Meta-Averse (or: Stick It, Redux)

"Long story short, it was aaall a dream."
"Thank you [...] for making [dumping you] a little easier for me."

 

The Good Place S02E09 Best Self

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Spoilers follow for Gamedec and The 13th Floor. Actually even the epigraph might be a bit much. Though let's face it, both cases offer little to spoil.

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Funny. Apparently they made a fourth Matrix movie which I never even heard about because nobody gave a shit. Having been informed... I still don't. Does that tell you anything about the direction the whole cyberpunk routine has taken? Like maybe it's taken no direction because it's so routine?

 

I bashed Gamedec last week partly for so ineptly telegraphing its climactic last act grand reveal a quarter into its story. The second mention of "the tree" at the start of chapter 2, appearing mysteriously in random places beyond the bounds of game worlds, immediately triggered flashbacks to The 13th Floor, if not for their content then for their ineptitude in foreshadowing a big mystery about as mysteriously as your drunken uncle elbowing you in the ribs asking if you got his fart joke. But had Gamedec even managed more subtle presentation, that reveal would still be... a fart joke. As soon as the tree was confirmed as important I found myself mentally repeating "please don't go meta, please don't go meta" until the tale inevitably fell back on cyberpunk's most obvious, most gratuitously rehashed logical conclusion of the world itself being fake.

Except nobody's been surprised by that since March '99! At this point we've all been treated to that "twist" so many times over that even if we literally woke up tomorrow on the other side of a virtual reality machine, all you'd hear is eight billion yawns and "yup, saw it coming" in every language from Albanian to Swahili. A plot twist stops twisting once you've so assiduously hammered it flat!

But this is hardly just a cyberpunk problem, predating it in soap operas by some decades, to the point it's its own tired cliche. You might justifiably argue some difference between the low-brow "it was all a dream" cop-out and the postmodern metatextual, fourth wall breaking, audience participation routine, but for the moment let's just admit they've both simply gotten old. Hell, this schtick's been old for almost half a century. Retcons, amnesia, coma dreams, alternate universes, magical construct worlds, amnesia, evil clones, long-lost twins, amnesia, irony, post-irony, meta-irony, trans-irony, irony 2.0, hirony and Byrony and don't forget the amnesia, all such cheap tricks to dodge the burden of coherent causality have long needed a few decades' worth of pause from common usage in order to regain any clout. Gotta let 'em air out a little. "It was all a dream" faceplanted as infamously contrived even when Dallas pulled it back in the '80s. Just frikkin' STOP IT!

Of course, aside from laziness and incompetence, one must address the added dimension of feigned cleverness or depth, both on the part of writers and their degenerate dysgenic audiences. Declaring the world a mere fantasy allows writers to position themselves oh-so preciously above it all, never stooping to the naivete of those penning honest, engaging narratives (while also never actually publishing anything more thoughtful) and allows audiences to forego understanding any complex plot, symbolism or characterization in favor of feeling clever for dismissing storytelling as make-work filler. Oh, never mind the originality, nuance, insight or coherence of our first four chapters; they were never the "real" game all along.

So what exactly did I pay you for?

 

Feigning such deep thoughts also allows both the writer and audience to indulge in mysticism so shallow it would elicit eye-rolls from snake-fondling Pentecostals, in some hogwash about the human spirit.

"Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly [...] as you are undoubtedly gathering the anomaly is systemic, creating fluctuations in even the most symplistic equations"

- translation: "shit's nuts bro" puffed up to five minutes of bearded bloviation.

Whatever the motivation and appeal behind such gimmicks, their common crime (aside from trite repetition) is disengaging the audience from the story they're reading/watching/playing. It's harder to get invested in saving the world once you figure out that by lvl20 your character can just reboot WorldOS(tm) and defrag its hard drive. Even if the grand reveal is pulled off flawlessly, your now demonstrably irrelevant setting and characters will have added little to nothing to the overall conflict. For cyberpunk in particular, it's not like the idea of humans getting stuck in virtual worlds can't be included, so long as it's downplayed, merely an accepted element of the world, a possible threat to be faced, to be dealt with via the protagonists' techne and technology, and not some cosmic revelation. I seem to recall the Shadowrun cRPG adaptations treating it just as such. Torment: Tides of Numenera's cadre of experienced professional writers, despite working within a telepathy-riddled science fantasy setting, rather wisely treated the question of the world itself being fake as the demented ramblings of primitive cargo cults.

 

Examined from our vantage point several decades later, despite its popularity since the New Wave SF of the '60s this sort of "what is real" magical surrealism has rarely borne fruit even under the pen of Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick or Neil Gaiman... and the rest of you ain't Lem, Dick or Gaiman.

Give it a rest.

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P.S.:

I may as well admit I've just rehashed this post from 2018... but honestly, the issue has only grown more aggravating with time.