On Moral Distance
Hey, I’ve been playing Cyberpunk since release and have been a quiet reader here for a while. First post—sorry if it’s a bit incoherent in tone or content.
Walking around the corner of the Dream Gig Bar in Dogtown (No Easy Way Out) and seeing Aaron’s (boxer) corpse lying among the trash bags, indistinguishable from the waste around him in the eyes of those who killed him and left him there, is damning.
My direct actions resulting in the death of Aaron is probably one of the first times in the game that the remorse and guilt has refracted off V herself, out of the screen, and into me, the player—blurring Cyberpunk’s digital world and my own distance from it, as Dogtown (or Night City more broadly) starts to make morality feel less like a system inside the game and more like something I’m still accountable to outside it, corroding my own mind.
I was sat on the tube (London Underground) thinking about this all day, going over it again and again. “Out, damned spot! out, I say!”
Edit: Was there a moment like this for the fellow chooms here, and if so, what was it?
Thought: this blurring between the digital and the real within the game might also, ironically, reproduce the same logic of capitalism and neoliberalism it critiques—the sense of moral weight is manufactured inside a consumable system, yet it still spills over, unsettling how thin the boundary is between (V’s) digital consequence and the player’s own lived experience.