Cyberpunk derives from Dark Future literature and Pen and Paper games. In those the player steps using a character sheet listing its characters skills set and equipment into a dark future world such as Shadowrun or Cyberpunk or Mech Warrior to live guided by a Game Master through an adventure.
I played that way before 3D computer games were available and affordable. I loved to be a Game Master and to guide my fellow class mates and friends through an adventure starting in first class of the German High School equivalent with about 13 years old.
It needs some preparation, knowledge of the rule set and was for me the perfect place and environment to let my fantasy, my full creativity roll while school only taught me to fit in and listen no matter of my own heart and soul.
So, I let five friends about as old as me enter a different world in a child’s play the grown ups did not understand based only on a set of DIN A4 sheets of paper listing attributes and abilities of an imagined person born into a dark future that was either a magician, street samurai, hacker or driver, a human enhanced with implants, an Ork, Troll, Elve or Dwarf depending on the rule book. A fictional character that had skills like small fire arm handling, sniper training, building and handling explosives, hacking firewalls, social engineering, driving a car, truck or motor cycle, understanding contracts and so on. We were those persons for those few hours. We lived in a Cyberpunk world. We were kids.
In those games the imagined persons are living in the shadows of society, they are runners, today we'd call them criminals or outlaws. We stole information stored on offline computers that needed us to breach into secured facilities. Secured by dark future companies that became dominant over states or nations and republics after the big Virus changed mankind and taht well could afford military grade personal and equipment straight up to war birds, but of course also counter hackers that would fry your crews hackers brain, Artificial Intelligence securing the intranet by running 24/7 armed security systems beside contract magicians that try to kill you in the astral space or as combat magicians using spells that would burn you by a magical fire from the inside. I fucking loved it!
I started to learn about military strategy and tactics, about computer systems and security, about fire arm and explosive production, function and use to become the one major game master around straight after finishing the more Star Treck like Traveller rule book, because I found a Shadowrun rule book in my preferred little already back than oddly book shop along with an entire series of novels of which many had rather realistic military scenarios, yet placed in a dark future scenario. Frome about 13 on I stopped learning for school protocol completely and instead started to self teach based on the principals of A.S. Neill. I knew I needed to learn quick, because it was so much to learn that caught my interest and so first I checked on how to learn. School was boring and what they wanted to teach me was for a life I knew I did not want. I hated their disrespect and pleasure in giving me orders, in shutting down my arguments by their position instead of an answer based on logic and reason, in that not answering my questions soon any more at all, in forcing me to learn what was not of my interest, so I turned Cyberpunk.
Years later when I was skateboarding instead of creating shadowrun adventures in this little garrison town divided into Natives, Germans and Americans it turned out that a lot of those dark future ideas where dam close to the real world.
In shadowrun some magicians are using drugs to enhance their magical powers, in the real world some gangster use drugs to become scarier than they are, as if it was a spell of illusion supported by toxic substances.
Hackers got into the news for breaching secure company and military computers.
Gangsta recruiters looked for get away drivers on bank robberies, gun men to rip off or secure drug deals, fists to beat up gamblers in depth, distribution partners for their product from Cocaine to Ecstasy down to Cannabis just like Con Men in the shadowrun utopia looking for runners. Just, this was the real world and I was no character sheet. Street sports were outlawed back than and I was on the constant run from the police in uniform and without. So, the OGs thought we might be ready for the next step deeper into the shadows and some did not take a "No!" for an answer.
Until I was about 16 I managed to avoid fights and got away with a bit of self-taught Judo, Boxing and skills acquired from street skating such as falling without pain, standing up again and basically running like Speedy Gonzales. I was pretty much straight edge except a joint if someone spared some for me poor native saving money for the next deck to keep skateing. Than I got my first major beating. The kick came so fast I did not see it, I was tired after a long day of skating and my hoody was not helpful to see the jumped high kick that hit my head and almost knocked me out. That German, what ever, from where ever, kept beating me up like none ever and I can't remember any more how, but I got away and home.
I was done with Germans now, even my fella German skaters around me that evening at the very city centre's market square just watched and blamed me for having had a big mouth.
So, I started focusing on martial arts autodidact training and studies, so I started getting in touch with the Americans. Who better could teach me fighting than a front line elite soldier? I never was in a German sports club of any kind for long and from that point on divided my days in between skating and street ball with the Americans. I focused on books on martial arts, read everything I got my hands on. I turned a street samurai if this had been a dark future world.
The Americans treated me with respect and did not lie or bad mouthed me as the Germans naturally always did. So, the next OG that did not take a No for an answer got beaten the shit out by me having had adopted a sweet southern American accent quickly and everybody in their gang rows respected that sharp, oiled Butterfly, because that trigger they would not pull, but pose with a gun way too easy. It was 15 years max, so, if it fired a live round.
The biggest fear of the GIs was not the local German gangstas that tried to establish a gang system with even some African origin heading a gang calling themselves Blood or Crips (I cant remember), prentending to be an American, but most they feard that those table top leaders back home would give them order to go east in arms.
Now, I learned about 70.000 nuclear war heads, about large army strategies, about military tactics of the second world war and its predecessors, about 15 seconds survival time in a Vietnam drop zone for those soldiers I loved with all of my soul and heart for just respecting me. And as soon getting into the secret wars of the cold war that the CIA was a pimp on Cocaine, the BND its prime bitch and Germany full of Weapon SS families in all major positions of economy, politics, military and state. And than I understood why the Germans treated me with such disrespect.
I titled this an old men's war, because in this real world from my Cyberpunk artist perspective, there is tragically still a realistic change that those still leading this world's globaly connected system of nations might try to stay in power, might try to stop the already so present shift from a Bi-Polar world to a Omni-Pole world by a last attempt of the cold war turning hot. By creating a violent dawn of those cold war ideoligist already considered dead.
Despite the CIA clandestine department indicating that they single handedly won the cold war there are hundreds of reasons why no one was ever seriously interested in these two super powers going for each others blood. Everybody was on Cocaine and a war would have more likely destroyed it all than creating more bling bling for the Cocain heads in charge.... in all parties involved, at the peak of cold war.
This is different now. The Corona crisis pushed everything into panic mode and is a real threat to those in power since the 80ies, the peak of western capitalism by creating now possibly the biggest economic crisis within an already struggling interest based system, putting especially their Cocaine head leaders at the line of fire without any proper protection while losers like me having the time of their lives at home, without any boss abusing, not having to fit in by faking to be normal.
Throughout history those in power that were about to be overcome by social and economic changes tried regularely to avoid adopting to that change by using ultimate force against everyone they considered a threat to their position, yet only managed to kill the bottom parts of the society they were supposed to lead through required change: That strategy is called "War".
No one knows at this point how Corona will end and not even how it will go on. Too many unknowns ahead.
Cyberpunk music: This is a warning.
