Hard Wired Island (Part 1)

Does Mark Fisher dream of Anime Sheepgirls?

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Jul 15, 2022

Hard Wired Island is a game published by Weird Age Games. Financing of the game involved crowdfunding. Game material and content is reproduced here for review purposes and is owned by Weird Age Games.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we do nor find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgement that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical term, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgement.

Ludo

I am once again cheating on my own framework, pointing out that there is nothing against speaking about art direction in the rules I put against myself; the art direction in Hard Wired Island is phenomenal. I’m stunned at how it all meshes together, the layout guiding the readability, matching the colour schemes of the art, coding the sections, how everything is given the space to breathe and nothing clashes or feels out of space, fully evoking the inspiration material while reinforcing its own identity. Again, art direction is something that I feel is often neglected as a skill in this artform, undermining the effort of writing, layout and illustration, so I will never stop praising when I see it used as an effective power multiplicator.

Cyberpunk games have historically been terrible against disabled and queer — specially trans — people. While some points can cause some issues with accessibility and approachability1, there was an obvious effort to be as accommodating and welcoming as much as possible. You don't just feel like there is space for you at the table; it is a tearful surprise to see things that were clearly designed for you.

The lead designer has one of the strongest voices in humor and setting within this art form and hum, let’s just say you are going to enjoy or struggle with Hard Wired Island depending on your appreciation of this sense of humor2. Thankfully, you can quickly figure it out depending on your tolerance to this Burger Kong Mural.

Ettin on Twitter: "I got a lot of positive feedback about the Hard Wired Island preview, specifically the awful fast food joint pride mural in the example scenario. So obviously I had — Tolerance of Mural Index, if you will

Brad

While I too love the art, I think it’s important to mention that the book has a wonderful pdf, it has a well-organized and, most importantly to me, hyperlinked table of contents, is fully bookmarked, and overall is well-designed, no important mechanics information hid in sidebars here.

The author’s voice, if you find it amusing, makes it a joy to read, and it lacks the boring “Look how miserable the world is” tone you see often in Cyberpunk games. This is one of few ttrpg books to get me to giggle while reading it, and the art direction is unmatched.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly breakdown, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Ludo

The game evokes 80/90s animation strongly. I wonder how younger people and others that did not experience this directly may interact with this piece of art, if it can stand on its own for them and how easy is for them to get into the text. I am optimist, but should be something to consider when getting into Hard Wired Island.

Despite how joyful a casual/entertainment read the book is, actually getting to do something with the book can be pretty painful — at least for my brain configuration. You get immediately dumped on the L5 station of Grand Cross, dropped into the setting, and flow through everything from election politics to gig apps and the breakdown of what you actually do in the game and how that works before being dragged into character creator. I had a fantastic time in my first cover to back read, but whenever I needed to recall something, consult a setting element or create a character, I kept getting lost and distracted by other shinies. Who knew a printed book could do the “Wikipedia binge” on its own?

Hard Wired Island is a game with a clear leftist bent and a dark, somber attitude towards the material conditions and the relentless pursuit of exploitation of every single issue. That should go without saying when talking about a cyberpunk, but we all know better; wild, I know, but this one actually does that. So, get ready for it to get extremely real during the sharpest drops — neoliberalism may be 30 years late to the party, but it is making up for lost time with viciousness.

You cannot escape the setting; you are pretty much stuck in the orbital. The arrangement of systems that make Hard Wired Island are too wired, sliding within each other. It is baked in everything from characters, to tone, to character options, to what can fit the imaginary. If you are familiar with our work here, you are thinking this is the kind of stuff I will hoot and howl about in #53 or how I smirk at the resistance of this presentation to Lorefication. But that is the thing with the awe-some: it can be quite intimidating. I don’t know how easy it will be to make Grand Cross your “own”, or even take the game away from its voice and context; rancid or great, the vibes are here to stay.

Brad

Ludo sure isn’t kidding. This game loves 90’s anime, and wears it so brightly and clearly that it’s impossible not to notice it (you encounter one on literally the opening page). This happens to slide right into the origin of my love of cyberpunk, and so I fall into its target audience. I do have some more to comment about that love in the sixth section, and how you can try to adapt to players who are not huge fans.

The bulk of info on L5 is a fantastic resource but I do absolutely agree that it can be a bit unwieldy to interact with during play, but man, the tone is so good.

The focused setting means that you don’t have a ton of extra considerations beyond customizing your own slice of L5, but if you are looking to set a game elsewhere you are gonna have an uphill battle.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and creates a common space for creation.

Ludo

It is a love letter to 80s and 90s anime, cyberpunk, late 00s/early 10s internet humor and making do with two/three jobs in the current hell of dying neoliberalism.

The PCs are residents of Grand Cross who get caught in the upheaval happening across the station. Some are street activists, gig workers, reporters, or more, who get pulled in by their occupations and living situations. Others are hackers, bounty hunters, and other people in slightly less reputable jobs who were immersed in it from the start.
Either way, they're still regular folks. They pay rent, they buy groceries, and they hang out with their friends. In between, they go on missions. These missions aim to change the situation in Grand Cross, defeat a specific enemy, or simply help the PCs and their community survive. Over time, successful missions improve life on Grand Cross.

Do not let the catgirl maid distract you; headpats are fleeting, but this being a game about people (just that, people, be them cyborgs, robots or Italian) coming together to deal with precarity and turn the tables on their oppressors is eternal.

The game further develops and presents these ideas over ten fantastic setting overview pages, rich in tone but not unapproachable, setting the features of the orbital, cultures, as well as defining threats — the kind of things you could put in twelve bullet points in a single page as a player handout.

To further establish what you are going to spend your time in the game actually doing, Hard Wired Island finishes the rules summary and character creation with pages of play examples.

Now, play examples have been mocked and have the reputation they have for decades of reasons; these stand out by being fantastic layouted, designed, being an honestly good read and giving the best overviews of the rules in practice. Social matters, stealthy and security, hacking the big tube in the sky and getting beaten up.

The Problem with Combat Ultimately, rules for getting into fights are also rules for attemptingmurder. Even if you don’t intend to yet, it’s possible that somewhere in your future is a guywith hopes and dreams and a chance to turn his life aroundwhose decades-long storywill come to an end on your blade. The option is on the table. The rules for combat actions are placed after the other actions because they’re meant to be a tool of last resort. They’re what you use when you can’t talk to, hack, or avoid your problems. People who try violence first tend to be messed up or, worse, policemen. But violence is still on the table. Sometimes it’s in self-defense. Sometimes, the possibility of violence is enough—some people aremuchmore willing to accept non-violent solutionswhen Plan B is looming in the background. Sometimes you justwant to have a cool action scene. That’s okay. Don’t be afraid to fight if you need to. Just be sure you explore all the options. — *The game also is pretty aware of what it is doing and what is at stake*

Then of course, a guideline about the economic nightmare of space neoliberalism and how to water and prune community in the void.

Brad

Ludo hits this nail right on the head with her excellent info. I love combat warnings like that and I want to comment that if you ask me about play examples I will start howling for blood, and even I like Hard Wired Island’s Play Examples.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists on a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lucrécia

Here we fucking go. Start the hauntology4 counter.

When making cyberpunk art, there is a central contradiction that must be engaged with: we no longer live in the same world that created those works — even if that dead world and its anxieties haunt us every waking moment. It should be properly addressed if one is to make worthwhile cyberpunk rather than reanimate its corpse.

In this decade, and related or tangentially related to this art form, we have seen the following approaches to engaging with the cyberpunk contradiction:

Ignore it and just do the thing, uncritically reproducing the trappings of the 70s to 90s, which include a complete unawareness of the psychopolitical, and with all the flawed anxieties about neoliberalism that were displaced into Orientalism against Asian/Slavic people and cultures — among many other things. This gives you at best, stale outdated cyberpunk with little of punk in it — that is not the world we live in, those are not the technologies of power deployed against us, — but more commonly gonna lead to Neonliberal art. You know which game I’m thinking of.
Focus on the fact that cyberpunk is a specific form of social sci fi. This takes conscience that many of the struggles remain and/or have mutated, and it is a constant fight, that we are already living in a cyberpunk dystopia. So to make it relevant, it updates the tech — not necessarily vulgar understanding of technology, but the technologies of power and control. A prime example of this is Voidheart Symphony; nobody would call it a cyberpunk work, but does align with this movement than the majority of contemporary “cyberpunk”. 5
You can accept cyberpunk’s historical moment is done, so you make something that celebrates it within its time and space, indulging in nostalgia. This is the spirit of things like Blade Runner 2049 and Cyberpunk RED.

And then there is whatever Hard Wired Island is6.

The nostalgic aspects of Hard Wired Island are pretty obvious: the 90s and the end of the century anime influences are extremely powerful. However, other than the technology of their 2020 being a mish mash of our technologies of control and a End of the World fantasy of scientific progress, nostalgia remains captive in the realm of aesthetics.

To the surprise of nobody familiar with my other work, I am a sucker for deeply hauntological art and Hard Wired Island is a prime example of that. It really captures a sense of a lost future that has been stolen from us by the last thirty years: a space race that was not about projecting nuclear power, a humanity united against an extinction level threat, social useful scientific progress instead of patent-farming chronic pharmaceutical cultivation or the big data surveillance paradigm.

An hauntological wonder or not, cyberpunk is useless unless it is socially relevant for its moment in time. This game does it two-fold: the first is to avoid the “cool future, wow” effect by making every technology be within familiar and relatable, as very few of its wonders are not something we could have right now if not for the, hum, uneven distribution of resources and priorities of our own 2020 — be it accessibility tools, biological and inorganic enhancements, vat-growth meat related fraud, affordable catgirl maids, multipass data collection, electable politicians that don't make you want want to tear out your eyes7; the second is by having the same problems we have in our 2020 be mirrored, replicated and exaggerated: — and being the trouble your characters struggle with — medical bills, clustered urbanism with stressed infrastructures, civil rights being under attack and rolled back because it makes more money to the corpos, rampant privatisation, the entrepreneurial precarity of gig economy, the self-destructive impulses of capital, data-self exploitation and predatory advertising and marketing, etc.

Cybernetic Burden In the future, there’s an entirely new form of economic oppression: augmentation. Whether you were augmented to stay competitive at work or for healthcare reasons, it's often easier to get new installations subsidized than maintain current ones. Once your company drops you, or your insurance company decides you don't need another arm, you're usually saddled with the costs of maintaining your own cybernetics even when they’re irreversible. In short, cybernetic augments increase your Burden. At negative Burden, you don’t worry about it. You can be as enhanced as you want, and many augments basically pay for themselves. At Burden 0 or above, each additional Augment increases your Burden by 1. Some character options can mitigate this cost—for example, the Builder Origin means one Augment is already paid for. They may have dumped you on the street once you stopped being useful, but at least they're paying for that leg. This doesn't apply to cosmetic or medical augmentations. If you get a set of cat ears, or an arm that works exactly like a regular arm, it doesn’t increase your Burden enough to matter. See p. 91 for more. — Economic mechanics nod both to classic cyberpunk themes as well as the constant psychopolitical drilling about anti-social atomized self-actualization, certification and self-healing that are deemed essential for productive function in contemporary society.

Or, as Hard Wired Island puts it: retro future, present problems.

Brad

Hard Wired Island has one of the most common things in the current land of TTRPG design, a breakdown of what to expect from the game, in the form of the Hard Wired Island’s pillars of Cyberpunk.

I kind of half-read this on my first go-round and then reread them on writing this review, and honestly, the reason I mention them is it is one of the few times I could see examples from the actual breakdown in the text.

This game revels in its retrofuturist anime perspective but doesn’t peddle last decade’s complaints. Hard Wired Island doesn’t even play around with pretending that it isn’t about the problems of today in a fun format, and even the bits it makes about the horrors of today are still horrible in their own way.

But this game doesn’t just exist to bum you out, it points at all the problems in this world, but points out the good things, that humanity came together after the Impact and built all of this, if only someone could inspire them in a way that doesn’t require a seven-figure body count, imagine what they could do…

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Fitting for the genre, for example, the gap between production costs and fair wages in the Imperial Core and how prohibitive this game is for most of the South.

I don’t know… Goon Chaotic Good? Is this a thing? Please don’t make it be a thing.

Spoilers: You would be correct.

Some may say hauntology is the spectre of Marx over the imaginary of the left and the nightmares of private-propriety-organized civilization; some may say it is the longing for lost-futures, of the loss of the infinite potential of people at the End of History; some say hauntology are the ghostly chains of materialism and the multigenerational trauma as the material consequences fail to be delivered. They are confused by the bad translation of Fantologia to French and English: it is actually when a gnome illusionist casts Phantasmal Killer and you make the save but must now live with the knowledge.

It can run a mean cyberpunk too.

It is hauntology, that was literally my opening of this section.

Even the cybernetic indenture service and the technonightmare of dreamers feels like we could have now because we know exactly who would give the thumbs up and the millions that would cheer.

Split/Party