Boy, I'm sippin' tea in your hood wtf is up
Dammit I can't leave, Night City keep callin me
I ended my 2nd playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 earlier this week. Then, as a bit of a coda, opted for yet another ending.
My first playthrough, last year, saw me treat the game much like a narrative-heavy single-player outing. I followed all the storylines I found compelling, but it was all, in the final analysis, about the forward march to the end. Or, at least, an end.
This second playthrough came at the other end of a period where I had fallen deeply out of love with open-world RPGs. Indeed, I saw them as the bane of my existence. Their glut was symptomatic of some greater societal ill where maximalist impulses married to late-stage capitalism made of us medieval sword-swingers chasing dragons with dollar signs for eyes. None of the bliss of heroin, only the despair and waste that drug addiction leaves in its wake. The promise of 60+ hours spent on a single playthrough of a single game less like a four-course meal in a five-star restaurant off the Boulevard de Champs-Elysées and more like a gift card for everlasting Big Macs. I looked upon the sea of processed meat spread on the table before me and knew hatred.1
To cleanse the palette after too many games that had felt like chores, I returned to The Last of Us Part II, which becomes an entirely different game in the context of the razing of Gaza. Then, once I’d ushered Ellie and Abby on their respective journeys through revenge and heartbreak and loss and utterly bituminous circumstance, once I’d seen this game try once again to make the point that the kindness and companionship embedded in the word “humanity” is the oddity and that hatred and violence are the true constants in our existence, I booted up Cyberpunk.
And, spoiler alert, it’s been nothing but fun.
I never reread books.
Rereading a book smacks of reanimating the dead. Blasphemy to many (friends among them), I know. But the best I can hope for is a faded facsimile of the original experience. What was once full of love and transformation and infinite possibility is now shambling, gray in the face, so slow to move that every raising of the arm, every groan can be predicted. The first read is a full life lived. The second is a homunculus. The first read is surrendering to life. The second is like traveling back in time to buy stock in Apple. You wind up rich enough to buy a couple Ferraris, maybe an island. But the planet is still immolating. You’ve changed nothing of consequence. We’re all going to die.
I can get away with thinking like this because I’m a slow reader. Those few instances when 700 pages vanished in 4 days are Haley’s Comet. I wouldn’t want to repeat those experiences not because they were difficult, not because staring at the sun only blinds you once, but rather because the newness of sitting at the center of a star is…there’s nothing like your first.
I don’t think it odd that I never reread books while gleefully sitting down for my 100th viewing of It’s a Wonderful Life or my 15th viewing of Man on Fire or my 3rd of The Battle of Algiers. (Or my 251st viewing of Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit.) How many times have I rewatched the penultimate episode of The Sopranos where the entire premise of the show—that going to therapy is intrinsically benevolent—is turned on its head? Even though I know it’s coming, know it so well that it’s become an object of study for me, it yet manages to feel so novel. I’m currently prepping for my 2nd go-through of the entirety of Gomorrah and just the other night, I rewatched Scarface. But none of those are books. As many times as I’ve watched The Godfather, I’ve only read the source material once.
Is it a time thing? Returning to a novel I’ve already read threatens to make me feel hubristic. The clock is ticking ever toward my mortal demise, there remains so much yet to do, I cannot stop time’s forward march, but maybe for the duration of this re-read, I can slow it down. Can a man reread books and still have time to mark off life’s to-do list before he croaks? Can a man truly have it all? Can I just…lean in?
If I’m honest with myself, time is a false excuse. Convenient almost to the point of laziness. I may not know what awaits me on a second go-round with a book, but I know that it won’t be a repeat experience of that first time, and maybe that truth is enough permission to say no.
Generation loss isn’t a given. Returning to books later in life that you visited in adolescence, in the throes of your 20s, on the ascending slope of middle age, can provide a different experience, but it is a difference in shade rather than sense. The words haven’t changed, nor the sentences, nor the scenes. The characters are the same as last time, they’ll do exactly the same things they did last time. It always ends the same. Is a journey richer for remembering every footfall?
Maybe rereading offers that sense of transport to an earlier age. We meet books when we meet them, and maybe rereading is like passing through the spy hole of memory to stand where you stood 5, 10, 20 years prior. But am I my earlier self (basking in the warmth, freezing in the cold) or am I merely watching my earlier self? That first pleasure is unrepeatable, and we all know how time travel stories end. In so many ways, the past is a fragile, brittle thing and each trip back hurts it, changes it, diminishes it.
You only get one first love. Until you pick up a new book and get a chance at another.
And yet this 2nd playthrough of Cyberpunk has bestowed upon me an entirely different experience. Of course, there are the different choices to be made (romancing Panam vs. romancing Judy, playing male-voiced V after having played female-voiced V, shooting that NPC after having let them live last time), but I’ve found that my entire philosophy of playing has changed. Strangely, I no longer find it rude to spend too much time leaving a text unanswered. I know that if I do ten of Regina’s sidegigs before I get back to Judy, she won’t feel neglected. I could clear all of the NCPD scanner gigs in Night City and Hanako would still be waiting with otherworldly patience at Embers, not in the least offended by my delay.
But my new embrace of the open-world-ness of the game went even further. Beyond the side quests and the gigs, extending all the way to the shards I collect religiously filled with pieces of lore, the baby stories littered throughout the world, revealing to me all the places where NPCs are existing, have existed, the spotlight spreading beyond me and my main missions to reveal the fullness of it all.
My elevator in Megabuilding H10 would take me all the way down to the building’s entrance, but I would remain in the cage the extra minute or so to hear the chilling news story, almost gleefully told, of the AI that had been awarded the game world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
I sometimes speed through games the way I’ve, sometimes in the past, sped through books, so why is it that I am utterly certain I will only read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead only once?
I must confess I haven’t told the whole truth.
While I’ve never reread a whole book, I do reread snatches. Sentences, scenes, pages. It’s work mostly, seeking through osmosis some of the brilliance emanating from those pages. And I will place beloved works of fiction on my desk while I write simply to have them near, to thumb through them and be reminded of what has been attained, my ambition to reach for what can be attained renewed. I’ve never reread The Brothers Karamazov but pretty soon, I may be able to recite that “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter from memory.
A novel, no matter how large, and an open-world RPG are two very different things, categorically different experiences and maybe, at the end of the day, it’s as simple as that. To have engaged a novel is to have interacted with a wholeness, and my tendency is to finish my plate. A game like Cyberpunk, like Elden Ring, it is simply too big to hold in one’s stomach after one sitting. Replaying those games has yet to feel like eating the same meal twice because there is always food left on my plate unfinished. There is almost always a new morsel to taste, almost always a new part of the world—an apartment, a dungeon—in which someone is waiting for me.
The world is littered with third spaces.
When it comes to the tendency among progressives, particularly the terminally online type, toward the stentorian, the dogmatic, I’m reminded of African decolonization and the birth pangs of countries struggling into a shimmering, stuttering version of independence. How loud those birthings were. I see in the commandments issued online—“you must care about this and this is how you do it,” “don’t say it that way,” “if you say you like this thing where I can hear you, you’re a morally abhorrent person”—much of what I see whenever I look back through the pinhole of history and see swathes of people newly empowered, struggling to figure out just what to do with their power, arguing over whose car should go before whose in the ministerial convoy while their Treasury lies empty.2
The Congo’s history is not the US’s future, but during Trump I and already during Trump II, my mind flees often to the experiences revealed to me of those who once lived or still live in countries where dependence on the government was rarely if ever a given. And I ask these people in my memory and in real life, “how did you survive?” The dictatorship, how did you survive that? The catastrophic inflation, how did you manage to eat? The hunting, the persecution, the death squads, the mobs, how did you manage an education in the midst of all of that?3
The answers are varied of course, almost all of them situation-specific. The exercise in trying to take lessons from contemporaneous or historical examples may be misguided as the “Jump Out Boys” may forever remain a fiction in the reality of a technofeudalist United States run by the type of people we once upon a time used to shove into lockers.4 Maybe the lesson is that they survived. The how, you must find out for yourself. Their time is not ours and our reality yesteryear isn’t even our reality today. Of what use are bus boycotts in a country whose public transportation infrastructure is already shambolic? Of what use is the million-man-march in a country where an elected politician no longer feels shame?
Conversations with friends in the aftermath of the election have shed light on what may possibly look like an answer or a piece of one or a piece of a piece of one. If ICE were to show up at my door, a dear college friend told me over the phone, I’d treat them like a vampire; I’m not opening my fucking door to that. A tiny act of refusal that no one on social media will ever hear about, wholly independent of the invocations of a Congressperson, something that no one can or will try to take credit for. A single word, a “no,” an action bounded locally, that maybe saves a life. It doesn’t change the world or reverse all the hurt, doesn’t spin back the clock, but how different is that from hiding the persecuted in your attic or being a part of the network ferrying the enslaved to freedom, a pastor with a trapdoor in the floor of his church?
Another conversation, pertaining to the current state of affairs, eventually arced toward what we missed most about the early days of our lives and what would we need to turn things around here. Oddly enough, those became the same thing.
There used to be this thing here, seen in sepia tone, called a trades hall or a union hall. And people would meet up, to talk union business, to build numbers, but also to eat and drink and shoot the shit. And politicians campaigning used to have to go to the union halls to campaign and they would have to talk directly to the union members about them and their needs and what that politician could do for them, and those politicians used to listen! I say this without irony or hyperbole, but I remain, to this day, mindboggled. Then I think more on it and my mind turns to Discord channels and Twitch chats and Twitter rooms before the enshittification. But as much as online fellowship may mirror those earlier forms of coming together, it feels much like how I think of rereading. A zombie is still capable of getting things done, but they have to be led around, they’re rather single-minded, and they have the nasty habit of biting at the nearest hand.
I expect the establishment Dems have a long time in the wilderness ahead of them, much of it self-inflicted due to their tendency to take the wrong lesson from every single event. But I do hope the left flank is open to some self-examination beyond “we need our own Joe Rogan Experience.5” It’s an oversimplification to say “the right won because they called people in while the left called people out,” but it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that. Perhaps more devastatingly, however, the right destroyed those third spaces where people once went to build something. Online, it is catastrophically easy to tear something down, to pollute a community, to poison a well. It is too easy. How much more difficult it becomes to do that to the person on the church bench next to you, the person across from you in the AA meeting, the person you’re sharing baked ziti with after the youth soccer game in the park. Where the moral economy is powered entirely by a currency of compassion.
There’s more in this world than the main mission. 100 hours in and I’m finally learning the value of touching grass.
There’s a secret ending in Cyberpunk where you conduct the final mission alone. You spurn the aid of all your confederates and decide to charge into the belly of the beast with naught but the clothes on your back and the weapons in your backpack. But even then, you are not alone. Because the whole time, the construct that has taken up residence in your head for much of the game—the construct that has berated you, consoled you, tried to kill you, rescued you—is with you, holding your hand while you fire that gun.
We’re reminded of this online, in Discord channels or in Twitch chats or in the replies to our posts on Bluesky, but I lust for the tactile. For these third spaces of lore. Those union halls, those skate parks, those library reading groups, those Bible studies before the main service where the bunch of us are huddled over the Gospel of Luke trying to figure out how best to go about this business of living.
I won’t say that playing Cyberpunk reminded me of third spaces, but in the aftermath of November, I’ve begun to see those spaces more and more, the promise of them, the need for them.
Remember that moment early in 2020 when there was so much fear and turmoil and everything was a question, when we were scrubbing down our mail and venturing out to Rite-Aid with bandannas over our faces to find there was no more toilet paper on the shelves? I think often about that time that U.S. Representative Ocasio-Cortez and a Canadian politician (I believe) joined several streamers on Twitch for a game of Among Us, and it felt like something magical had happened. We’d glimpsed for a moment the power we had as people where, instead of filling the voicemail inbox of our Senators and Reps with pleading, they had come to us. They’d sought out our third space, and they’d come to us.
There’s no advice here, no prescription. The older I get, the wiser the counsel that you can’t control what another person thinks or does, that old adage embodied in the Serenity Prayer. I’m not here to say that, in order to fight back the horrors that have breached the castle walls, we must call this Rep or post this thing online or march down this street in these numbers. It’s not how my mother survived all the dictatorships she lived through. And that’s not how the parents and grandparents of my many first-gen friends survived the famine and dysfunction, the killings and disappearances and other sundry horrors that afflicted their own countries. But one thing they all did do to the best of their abilities, even those who did not survive to see the other side of their suffering, was that they lived. Wherever they did it, they lived.
Even if it looks like there is no one else at our side, as alone as we may feel we are, Johnny will always be with us. Even if we take those seductive omega blockers and try to blot out the noise, we can sit in the quiet and still know that it’s only a matter of time before that narcissistic, asshole rockerboy opens his mouth and reminds us we’re not alone.
Currently reading: Ghosts - César Aira
Currently listening: Gospel - Rich Brian, Keith Ape, XXXTENTACION
I’m sure Baldur’s Gate 3 is a superlative achievement and deserving of every single award and nomination it accrued. But I will never have the time I need to play that game.
To extend the parallel: just as the Belgians sabotaged Congolese independence and the French, even after having been bombed out of Algeria, actively exploited the territories they had ostensibly let go, so the powers that be have conditioned the increased vocal power that the Internet has allowed to the oppressed. You may have dozens of thousands of followers on Bluesky, but we still dancin’ to a Patriot Act-type beat.
It’ll come as no surprise that many of them managed to eat, get an education, and survive quite simply by leaving. Do with that what you will.
Maybe not a fiction. It’s the uncertainty that inspires fear.
One Chapo Trap House is enough.
This is a hell of an essay.