What I found, of course, was a detailed system of combat and how to kill people in ways that were more graphic than other RPGs. Yeah, you could play a Media or a Rockerboy, but TV broadcasting and rock music (so quaint!) didn’t each get their own separate book in the box like combat did, complete with detailed gun illustrations and descriptions. There was also a typo that gave a particular bullet — the 7.62 — enormous murderpower and I exploited that with glee. And the robot blender/snake that you kept in your throat. And a dartgun in the eye.

But that simple system — stat + skill + roll vs. objective — showed me a lot about how games work, about how the rules give you these certain ways to do things. I started applying it to all sorts of stuff. It became my go-to system.

Later, I realized that its core moral arena — whether you “improve” yourself at the cost of empathy — was a huge copout. Not only is it grossly insulting (people with prosthetic limbs are less human than natural people?), but it’s also already given you the answer. Not only does it cost you empathy, but Empathy and Cool stats are used for the same thing. It actually doesn’t cost you anything because the world is fucked because everyone is upgrading and losing their humanity.

Ben Lehman used to play a great way, though. I don’t think this was in the rules, but it’s great: anyone on your “contacts” list, you deal with using Empathy. Anyone else, you deal with using Cool. Sure, the system still manhandles you into a moral position, but at least you can see what it’s getting at. For any players I knew, Empathy was just your tank for how much cyberware you could handle before your character died.

Now, though, on the eve of 2013, I’m thinking differently. You don’t make change with guns anymore. You make change with communication. It’s not like Jonny Mnemonic, with its weapons and secret data. It’s like Max Headroom, with its ubiquitous cameras and leaking data. Only we’re all TV stations now. There are networks, sure, and they’re big and powerful, OK. But Mubarak’s Egypt didn’t fall because they took over state TV. It didn’t even fall because of Twitter. It fell because of the people tweeting. It fell because we could all see what was happening and the people on the ground could communicate and coordinate. Even Mubarak’s military could see that writing on the wall, so they backed the winning horse.

So now I’m working on a cyberpunk game for 2013, in honor of Cyberpunk. It will be all about the powers we have as transhumans to shape our world through our information networks. It won’t be VR and guns. It’ll be celldrones, meshnets, bamboo phones, and hagfish slime 3D printers. It will assume that Moore’s Law affects every part of society. It will be political and it will be ragged. You know. Punk. Like it said on the box.

Another was a breaking and entering thing, with one corporation hiring a nobody private eye (Nye’s character, naturally) to steal a thing. He smelled a rat, so he hired the rest of the PCs as his muscle. Those guys thought they were in charge because their guns were large, so they literally didn’t get past the lobby. Nye’s character is telling them, “Hey, guys, hey, something stinks here, hey, let’s get in the flying car, hey, OK, fuck this. I get in the car and fly away.” He’s the only one who survived. The other players didn’t much like that, so we didn’t play again, but if I recall, Nye’s character had his own story where he figured out what went wrong (aside from no one listening to their netrunner when the security system was still running and using concussion grenades in an attempt at sneaking in.) If I recall, it was an attempt to scandalize the company, drive its stock prices down, then buy the company with the industrial secret macguffin still in hand.

There was another thing with an orbital smuggler who had the cure for a manufactured plague. The purveyors of the treatment (and the plague, if I recall) didn’t want the cure spread around, so they intercepted him in low orbit. The smuggler got out of his spacecraft to do something, I don’t remember what, fumbled an Ag roll, lost grip on his spacecraft, and floated away to overheat, suffocate, or re-enter.

You can probably see the frustration I was experiencing using that system. I mean, that’s a really excellent death for a character! It’s about the extraordinary power of the status quo and how hard any individual has to work to make a difference, and how all it takes on the part of the individual is a tiny mistake to make all your efforts turn to dust. It’s a Wire-like ending. But it was my friend’s character. It probably took two hours to design that guy, figure out his spacecraft and everything. The only reward was going to be XP and cash and he got neither because, for a genre about irony, the game sure wants to be triumphalist. You know, while tut-tutting you for engaging the cool thing about the setting — the cyberware.

Ooh, that’s right, your Humanity went down the more prosthesis you had, which is really an awful message for folks who get around on them. Nowadays it seems prothesis are all around us and here’s a game in our history that says they are becoming closer and closer to going on a Terminator-rampage. Was that the gist?

I wonder if cyberpunk, in those early days in particular, had an advantage in that the genre wasn’t as expansive, so you wouldn’t have one player wanting to do Tolkien and another wanting Howard having clashing expectations.

Nowadays you could get into all kinds of conflicts of visions, with early Sterling and Gibson alongside Stephenson and Doctorow. Is your current design about that evolution of the genre or born from wanting to see those artists and reporters have more mechanical muscle to change the world?