From the moment I understood the weakness of my body, I thought: no harassment, like. Everyone has different skills. Then I realized that some other people might be less enlightened than I about all things “having limits” and that there is a lot of money to be made in hawk implants. Enter the story of space strategy – spit Stellaris, specifically it’s spot specent spee-LC The Machine Age. It adds a lot of options for your civilian space vehicles, most of which I’m too rusty with the myriad nuances of the ever-yawning sandbox to appreciate. But what is this? A new origin that lets you play as a techno-religious corpo-cult obsessed with transcending the limits of their flesh prisons through cybernetic augmentations? I know that from toys! Let’s click a little.
Cyberpunk, for all its narcotic sex-appeal and Inspector-Gadget-with-a-coke-problem style, is really just a legitimately paranoid vision of a future economy based on deep feelings of inadequacy. Justified because it’s just a romantic extrapolation of how the advertising industry actually works. Advertising, the bizarre and malevolent thing that it can be, exists as perhaps the most overtly destructive social force that we collectively embrace with constant hurt, while not being so depressingly evil that it’s no longer at least a little fun to think about. . That this is mainly because HF means that it takes a lot of evil to actually get depressed is a gutsy depressing thought in itself, but hey!
You can still giggle at the gallows of, say, a sugar-and-woodchip cereal marketed as health food, or when Apple comes to rescue you from any vaguely unoptimized path of creativity as part of big tech’s effort to ensure you’re never forced to feel anything again. It’s a lot less fun to think about other dystopian banalities like factory farming or the booming British arms trade, but advertising? This is an industry we celebrate in proportion to its ability to tell us stylish lies; its ability to disarm us by allowing its open fist to dig deep into our chest and pull out, still beating, any sense of wholeness or contentment we might feel. Stellaris himself added his “Megacorp” government type yonks and I’ve since found that when I really want to hammer “utilize” a piece of the 4X pie.
Since the genre’s titular 4X principles (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) work as well as subheadings in a corporate strategy document, Stellaris Megacorp’s own selections are little syncretic story moments waiting to happen. Plus, they just suit my playstyle. I’m not trying to paint a map, I just wish I could dip a toothbrush in my paint and flick it back and forth, leaving an imprint on the galaxy without having to deal with sandworm sized charts.
I call my empire the ‘United Earth Corporation’. That’s actually something the game suggests to me, and its almost shameless lack of imagination seems more suggestive than any of the other, arguably more interesting names I can think of. We’re using the ‘Cybernetic Creed’ origin, which means we’ll start with a few sub-factions that just can’t agree on how to properly replace their fingers with 2.0 fingers and their toes with whisks. We also run ‘Augmentation Bazaars’ which effectively allow us to create cyberpunk ripper docs on our planets. Start as you will, continue as they say, and I intend to continue creating a stratified class system of deeply unhappy giga-humans. Have you ever thought that it would take only one god not to realize that humans in his 4X game are sentient beings, resulting in endless suffering for countless souls? Me neither!
We went to space. We take the planets. We make money. You know, Stellaris stuff. Throughout, the new origin offers a variety of story events to choose from. Along with all the other DLC I own, Stellaris has turned into an impressively exhausting machine that spews out a new story event every twenty seconds. I make bad decisions. Whenever I see an option and think, “That sounds bad!” I’m doing it. Brain slugs, huh? It sounds terrible. Let’s go! If they can adequately fight for space with these fancy new skulls, they’ve earned their place here. It’s a trickle-down economy: any new parts of the brain that the body doesn’t reject and send trickling out of our earholes stay.
It seems to me that ironically playing video games like a bad chorus is about as conducive to actual activism as tweeting, just with a less erratic spread of serotonin drops. Numbly cajoling you into smirking at your participation in a spiritual revolution while assuaging your need to help enact any material change. But I think there’s a certain emancipatory beauty to Stellaris that can be found in its evident love of exploration for its own sake and wide-eyed wonder in the macro, and determination to represent every flavor of sci-fi trope imaginable in the micro. They can sell you stories, but they can’t sell you how to interpret them. Probably. Unfortunately for my population, at this point I interpret them mainly as attached minor modifiers. I have a machine brain and the numbers have to go up.
See, like all things in Stellaris, this whole beautiful narrative basically boils down to a few percentage modifiers. Of course it depends on what you make of it, but I’ve decided to just take the most literal approach to it as part of the roleplaying experience. As my society evolves and more augmentations spread through the population, we are getting closer and closer to our ultimate goal of transcending the body. There’s a brand new lore tree for Cybernetics! It’s quite transformative! Work really hard and you’ll eventually unlock the traditional “eating shit” perk. At least that’s how I read it. “Reprocessing Metabolic Waste into Digestible Chemical Components.” Yes. We’re all cyborg shitmunchers now. Bring on the future!