Your cyberpunk games are dangerous

Your cyberpunk games are dangerous
How roleplaying games and fantasy fiction confounded the FBI, confronted the law, and led to a more open web

This is a great read.

Awesome! Thanks, Locksley. I love this post.

Calem and I were actually just having a conversation about some of what was touched on in this article.

Cyberpunk literature and culture has been a huge part of my life as far back as I can remember, and in many ways it helped mold who I am today and how I see technology and the world as it exists now. We are essentially living in the cyberpunk era at this moment, with many of the positives and negatives that go along with that.

That first image in the article is the title screen from one of my favorite videogames - a 1988 adventure game based on William Gibson's Neuromancer - that only came into existence through the persistence of Timothy Leary (who owned the rights to the game and brought the story to the attention of the game's developers).

Dangerous, indeed.

You're welcome!

Arcade wrote:
That first image in the article is the title screen from one of my favorite videogames - a 1988 adventure game based on William Gibson's Neuromancer - that only came into existence through the persistence of Timothy Leary (who owned the rights to the game and brought the story to the attention of the game's developers).

Dangerous, indeed.

Timothy Leary pushed the creation of a video game??? :ohmy: That is a game I need to play.

But yeah, it's a really fascinating topic. We've become so used to exploring and experiencing the world through this form of technology that I think it's sometimes hard to remember that just fifteen years ago the world wide web was still basically an infant.

I also love the fact that again we see sci-fi offering a relatively accurate portrayal of the future - it gives me hope for a Star Trek styled human race some day.

I'd never known, before reading this article, how the EFF came to be either, and I just love that it was because of roleplaying games and geeks - but I think my favorite point in the article was that it was the government, not the geeks, who failed to differentiate reality from fiction. I think that says something rather poignant.

Locksley wrote: Timothy Leary pushed the creation of a video game??? :ohmy: That is a game I need to play.

He did! He was really into videogames and virtual reality before his death in the mid-1990s. He was the man behind these two games.

Mind Mirror (1986)
Neuromancer (1988)

And he was working on others . I honestly don't know how much input he had on the Neuromancer videogame, but if you look at that last link you'll see that he was working on what he called a "mind movie" based on Gibson's book as well.

That said, Neuromancer is a fantastic game if you like classic point-and-click adventures with RPG elements and a dose of strategy. I'd recommend the Amiga or C64 versions over the Apple and DOS versions.

We've become so used to exploring and experiencing the world through this form of technology that I think it's sometimes hard to remember that just fifteen years ago the world wide web was still basically an infant.

So true. I tried to explain to someone what the internet was like back in the early 90s when I used it regularly in college, and it was (maybe not surprisingly) a challenge! I was noting in particular how dramatically things changed between 1993 and 1997.

Back in '93 most people were still using text-based protocols (like Lynx and FTP ) to search and retrieve data and information. The web was a relatively new thing (there were somewhere around 100,000 websites at the time) and I created my first webpage (a "Twin Peaks" fan page) on Mosaic , an early web browser that didn't even support background images.

At that time, there was very much a human element to the internet. It was obviously small and somewhat intimate, and I think that made it easier to recognize that the technology was largely about connecting people and sharing information. The commercialization of the internet hadn't yet occurred and the only marketplace (if you could consider it that) was Usenet , which was more or less a trading post for goods and information.

In the mid 1990s, AOL was the most commonly used service for sending e-mails and chatting online (I don't know why, it was a horrible company). But most people utilized very slow modems and connected to this service (or one of the many bulletin board systems ) using standard telephone lines (the same ones we used to call our friends), so it wasn't like you were always connected.

I think it was 1997 (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) when AOL bought another big online service, CompuServe , and then gave users access to the (actual) internet. That was the moment that everyone's eyes focused on the internet and the potential they saw in it. Unfortunately, some of what made the classic internet work well didn't adapt or conform well to that vision.

By 2008, there were over 160 million websites - and who knows how many there are now. So simply measuring the internet's growth using that example, it's pretty clear how quickly things exploded (re: around 100,000 websites in 1993). It's pretty amazing to me, but I realize many people have grown up not knowing a life without the internet of the 21st century.

I also love the fact that again we see sci-fi offering a relatively accurate portrayal of the future - it gives me hope for a Star Trek styled human race some day.

That would be cool!

I think my favorite point in the article was that it was the government, not the geeks, who failed to differentiate reality from fiction. I think that says something rather poignant.

Agreed.

It does seem, though, that the internet in it's present form came too soon. People haven't had a chance to develop what I believe is a healthy amount of scepticism. There are students now citing Wikipedia as their prime source, everyone making an effort to create a shiny image of themselves and their lives, companies trading sensitive information in order to create better advertising that makes us want to buy things we don't need with money we don't have. But which we can now lend at mafia-like interest with the click of a button.
On one hand people are fighting the NSA and other intelligence agencies, trying to prevent them from spying but then they turn around and activate check-in apps, geotagging and deliberately volunteer all the information an agency could ever want. There's a reason why agencies generally are more concerned with meta-data about a user than the actual content of that users email. Even the fact that I without even thinking about referred to an individual, a real live human with thoughts and hopes and dreams as simply a 'user' shows just how pervasive this new reality has become. And it says quite a bit about me.
Cyberpunk is no longer an obscure literary genre, it has become the world we live and breathe everyday. Unfortunately, we appear to be going down the dystopian path rather than the utopian but maybe it has to get worse before it gets better.

Calem wrote: There are students now citing Wikipedia as their prime source

That gets to me too. Yesterday, I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for the Hebrew word 'Elohim' (a word used in the Bible that refers to multiple gods), and the entry is extremely biased toward a specific understanding of the term - that's not correct! In Classical Hebrew, the word always refers to the plural form (many gods), but the Wikipedia entry says otherwise and contains information that supports the idea that Elohim = one god (i.e., Yahweh).

There is a conversation about the issue in the TALK section of the page where people are explaining the term and promoting its proper translation, but I somehow doubt there will ever be enough "sources" for most Christians to be comfortable with the word's actual interpretation. That kind of bias will inevitably always find its way onto a site like Wikipedia, which is why I tend to use the information on Wikipedia as a starting point for further research and nothing more.

In regard to everything else you wrote, we are (as usual) on the same page.

Thanks for this post. I am a huge Cyberpunk fan. As a child of the Gibson fiction, I loved the Anarchy and pro freedom element of the people against "the Man" or "Corporations as Evil" mindset. Cyberpunk literature and culture has been a huge part of my life as far back as I can remember as well.

I think I still have my copy of the 1988 adventure game based on William Gibson's Neuromancer.

AOL I used to call Antichrist Online because everyone was just sucked into using that crappy company/program. There was so much more behind the face that people did not know existed, the true World Wide Web/internet.

Unfortunately too many people believe that just because it is on the internet makes it true. I think some people throw stuff out there just to add to the misinformation out there. Wikipedia ugh!

It is amazing and scary how far we have come in a short time. Thanks again for the post!

I too was a 'child of Neuromancer' Would that mean my parents are Molly and Case!!?

I didn't care for the anti-authority angle though... it was more anti-corporation then authority wasn't it? I was attracted to the accessible big data concept and its capacity to be trans-formative and inter-connected.

I didn't like the games either, and instead thought flight simulators were a closer representation to jacking in. Though the genre more broadly turned out to be very anti-authoritarian
:side:

Once I remember playing Microsoft Flight Simulator in 1986, a disk I'd gotten from an Uncle with no instructions.... before the internet, so I had no information on it. He gave us what must have been over 100 disks of various content which I got to explore and discover by trial and error!!! Anyway, there was a short list of about 4 cities I could fly from as start locations (SF, Chicago, New York, Combat Grid), so one day I decided to grab a map and plot a course to Seattle - not knowing if it even existed. Because in those days the graphics for a city were just a collection of some lines and shading which would just cover a small area, with the rest of the world being pure empty space - just a horizon line and an invisible 'hard' ground beneath. So I set off into the dead empty space of no graphics, and waited a few hours of droning through nothing, to travel the requisite distance on the correct heading at a suitable height, very boring, but it was a great feeling when in the distance some pixel's started to emerge and then continued to unfold as the city, coastline and a few main airports of Seattle emerged beneath me as I was slowly running out of fuel!!!! The home of Microsoft surely would not be forgotten by the developer and there it was
:silly:

For me this is what 'plugging in' and running a hack was like, driving through uncertainty to discover some logical absurdity. Cyberpunk then (for me) was the instinctive drive to access and explore this new domain of electronic potential. The anti-authoritarian stuff, and this article, was just a byproduct of the archaic legislative boundaries being misplaced to meet the new electronic frontier - and not actually any core factor

#cyberblasphemy

Anyway here is what I spent way too many hours of my youth doing, MS FS 1.02 on a Mac, not too bad actually for 1986;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xqd1uvklnpI