(Possibly real quote from me, "ahh! you modify the difficulty of evading Trace IC by the ratio of your Persona file size to your jackpoint's available bandwidth - I have achieved enlightenment [derogatory]")
But seriously, it is far too late for have a problem with it now. So I'll conclude how I always conclude - I don't have the guts to run Shadowrun the way it's meant to be run, and maybe that makes me a little wistful, but I've largely made peace with it.
But while my knee-jerk reaction was "oh, wow, thanks, but maybe that's just a little too much fantasy internet for me," that doesn't mean I found Matrix to be completely useless. There were some tantalizing canon mysteries - powerful AIs with their own inhuman agendas, the so-called "children of the matrix" aka "otaku" who can run sophisticated computer programs in their brains (for purposes of hacking, mostly). They got an unfortunately small portion of the book's overall page-count, but I liked that they were there. It helps me get a sense of what's possible in this science-fiction/fantasy universe.
The stuff near the beginning, about the Matrix's effect on society, was similarly welcome, even if it couldn't help feeling like a discarded retro-future. Like, the Matrix has thousands of channels and you would not believe how advanced their pager technology is. It's funny. I lived through this time. I was eighteen years old when this book first came out and first read it when it was relatively new. I know there was a time when it felt impossibly futuristic. I experienced it. But it all feels like a million years ago. Here in the far-off year of 2024, I'm like, "sorry, Shadowrun, but unlike your fictional megacorporations, real capitalists will reject work from home for . . . real estate reasons?"
It's easy to get annoyingly smug about this, as if I'd somehow earned this wisdom, instead of having it foisted upon me by the inevitable and universal passage of time, but I'll try to avoid giving in entirely to my worst impulses. Just one more quick observation, though - there's something quaint and cozy about revisiting old sci-fi. Nowadays, we have a name for this aesthetic - cassette futurism - but back then it was just general cyberpunk and it's humbling to know that I could not recapture it if I tried.
What's most interesting about Matrix as a gaming supplement is that it's not quite retroactively cassette futurist. It's right on the cusp. Some aspects of its future seem like a modern future - there's online shopping, internet socializing (even if it's in the form of message boards, which could still make a comeback, you know) and it's experienced enough to know that everyone is going to hate video phones (corporate executives frequently use AR filters for their conference calls, and though nothing in the text suggested it, I couldn't help imagining a boardroom full of vtubers).
And yet there's still no satisfying explanation for the ubiquitous VR. You log onto a sculpted server and "menus appear as scrolls written in Latin" and . . . what is the appeal of that? I mean, tech companies releasing products that nobody wants, what could be more modern than that, right, but . . . An engineer had to make that. Some senior developer called up an underpaid coder and through their anime avatar said, "hey, I really need you to put in some crunch time getting those menus translated into Latin and put on a scroll, if we don't ship by Q-4 the C-suite is going to be on my ass." And then, I guess, armed criminals break in and steal the source code to sell it to their competitors.
Although, now that I put in these terms, maybe there's something there. Shadowrunning as an unprofitable form of late-capitalist excess. Megacorporations constantly stealing each other's "top secret research" but 90 percent of the time it's just a buzzword-driven boondoggle that was never going to work. And somehow, they never learn. They never connect the dots between the useless crap they get from their shadowrunners and the "bleeding edge tech" stolen by rival shadowrunners. So the constant low-level warfare continues, becoming an end in itself, a way for the execs to flex the power their wealth gives them over the physical world. It's something you can snidely allude to in inter-corporate negotiations, just to make the other guy squirm and then go red in the face when they turn it back on you.
Except it's all happening online and so it's one vtuber avatar saying it to another. ::anime giggle:: "I heard your Renton facility had a break in last night, tee hee!"
But is the world ready for a really goofy and mean-spirited form of cyberpunk? It wasn't in the year 2000, which is probably why Matrix is mostly pretty dry.
Ukss Contribution: There's probably no way to translate the concept of vtubing to the early-20th century meets fantasy milieu of Ukss, even with the Astral Web taking the place of the internet. So I'll go with the overall vibe surrounding the AI, Mirage. He started out as a hardcore military program, designed to combat an adaptive computer virus, but once the virus was defeated he was put on an isolated server in some Fuchi basement and forgotten about for decades. Then some hacker kids broke in, found the cool tech and they mutually adopted each other. Now, he's learning the value of human life and the meaning of love as he mentors a bunch of scrappy orphans, while still being highly military and ruthlessly sending his child soldiers/found family out on dangerous missions for the good of the world (as his alien computer mind understands it).
I could probably find a way to translate that to fantasy.
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