- Mike Pondsmith created the tabletop version of the Cyberpunk genre.
- Pondsmith and Geoff Keighley joined the ‘Making the Metaverse Personal’ panel.
- They discussed braindance and its implementation in Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077 presented a twist on virtual reality when it debuted late last year. Braindancing saw players witnessing an incident from the point of view of another person. It means downloading data from an encounter to view it from someone else. It went deeper than what we experience with virtual reality headsets such as the Oculus Search in the real world.
Pondsmith invented the tabletop variant of the Cyberpunk genre. He joined Geoff Keighley, the organizer of The Game Awards, at the GamesBeat: Into the Metaverse summit for the “Making the Metaverse Personal” panel. The two talked about braindances and what it takes to make players connect to in-game worlds. They also discussed the Night City of Cyberpunk 2077.
Pondsmith added that in order to see through someone else’s eyes, he does not think we are prepared for a real-world version of braindancing, where people will have to ‘jack-in’ and download info. Keighley asked Pondsmith if he thought we’d see the real world evolve into something similar.
Braindance in Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077 depicts the first braindance instance. It shows a burglar being betrayed and killed by a guy who asked him to rob a shop. We get to watch the scene from different angles. We can even slow down and fast-forward through the video. And find out who killed him by bringing together various pieces of evidence.
The two also explored what it takes to build credible worlds in movies, tabletop games, and video games for developers. The importance of touchstones, or moments and rules to which viewers and players can instantly refer was stressed by Pondsmith.
“You need to have touchstones for people to plug into themselves in an unreal world,” he said, before referring to Star Wars: A New Hope. He listed the scene where Luke Skywalker is working in a garage on Tatooine on his T-16 Skyhopper. He said, “Even though you never sat there working on your car, everybody knows that trope.” They know they’re going to be cluttered in the garage, they know what a garage looks like, they know what a car is going to do. In order to say that Luke is a child who works on hot rods, they don’t have to take a huge jump.
“They know immediately how they fit into that universe,” he said. “They’re aware of the rules.”
Pondsmith’s View on Open-World Games
Pondsmith went on to claim that early MMOs failed to build such touchstones, such as The Matrix Online he worked on. They created a futuristic vision that couldn’t persuade players that it was a future in which they could see themselves, partially because the development team faced technical limitations back in 2005.
Since they concentrate on density, more recent games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 have succeeded in building credible worlds. Right in front of the player, they concentrate on building a realistic, visually masterful world. Pondsmith said, “I like to wander around Red Dead Redemption on horseback. I know other people would find that boring. For me, it’s like ASMR.”
