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Cyberpunk 2077 launched as a damaged sport. However as somebody who was going by way of the early work of gender transition throughout a world-stopping pandemic on the time, it someway made sense that the big-budget, mega-popular online game everybody was so hyped about was additionally falling the fuck aside.
Most nights in the course of the warmth of the pandemic for me would finish the identical, particularly earlier than I began hormone remedy: I’d drink myself to sleep, normally waking up with the solar obtrusive by way of the window of my rest room, the place I’d ended up sooner or later 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 at all times a trial.
Peeling myself away from the mirror these mornings (which had been usually surely afternoons, or evenings), I’d mosey over to my laptop 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 just a little higher about this fucked-up world, and my place in it?
A damaged girl enjoying a damaged sport
I selected the Corpo lifepath for my first V. You start that chapter throwing up in a sink earlier than observing your self within the mirror…besides once I performed Cyberpunk in its early, beyond-broken state, myself a broken-down trans girl attempting to make this mess of a sport run on my poor GTX 1060, it was like observing my very own face within the mirror: a fucking catastrophe. Half the textures loaded, the sport stuttered continuously. 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’ll misinform you, creating an phantasm that the life you’re residing is okay, is nice sufficient. Gender dysphoria will shrink till it’s simply tough edges of discomfort you’ll be able to excuse away as one thing else. You simply get used to it. Till you’ll be able to’t.
Like a violent glitch that spontaneously sends your automotive 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 notice it’s not superb, and that some combination of the software program and {hardware} that’s “you” isn’t enjoying nicely, is crashing to desktop once more. Or in my case, the beer-bottle-littered flooring.
However for me a minimum of, the sport was secure sufficient, usually 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 a wierd graphical glitch obscure my imaginative and prescient anytime I exited a automotive, I might simply reboot, or roll again to a earlier save that wasn’t too distant. I’d do comparable issues with my very own life earlier than transition: Dysphoria would rear its head and I’d simply concentrate on the instances I loved my id and life. My very own reboot course of.
By some means Cyberpunk simply continued to make it private, this time with the precise narrative expertise I encountered beneath all these glitches in its matrix.
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 flawed to search out out she’s not alone in her head. In Cyberpunk 2077, that further psychological assemble is a messed-up former rockstar from whom the world has moved on, zealous in his views on society and utterly prepared to threat his life for them. It was the type of individual I knew nicely; it was the type of individual I personally had been earlier than popping out, having traveled the nation and different elements of the world enjoying metallic music in venue after venue, evening after evening.
That additional individual, that assemble, needed 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 sport or about how arduous it was to lastly come out and override my very own fake assemble? Most likely each.
Every time a good friend would ask me what I considered Cyberpunk 2077, I’d give some variation of the identical reply: “It’s a damaged sport a few 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 drugs 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 normally be a collective second of silence and an voiceless, “oh…” in response.
The state of the sport and the disastrous scenario 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 Hearth,” wherein you first expertise this determine now driving shotgun in your mind by way of Johnny’s reminiscences of being backstage at a small membership earlier than happening, jogged my memory vividly of numerous nights I’d lived by way of myself, and the best way the sport framed Johnny’s expertise there was basically how I’d felt for 30 years of my life: that I’m not me. That I’m simply going by way of 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 understand you’re not the individual 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 type of place I’ve been my complete life, significantly 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 evening in my earlier life, when there may as nicely have been a W key I used to be urgent. And it was a smaller venue, the sorts I’d play on tour—random, no-name locations, only a stage with amps, drums, musicians, the odor 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 sport; this was principally a reminiscence from my very own life.
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 evening ended violently for Johnny, so did my very own last present throughout that chapter. Filled with rage in regards to the music trade and my place in it, I threw my guitar towards the wall and give up the band a number of quick days later.
My departure meant the dying of the band, an costly, formidable mission. “So that you’re simply going to fucking burn this all down?” a bandmate requested me once I give up. Yeah. Just like the Arasaka Towers, I did.
However in 2020 these reminiscences had been almost 4 years previous. I had come out as a girl, prepared to start out medical transition, and was residing my life anew. And like Johnny glitching himself into existence to hang-out V, so did my former life bedevil me. For the primary yr 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 id. And like V, I had a option to make.
Been good to know ya
Cyberpunk 2077’s narrative was usually 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 arduous to disregard the plain query I’d been wrestling with and would proceed to wrestle with: Do I select hostility or grace when confronted with features 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 id take the wheel? Or do I simply eat drugs, 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 superb. V initially thought she might simply let him have her physique, till she realized she couldn’t. It’s arduous 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.
I made the identical alternative with my very own false assemble, the rockerboy I left behind.
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