actually feature accurate translations of different languages? Why does it seem to avoid all of the ideological complexities baked into the cyberpunk genre?
The mind boggles.
But what stuck out to me most was the game's approach to gender. I'm not going to lie - I was one of those problematic trans people that was actually interested in the game, at first. The ability to be a big-dicked queen with a robot arm was pretty enticing. It's pretty rare for a AAA game to invite players to "mix it up" when it comes to gender, and when they do, it's mostly bad. So I was excited, then, to explore 2077's world as a character with permeable gender and genitalia.
However, a bit of info that's come out has made me realize that Cyberpunk 2077's gender options are probably all in bad faith. Because the game having pronoun options is a smokescreen for one of single most toxic things you can determine somebody's gender by: voice.
Listen Up
Vocal training is one of the shittiest parts of transitioning. Don't get me wrong - your body acclimating to hormones (if you take them,) clawing attempts at getting people to not misgender you, trying to reconcile the way you've been trained to look versus how you need to look - those things also suck. Oh, and you know, systemic oppression is also a real bitch.
But there's something uniquely painful and agonizing about voice. Your voice plays such a huge role in how people perceive you, in ways that you don't know it. Certain tones, pitches, cadences are "masculine" and "feminine," and even cis people with voices that don't "fit" their birth gender often have a hard time navigating speech. If you're a man and your voice is pitched higher, you're "gay," you're "girly." If you're a woman with a deeper voice, you're a "lesbian" or "mannish." Sexuality or gender identity doesn't matter when it comes to the creepy cult of vocal passing - people just assume. This is especially toxic for nonbinary people, although that experience is best left talked about by actual enby peeps, not me.
Point is, voice is a codified gender and sexuality signifier in our culture - and a toxic one, at that. Trans people have to grapple with that on a daily basis. Every introduction, every phone call, every order in a restaurant is something to agonize over. Even when I'm having sex, I'm conscious of every moan and murmur that comes out of my mouth. It's something I can't escape, even at my most intimate and vulnerable moments, and I'm not alone in that. One of the most common discussions I have with most of my fellow trans gal pals are around voice, and how to control it, and how to get people to recognize our validity as women.
For many of us, it doesn't matter what we're wearing, what our name is, what our driver's license says - our voice is often the biggest hurdle we have to overcome for people to recognize us as who we are.
A Bleak Future
It came out, this past week, that Cyberpunk 2077 will tie your character's pronouns to your chosen voice - with no option for they/them genders, on top of that. That means if you pick a "feminine" voice, congrats, you're stuck with being a girl! Until more comes out about the game, it seems that it doesn't matter how you look, how you dress, how you name your character. If you sound a certain way, that's the gender you are.
Now, I could get into how "offensive" this is, but I try not to trade in being offended. Instead, I want to point out what a basic betrayal of the genre that this is. Cyberpunk is a genre that, at its best, is preoccupied with the permeable nature of human beings. It's a style of science fiction birthed from an ambition to play around with race, gender, and sexuality through the lens of rapid modernization. Good cyberpunk media uses that encroaching creep of technological evolution to show the good, the bad, and the ugly of the loss of organic personhood that comes with that. Works like Serial Experiments Lain and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex show us that our sentimental attachment to sense of self is ultimately meaningless in the face of powers that depersonalize, dehumanize, and eventually destroy us.
Cyberpunk that doesn't suck offers interesting propositions for how to operate within this new paradigm. Cyberpunk that does suck, however, throws all those questions out of the window to show us cheap commodification of sex work, lazy racist caricatures meant to show us how "primitive" (ugh!) human beings are, and sick-ass flying cars. Don't get me wrong - I love sick-ass flying cars and cybernetic sex workers. But so many pieces of media lack the nuance of a Chobits or a Tetsuo or a Soul Hackers. They want to show us the what, but don't want us to question the why.
That's how we get CD Projekt Red devs palling around with Elon fucking Musk on Twitter. They don't actually understand what they're making.
Raise Your Voice
So, then, Cyberpunk 2077 tying gender to voice pretty says everything you need to know about this game. Well, that, and how all of the rival gangs are some of the laziest racial stereotypes to come out of a game in a bit. Oh, and how multiple languages are misspoken because they couldn't be bothered to actually hire native speakers to work on the script. Ah, and also how limited the genital options are, and how they're intrinsically tied to an extremely cis, extremely heteronormative view of human bodies.
Eesh... this game seems like a real mess, doesn't it?
Obviously, the nature of my job all but ensures that I'll play Cyberpunk 2077. If I want to talk about it on any complicated level, I have to play it and engage it on its own terms - I'd be a disingenuous games writer if I didn't do that. But just from what we know about this game, it doesn't seem to be operating in good faith. It doesn't seem to actually care about that "why," but only the "what." Worse yet, it's easy to assume that the game's own "whys" are probably all bad - I really, really don't want to know why the racist gangs are, in fact, so insufferably racist. I don't want to know what drove the developers to tie gender to voice. I don't. I don't care. The reasons are probably all bad.
But I'll find that out for myself. And I'll probably hate it. By making this initial insidious attack on trans personhood, Cyberpunk 2077 has already positioned itself as a game I'll likely despise on a thematic and narrative level. We'll see if CD Projekt Red can prove me wrong in November.