From the moment I realized the weakness of my flesh, I thought: no worries, how. Everyone has different abilities. Then, I realized that some other people might be less educated than me about the whole ‘having limits’ thing, and that there was a lot of money to be had in getting falcon implants. Write the story of the space strategy-spewer Stellaris, specifically, it is spost spee-LC The Machine Age. It adds a lot of options to your space systems, most of which I’m too rusty with the countless nuances of the ever-opening sandbox to evaluate. But what is this? A new origin that lets you play as techno-religious corpo-cults obsessed with transcending the confines of their flesh prisons through cybernetic augmentations? I know him from the toys! Let’s make some clicks.
Cyberpunk, for all its narcotic sex appeal and Inspector-Gadget-with-a-cox-problem style, is effectively just a justified paranoid vision of a future economy based on deep feelings of inadequacy. Justified because this is just a romantic extrapolation of how the advertising industry actually works. Advertising, the strange and malevolent thing that it may be, exists as perhaps the most visible and visibly destructive social force that we collectively admit to ongoing harm while not being so depressing that it’s no longer at least a little fun to think about. to. . The fact that this is mainly because CTE means it takes a lot of bad to actually make us depressed is a scratch of a depressing thought in itself, but hey ho!
You can still have a tripod that laughs at, say, cereal made from sugar and wood chips being marketed as health food, or Apple coming to rescue you from any nonsensical avenues for creativity as part of research. of great technology to ensure that you are never again forced to smell anything. It’s a lot less fun to think about other dystopian banalities like factory farming or Britain’s booming arms trade, but advertising? This is an industry we celebrate in proportion to its ability to tell us lies with style; his ability to disarm us so that we allow his open fist to reach deep into our chest and force out, still throbbing, any sense of wholeness or satisfaction we might feel. Stellaris itself added its ‘Megacorp’ government type yonks before, and since then I’ve found it my go-to when I want to hammer home the ‘exploitation’ part 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, Megacorp’s own Stellaris choices are little moments of syncretic history waiting to happen. Plus, they just fit my playstyle. I aspire not to paint the map, I just want to dip a toothbrush into my paint and move it around, making my mark on the galaxy without having to deal with sandworm-sized spreadsheets.
I call my empire the United Earth Corporation. That’s actually something the game suggests to me, and I find its almost brazen lack of imagination more evocative than any of the other, possibly more interesting names I can find. 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 replace their 2.0 fingers and whip toes correctly. We’re also running citizen Augmentation Bazaars, which effectively allows us to build Cyberpunk reproduction docs on our planets. Begin as you wish to continue, as they say, and I want to continue creating a stratified class system of giant deeply disaffected people. Have you ever wondered how it would only take a single god not to realize that the people in his 4X game represented sentient beings to result in an infinity of suffering for countless souls? Neither me!
We spread out into space. We get planets. We make money. You know, the Stellaris stuff. All the while, the new origin offers a series of optional story events. Along with all the other DLC I own, Stellaris has turned into an impressively exhausting machine to vomit up a new story event every twenty seconds or so. I make bad choices. Whenever I see a choice and think, “that sounds bad!” I do it. Brain slugs, huh? It sounds terrible. Let’s do it! If they can adequately jostle for space with these gorgeous young skulls, they’ve earned their place here. It’s an economic flow: any new part of the brain that the body doesn’t reject and doesn’t leak out of our ear holes can stay.
It occurs to me that ironically playing a video game as a badass is as conducive to actual activism as tweeting, only with less erratic spread of serotonin spikes. It numbly makes you smile at your participation in a spiritual revolution, while calming your need to help implement any kind of material change. But I think there’s a certain emancipatory beauty to Stellaris, found in its apparent love of exploration for its own sake and wide-eyed macro wonder, and commitment to representing every flavor of sci-fi trope that can be found. it is imagined in micro. They can sell you stories, but they can’t sell you how to interpret them. Maybe. Unfortunately for my population, I mostly interpret them as minor modifiers attached to this point. I have a machine brain, and the numbers have to go up.
See, like all things in Stellaris, all this beautiful storytelling basically translates into the form of some percentage modifiers. It’s what you think of it that matters, of course, but I’m deciding to just take the most literal approach to it as part of the roleplaying experience. As my society progresses and more supplements spread among the population, we get closer and closer to our ultimate goal of transcending the flesh. There’s a whole new lore tree for cybernetics! It’s so transformative! Work really hard and you’ll eventually unlock the benefit of the ‘eat shit’ tradition. At least that’s how I read it. “Reprocessing of Metabolic Wastes into Soluble Chemical Components.” Yes. We’re all cyborg cheaters now. Bring on the future!