ABSTRACT
The 1990 tabletop roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2020 is elemental to solidifying many of the cyberpunk motifs in this specific media format, from the urban sprawls and high-tech, low-life mentality to the genre's interest in cyborgs and human-technology interfaces. The interactive textual descriptions of the game's rule books work in tandem with a game system and a referee to create vividly imagined situations that foreground fashionable aesthetics as a central part of the gaming experience. In Cyberpunk 2020, however, players are encouraged to enact an explicitly posthuman aesthetic, but in so doing there is the subversion of the model of clothing and fashion as frivolous reflections of commodity culture. In its use of fashion, Cyberpunk 2020 destabilizes subject-object relationships and invites players to create new ethical identities and experience an embodied posthumanism that engages with finitude and physical-psychological risks.
