 There is a curiously pervasive trope that encompasses all cyberpunk fiction. No, I'm not talking about dystopian cityscapes, capitalism run amok, or singularities being breached, but something more close to home. Transhumanism. Transhumanism is the idea that human beings should augment themselves with technology, transforming ourselves physically, psychologically, and even spiritually. Whether the intricately woven systemic levels of deus ex or the neon expanses of cyberpunk 2077, Cyberpunk games pay homage to this, not just thematically, but also mechanically. We literally upgrade ourselves with sensory supplements and additional mobility to enhance our abilities in a simulated cyberspace. But here's the thing, is this not true of all games in some sense? Most of you will recognize that upgrading our abilities is intrinsic to most types of genres, whether action games or RPGs, but my argument here is that this is true at a more foundational level. The video game is a transhumanist medium. We plug ourselves into a cybernetic feedback loop that a digital machine renders, and we amplify our abilities in ways the real world seldom affords. We can become a god of war to bring down Titans, or we can take a gods-eye view as we do in any strategy game. We are amplifying our physical and psychological awareness using technology. With a slight tap for button, we are leaping through space and greening around corners at thousands of kilometers per hour. We are the gods in the machine. Cybernetics is a field about the creation and management of systems and their dynamics of interaction. Formalized by scholars like Norbert Wiener, it deals with the machinery of connected systems with phenomena like feedback loops, sensors, and dynamic control. Sound familiar? Video games are interesting in that they are closed systems that incorporate us into their dynamic structures. In the book Rules of Play, Katie Saylin and Eric Zimmerman dedicate a chapter to understanding games as cybernetic systems. They articulate how an understanding of feedback loops is essential to understanding game design, like how the positive feedback loops of Call of Duty's Killstreaks pushes the game towards imbalance, or how negative feedback loop mechanisms like rubberbanding and erasing game keeps the system in check. Employing these devices allows designers to alter the length of games, the discrepancies that skill generates, and mediate the experience for all. However, the loops of interaction games create go much further, as Michael Sellers argues in his book Advanced Game Design. There are engines, economies, and ecosystems that necessitate resource acquisition and long-term planning in conjunction with direct control. Civilization is as much about making interesting decisions in the present as it is about anticipating the state space as it evolves in the future. The loops in games constitute its primary field of engagement. It's the gameplay loop of Doom as you move from combat encounter to combat encounter, mediated by push-forward systems that incentivize mobility. It's the shift from calculation to anticipation to evaluation to execution, as the play space evolves in a game of chess. Incorporating us into the cybernetic circuit is sometimes called second-order cybernetics, which is interesting because game design is seen as a second-order discipline as well. Designers are not creating an experience directly, but a system that generates an experience through the inclusion of a player, sometimes multiple. They have to learn to see systems both inside and out, dynamically shifting between different scales. Both the design and creation of games are cybernetic then. It is systems all the way down. The term cybernetics comes from the Greek word which refers to a pilot or steersman, and the notion of agency and participation is built into the concept. If we take another cyberpunk inspired game, Wipeout, we see how our sense of control has been both amplified, but also tightly tuned. The sense of control you have over these hovercrafts is astonishing. That is, once you have mastered the system. Micro-movements to navigate absurd corners at even more absurd speeds become second nature. The ship itself feels like an extension of your body. Quantifying the visceral nature of enhanced control is really hard. It is deeply phenomenological, but books like Steve Swing's Game Feel have tried to formalize it. What makes a game good or fun to control is fundamentally elusive though. It just feels responsive and integrated with our psyche. The aesthetics of pure cybernetic control seems to be when the technology itself is erased as if we were the machine itself. This idea of escapism is built into games as well. At a low resolution, the sense of flow we create through difficulty escalation takes players out of the moment. They are plugged into the matrix of the game. However, this expands into deeper forms of immersion. The immersive sim is a genre that Warren Spector describes as creating an alternative world that just feels real, but through both systems and fiction. System shock and deosects are deeply systemic games that grant players agency and to augment themselves how they want, altering the course of the narrative. The themes of these games might be explicitly cyberpunk, but it is in the structure of the games themselves that the games become cybernetic. People still debate the nature of escapism in games, which reveals some deeper things about the nature of games as text. Janet Murray proclaimed that games were destined to become the holodeck of Star Trek, where we could physically transport ourselves to alternate worlds, living out new realities. But in his book, Cybertext, Espen Arseth emphasizes how games as text require a heavy cognitive load. They require work to sustain on earth and play with. Other mediums can be observed passively, but games require intellect, non-trivial cognitive engagement. This creates a paradox, though. Games are a vehicle for escapism, but also preclude escapism by virtue of their cognitive load. We are aware that there is a designed interface. Zermamin and Salem called this the immersive fallacy, the idea that escapism should be the final ambition for digital entertainment. Games exist on the border between agency and design, escapism and metacognition. By virtue of their very structure and design, games create an aesthetic of blended perception, metacognition, and sensory amplification. Cyberpunk is a genre of science fiction that blends dystopian ideas with technology and futurism. It is also dualistic in the way games are. They feature worlds enhanced by the fruits of technology, but also driven to ruin by discrimination, marginalization, and social control. Its artistic roots came out of the new wave science fiction movement of the 1960s, which experimented with both the form and aesthetics of writing to communicate ideas of social change. Then books like Philip K. Dix do Android's dream of electric sheep, and then later work like Neuromancer, consolidated in aesthetic. Other mediums also had variants of these stories, George Dredd for comic books, Blade Runner for cinema, and then Akira for Japanese anime. Regardless, there was something about this Cyberpunk aesthetic that resonated around the world. Cyberpunk is a hybrid genre, synthesizing anxieties and themes that pervaded culture when it arose. The 60s was a time of social revolution and change, in the guise of civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and women's rights. It was also a time of fear, it was the nuclear age with all the existential dread that brings. However, with these anxieties came technologies of potentially transformative power. Computers and artificial intelligence developed at this time. Fear was coupled with the promise of a better future, requiring an art form that spoke to the contradictions of our time. So what are video games relationship to all these strands of culture? Video games were born out of research on computers. They are an art form with roots in the technological revolutions of the time. Early game stories were all science fiction, about exploring space and technology, and the way games themselves were also hosted by that very impulse. Games though have also been instrumental in the development of artificial intelligence, providing the narrow sub-domains necessary for our first rudimentary steps into simulating intelligence itself. Video games specifically, not games, are an art form that speaks to the zeitgeist of the information age, as cybernetic circuits both built by and instrumental towards developing technology. Being both mechanically and aesthetically cyberpunk, some of the most popular games that came out of the 1990s, when these strands of history came to a head, reveled in these themes, not just the obvious examples of Deus Ex and System Shock, but much more popular franchises. The Metal Gear series is cyberpunk at its core. It explores themes like genetics and memetics, artificial intelligence, and the interface between games and player. Final Fantasy VII skyrocketed Japanese role-playing games into the stratosphere, bathed in the age's anxieties about techno-futurism and authoritarian control. Both games were aggressively political as well, Metal Gear not shying away from condemning nuclear proliferation and militarism, and Final Fantasy VII bringing forth an ecological critique of technological excess. However, both the design of games and their expression as aesthetic objects is most evident in their place as a medium around programming, around hacking. In his book Respawn, Colin Milburn makes this argument about games that they are based in the era's valorization of the individual and their ability to shock the system, to hack into the matrix. He shows how this ethos permeates the themes and mechanics of System Shock. You play a hacker in the fiction who must save the world with this variability. Both the designers who make games and the so-called deviants who mod them are also hackers, playing with code to realize this aesthetic both in creation and destruction. And then, the cybernetic notion of incorporating us into a system and the aesthetics of cyberpunk finally converge in the individual, the Dave's ex Machina. Lawrence Person said this about the cyberpunk hero. Classic cyberpunk characters are marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society in generally dystopic futures where daily life was impacted by rapid technological change. A double take reveals this definition to be eerily reminiscent of the modern day gamer, at least society's stereotype of one, except video gamers are mostly very techno-literate. There is less a sense of anxiety and more a pervasive celebration of the possibilities new technology might afford. Gamers are hardly revolutionaries, though. We sit in the comforts of domestic bliss whilst we play video games as a form of banal escapism. Is there really agency with the video game player when we mostly submit to the pleasures of digital entertainment, living our lives plugged into a system that carefully calibrates rewards and failures, giving us a false sense of accomplishment? Game designers are mostly complicit in this too. Celebrating fun, engagement, and escapism has an aesthetic to be revered. This is decidedly anti-cyberpunk. We are not Neo in the Matrix. In his book Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway presents an alternative, though. A new vision for both the playing and design of games that can unite cybernetics with cyberpunk. He starts the book by foregrounding how there is a physical medium to interface within games. There are both diegetic and non-diegetic elements. Immersive elements on a screen, but a console as well. The Psycho-Mantis boss fight in Metal Gear Solid 1 forces us to recognize that we and the console actually exist. The fourth wall isn't so much broken as much as it is simply destroyed altogether. In chapter 4 entitled Allegories of Control, Alexander expounds on what he thinks the aesthetics of games has become. The relationship between video games and the contemporary political situation refers specifically to the wired world and how organization and regulation within it are repurposed into games. Video games at their structural core are in direct sync with the politics of the information age. In essence, to play a game is to uncover a scripted algorithm of control, a defined cybernetic circuit. We do this in two ways. One in how we literally memorize sequences of buttons. However, we also embody systems. We play out networked algorithms in games like SimCity and Civilization. And so what a game like Civilization is actually about is not the strategic decisions you make in the game, nor is it about endorsing a theory of history, but as Galloway states, civilization is not about history, but the transcoding of history into a mathematical model. Games turn everything into an algorithm, a metaphor for our lives under information control. So are our delusions for a subversive medium just that? Are games just vehicles for appeasement of algorithms that program our behavior the way society has already programmed us? This seems to be what cybernetics entails. We are just a cog in the machine, right? We will never break free. But the beauty of cyberpunk as an aesthetic movement is that it challenges this very idea. It asks us to question the legitimacy of algorithms themselves. Galloway agrees with this and suggests an alternative he calls the counter-gaming movement, a movement driven by art movements and the avant-garde. What counter-gaming does is break out of algorithms and help create new allegories, new meanings, new allegory rhythms of play. It does this by challenging, foregrounding, revealing the artifice of games to gamers and inviting them to rebel against its structure. Untitled game is a game, but is it really? It is just pure data, diegetic machine happenings that can't really be manipulated. The player may be frustrated, but they might also ask why? Anti-chamber is seen as subversive, as much as a game like Portal is, with the absurdity of their spatial incoherence, as well as their subversive aesthetics for grounds the nature of games as artifice. Removing graphics does this as well, as Res does when it strips everything down to its core elements. It's wireframe pixelation. Of course, the game still has something to say, something very reminiscent of a transformative cyberpunk ethos, about hacking the system and transforming it from within. Games like Death Stranding and even Eco do this, in how they disrupt good control, feel, and cybernetics to get us to understand allegory at a different level than just pleasure. We are pushed aggressively towards the idea that there is an alternative, by both revealing games for what they are and deconstructing them. In his book Avangard Video Games, Brian Schrank formalizes the connection between play and the politics of subversion, by connecting games to a lineage of Avangard political movements, from Dada to the situationists. Play has never been about just submitting to rules and algorithms of control, but also to question the legitimacy and design of those rules to begin with. The politics of the information age would have us become algorithms, but when play connects cybernetics with the aesthetics of cyberpunk, we can finally shock the system. However, are we not then valuing games not for what they are, but what they can do for us? Is true cyberpunk anti-technological? It's funny, the end of Deus Ex asks this question explicitly, but asks the player to answer it. Should we integrate with the system, gaining control ourselves as we forge a new future with our new AI overlords? Should we become literal gods in the machine? Or do we reject this? Do we dismantle all that technology has both brought and wrought and transitioned to a simpler time when humanity was free from networks of control? These questions are now bubbling to the surface of our modern political discourse. Popular mainstream books like Deus as well as futurists of many stripes are posing similar questions. What is the relationship between technology and society, humanity and machine? As the cybernetic medium now attuned to its cyberpunk mantra, the playful individual at the heart of both games and life has to answer this question.