From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, I thought: no trouble, anything like that. Everyone has different skills. Then I realized that some other people might be less informed than me about the whole “having boundaries” thing, and that there was a lot of money to be made selling implants. Enter space strategy story spewer Stellaris, specifically, it’s spost specent spee-LC The Machine Age. It adds a lot of options for your space civilizations, 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 confines of their flesh prisons through cybernetic augmentations? I recognize that from toys! Let’s do some clicking.
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. Rightly so because this is just a romantic extrapolation of how the advertising industry actually works. Advertising, as bizarre and evil as it can be, exists as perhaps the most obvious and blatantly destructive societal force whose continued harm we collectively simply accept, while also not being so depressingly evil that it is no longer at least a little fun. is something to think about. . That this is mainly because constant forced exposure therapy means it takes a lot of evil to actually make us depressed is itself a punch of a depressing thought, but hey ho!
You can still giggle at, say, breakfast cereals made from sugar and wood chips marketing themselves as healthy foods, or Apple coming to save you from a vaguely unoptimized avenue for creativity as part of big tech’s quest to to make sure you are too. never be forced to smell anything again. It’s much less fun to think about other dystopian banalities such as factory farming or the booming British arms trade, but advertising? This is an industry we celebrate in proportion to its skill at telling stylish lies; its ability to disarm us so that we let its open fist reach deep into our chest and, still throbbing, draw out any sense of wholeness or contentment we can feel. Stellaris itself added its ‘Megacorp’ government type years ago, and I’ve since found it my go-to when I really want to get the ‘exploit’ piece of the 4X pie.
Because the titular principles of the 4X genre (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) work so well as subtitles in a business strategy document, Stellaris’s own Megacorp choices are little syncretic story moments waiting to happen. Besides, they just suit my playing style. I aspire not to paint the map, I just want to dip a toothbrush in my color and move it back and forth, leaving my mark on the galaxy without having to work with spreadsheets the size of sandworms.
I call my empire the United Earth Corporation. This is actually something the game suggests to me, and I find its almost blatant lack of imagination more evocative than any of the other, arguably more interesting names I can think of. We’re using the “Cybernetic Creed” origin, which means we start with several sub-factions who just can’t agree on how to properly replace their fingers with fingers 2.0 and their toes with whisks. We also run the ‘Augmentation Bazaars’ civic, which allows us to effectively build Cyberpunk’s ripper documents on our planets. Start as you wish to continue, as they say, and I intend to continue creating a stratified class system of deeply unhappy giga-humans. Do you ever consider that it would only take a single god to not realize that the humans in his 4X game represent sentient beings, which would result in endless suffering for countless souls? Me neither!
We spread out in space. We take planets. We make money. You know, Stellaris stuff. All the while, the new origin offers a whole series of story events with choices. Along with all the other DLC I own, Stellaris has turned into an impressively tiring machine that churns out a new story event every twenty seconds. I make the bad choices. Whenever I see a choice and think, “that sounds bad!” I’ll make it. Brain slugs, huh? Sounds terrible. Let’s do it! If they can conquer enough space with these beautiful new skulls, they have earned their place here. It’s trickle-down economics: all the new bits of the brain that the body doesn’t reject and let trickle out of our ear holes can stay.
It occurs to me that ironically playing a video game as an evil corp is about as conducive to actual activism as tweeting, just with less irregular distribution of serotonin drops. It numbly tempts you to grin at your participation in a spiritual revolution, while soothing your need to help bring about any kind of material change. But I do think there is a certain emancipatory beauty in Stellaris, which is found in the clear love of exploration for its own sake and the great wonder in the macro, and the dedication to representing every flavor of sci-fi trope imaginable is in the micro. They can sell you stories, but they can’t tell you how to interpret them. Probably. Unfortunately for my population, I mainly interpret them as the attached minor modifiers at this point. I have a machine brain and the numbers have to go up.
See, like all things Stellaris, all this beautiful storytelling really just translates into the form of a few percentage modifiers. It’s all about what you make of it, of course, but I decide to only take the most literal approach to it as part of the roleplaying experience. As my society progresses and more and more augmentations spread through the population, we come closer and closer to our ultimate goal: transcending the flesh. There’s a brand new tradition tree for cybernetics! It’s quite transformative! If you work really hard, you’ll eventually unlock the benefit of the “eat shit” tradition. At least, that’s how I read it. “Processing metabolic waste into digestible chemical components.” Yes. We’re all cyborg shitmunchers now. Bring on the future!