Moscow-2077

Gamers around the world play modern Russia

It is more impossible to make honest labor for life. All economic assets are controlled by large corporations that have replaced the state. To become a privileged "corporate", it is desirable to be born in the appropriate family. Among these owners of life, a large energy company emerges in the post -Soviet space.

Police violence flourishes, laws do not act or openly aimed at protecting the ruling class. Modern medicine is available only to the rich. Young people cannot count on constant earnings, it is interrupted by temporary, piecework, often not quite legal work. CCTV cameras are installed everywhere, from which you can hide only if you hacked the system of digital surveillance.

Surprisingly, these are not the political results of the year in Russia, but the plot of video games, in which the whole world plays these days.

Unless a company that controls Russia in the alternative history of mankind is called not Rosneft, but Sovoil. And then only because to the joy of the patriots in the world of the game, the USSR-2 arose, the first roles in which the raw material state corporation plays.

Eight years after the first announcement, the Polish studio CD Project Red introduced the 2077 Cyberpunk video game, telling about the gloomy future of mankind. In the coming years, its plot will become an important part of modern culture, tens of millions of people will get acquainted with it. Partly a record interest in Cyberpunk 2077 is associated with the success of the previous game of the studio made based on the series of fantasy-faces of Andrzei Sapkovsky. The Witcher III, published in 2015, talks about the version of the East European Middle Ages, filled with magic and folk beliefs. But the point is not only this.

When people spend hours after magical adventures in a fictional world, we usually explain this with escapism, the desire to run from reality. The reason for the interest in video games like Cyberpunk 2077, telling about the world of the future in which our contemporaries can be more complicated. The theorists of the 20th century, comprehending the mass culture consumed by millions of people, argued that each of its products is a kind of diagnosis for society in which it is popular.

Antiophy presented in Cyberpunk 2077 demonstrates the fears of a generation growing up in the 21st century. The collapse of the industrial world made it impossible for stable vertical careers - this is when you start an intern and retire the general director of the company. People are now not permanent work, but “projects”, and sociologists call this process a lot of labor. Even in the USA, which for a century was the flagship of the industrial era, the current generation of young people for the first time in all this time cannot count on the standard of living is higher than that of their parents. Interest in new technologies, including artificial intelligence and genetics, goes hand in hand with fear of the unknown world in which we enter.

That is why we play the Polish game: to taste the future that we were in a hurry in the 20th century and the onset of which we now want to postpone.

Well, the inhabitants of Russia were doubly lucky. To be in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, residents of Moscow do not need to buy a computer with expensive "iron". It is enough to go out into the street. By the way, pay attention to what realistic graphics here.