Cyberpunk 2077 & The Only Character You Can't Play

Can I talk to you about character creators for a moment?

A character creator in a game is a tool designed to assist players with immersion, the feeling of suspending your disbelief when choosing to enter into a simulation. It’s somewhat like the Silent Protagonist trope. It allows a player to better project their sense of self onto the perspective character by preventing a clash between the character’s dialogue and how the player imagines themselves to be speaking or reacting in that moment. You build the player-character relationship in the interactive narrative through an act of Negation. Negating the character’s voice.

A character creator strives for the same end with a Positive assertion. Through creating either yourself, or an idealized/extreme version of yourself, the player may place themselves within a game.

That’s the design theory anyway. Reality is more complex. Silent Protagonists can be distinct characters who express a specific voice or perspective outside of dialogue boxes. From The Legend of Zelda’s Link to Persona 5’s Joker, gaming is filled with protagonists who are distinct characters while presenting as player-inserts. And a Character Creator, too, has nuance. Limitations within a character creator can reveal the priorities of a studio or publisher regarding the game-product’s target audience. Limitations in skin tone and hair style can reveal a lack of diversity in an artist team’s expression. The default order of options presented can reveal what appearances a developer sees as normal and what they see as other. And some character creators aren’t about self-expression at all.

Games like Blade & Soul or Black Desert Online demand adherence to a certain visual aesthetic that the game is centered around. The character creators for Code Vein 1 & 2 demand that the player design a post-apocalypse hot topic anime vampire, and present no options to do otherwise. And to reimagine either your self or a new character within a myriad of artistic frameworks is one of the reasons I love character creators in games so dearly.

It is only when a character creator is so extensive so as to clearly be aiming at realistic immersion for any and all possible players that I begin to narrow my focus to everything that is missing. Between hair, skin, gender, cultural background, body shape, and even genitals, Cyberpunk 2077 seems to say that anyone and everyone can be here.

Which is why I must tell you that, no matter who good, extensive, and impressive the character creator of Cyberpunk 2077 may be, it can never represent me. I am the only character you can’t play in Cyberpunk 2077.

I noticed this hard truth while watching the let’s play of one WoolieVersus channel, episode 26, titled, “Creole Lessons.” In it there is a quest in which the player-character, V, must retrieve a device, a translation implant, in order to understand and communicate with the Voodoo Boys. One of the gangs of Night City who exclusively speak in Haitian Creole. One of the two co-hosts, Reggie, is something of a polyglot and understands some Haitian Creole. Providing color commentary on what certain characters were saying and expressing in moments when the main character was unable to understand them.

And it is this IRL translation of lines the game itself intends to be unknown that solidified my understanding. V cannot be Haitian. They cannot speak Creole. No version of V can even be familiar with it. There is no option for V to say, “My mother is from Haiti, but I never learned Creole.” To V, Haiti is purely foreign. If not, this quest doesn’t work.

This upset me a little. Though I rarely find an occasion to mention it, I am Haitian. A second-generation Haitian American. My grandfather, Andre Renaud, came from Haiti to continue his practice as a gynecologist, and had a whirlwind career working in Florida, Kansas City - Missouri, and at one point was even working with NASA delivering astronaut babies. The details are a bit murky for me however. He died when my mother was still a young child, and as a result my upbringing in the MidWest was devoid of Haitian cultural heritage. It was devoid of Creole.

My high school French teacher is the one who taught me that Haitian Creole, the language, exists at all, and would include some facts about differences between European French and Haitian Creole because she saw my interest. I didn’t even know I had distant cousins in Florida until I was nearly 27 years old, after I moved here.

My relationship to my Haitian culture is one of striving for a treasure that my family history lost to the beast of Midwestern Ennui. 

Which leaves me in a strange place with Cyberpunk 2077.

In the comments name for me, if you can, two other games that have Haitian representation of any kind?

I can only name one. Mafia 3, in which you kill The Haitian Mob for being an opposing crime family. Just like Cyberpunk 2077. But Cyberpunk is different. Our language is here. Our culture is represented here, but in the only way that the hyper-capitalist dystopian setting could promise. The history of Haitians in Night City if one of Hispaniola lost to global warming powered tropical storms. The religion of Voodoo has lost connection to the Loa, nor is Christianity all that healthy in the city for Christian Haitians. And yet, the revolutionary spirit of the first, free African state, post-colonialism, lives. The Pacifica District being owned and controlled by the Voodoo Boys after successfully repelling the Night City Police Department from claiming the town Haitian Immigrants built for the Corpos.

For this, I love Cyberpunk’s representation of Haiti. It would have been infinitely easy for CD Projekt Red to omit the more complex and complicated dynamics of Mike Pondsmith’s worldbuilding when adapting his universe and tabletop games to the digital screen. They took the time, and gave me a beautiful gift. But I see it and I wonder, is the gift for me?

When the wrapping paper says, “You are not Haitian.”

In the genre of cyberpunk, where the tropes of orientalism are used to sell a globalized, cross-cultural exchange subsumed by capitalist commodification, the best representation a smaller population can hope to ask for is to be cast as Forever Foreign.

Thank you for watching,

Take care of each other,

And stay true.