Game Ranger Detective: The Redemption of Reason in the Cyber world

Gamedec is the debut novel released in 2021 by Polish indie game dealer Anshar, based on Polish writer Marsin's science fiction series Detective: The Edge of Reality. This year was jokingly called "cyberpunk blitzkrieg" by fans, for two reasons, one is that in recent years, the industry has been surging up, "Predator", "Detroit: Incarnate", "Bliss Disco" and "Cyberpunk 2077" have come out successively, setting off a terrifying wave in the game market, "Ranger Detective" is undoubtedly a further continuation of this wave; the second is that cdpr, the big manufacturer of the pilot cyberpunk boom, also happens to be from Poland.

The cyberpunk boom has been accompanied by peer pressure and vicious competition, with a large number of follow-up works emerging, and obscene neon sets, faulty elements and bloody scenes have dissolved the serious core of cyberpunk, reducing it to a stack of elements with its own appearance. "Ranger Detective" chose to do the opposite, abandoning the popular combat design of cyberpunk games and returning to the old-fashioned style of the golden age of CRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) at the end of the last century— emphasizing narrative-based, zero-battle rules, and player-selected experiences. "Ranger Detective" takes the class-defined warsaw city as the stage, is loyal to the formal logic of cyberpunk "advanced technology, backward life", and presents a profile of human life at all levels under a highly cybernetic society with a box court perspective that looks at the whole picture.

After the game's release, some people called it "sunshine punk" or "hope punk". The former emphasizes ecological dystopianism, aiming to design an environmentally friendly production system that can provide a basis for future society; the latter focuses on an optimistic narrative in which people transform society in the context of love and kindness. This is the unique "screwing" characteristic of contemporary science fiction, which both rebels against the blind optimism of science fiction works of the last century and longs for the good function of the future world.

The author, Marcin, refuted both of these evaluations in his own handwriting, and even objected to the work being classified as cyberpunk. After all, it was meant to be a game that envisioned the future, not to be limited to a lot of rules. Of course, meaning is always constructed retrospectively. Detective Ranger does shape dystopianism, but instead of sticking to the traditional spirit of rebellion, it focuses on a more realistic theme, namely reflections on free will.

Eternal life, the void, the anti-gravity... These techniques enabled the inhabitants of the city of Warsaw to attain physical well-being, but they could not dispel their spiritual crisis. Fredo is trapped in the void because of his father's domestic violence personality distortion, 37 years old is still like in the rebellious period, because of sexual harassment of female employees of the company, they are trapped in the virtual world; the orphans who produce pumpkins are addicted to drugs and work like slaves to seek guardians to maintain supplies; the civilians have formed a new "lack" due to information excess, and the marginal dissolution of the present and the virtual world has made the situation more serious, and many people are completely living in the virtual world and are permanently out of touch with reality. Alienation, drug epidemics, sexual perversion... Isn't the opposite of this coin a projection of the shadow of contemporary society?

However, neither Marsin nor Anshar Studios is demanding to confront the problem head-on, but takes a more concrete, ingenious, and obscure approach: instead of discussing the boundary between virtual and reality, it dissolves the boundary between artificial intelligence and the human mind. Towards the end of the game, the truth will be narrated in the form of "Rashomon", and the player can only know that the city of Warsaw is not the real world if they combine the evidence and peel off the cocoon. The protagonists, Ken Zhou, Fredo and others are neither human nor data, but the cyber spirit created by technology. If the network spirit loads the consciousness carrier into the bionic device, it can live like a normal person in the present world. There is no longer a difference in mind between AI and people, and reality and virtuality are naturally no longer distinct. Of course, the real AI still does not have superior transfer learning capabilities, and naturally does not have to worry about the confusion of humans and machines, but this still shows the author's doubts about the certainty of contemporary people themselves.

In the future depicted in "The Ranger Detective," humanity faced a natural revolt in 2070. In the next 50 years, humans used anti-gravity technology to create "tower cities". This caged city-state was able to fight off an aggressive ecosystem and used information technology to create the "Void," a virtual world of hundreds of games. Reality is therefore divided into the present and the virtual world, and anyone who has a computer, a couch, a game suit, a nutrient solution, and a "swim pill" can live in the virtual world. They work, earn money, buy food, and pay rent in holograms, just like life in the present world. It wasn't until 2120 that there was a "present collapse" when a virus called RAC-5 caused everyone to suffer from time dementia, and people lost the ability to recognize time. The upper-middle-class rich either use special technology to achieve immortality, or immigrate to the planet Gaia; the civilians in the lower city struggle to survive in poverty, language disintegration, drug addiction, and social riots, and those who survive form gangs - the tough and conservative "Iron Sleeve Gang" and the "cynics" who use hacking technology to fool the virtual world.

The protagonist lives in the city of Warsaw at the end of the 22nd century and is a full-time Ranger. This is a special kind of detective profession, they travel through the virtual world, deep into the game to solve cases. The first commission, Haggis, CEO of Blue Whale Interactive from Uptown, was to retrieve his son, Fredo, who had been lying on the game bed for a month and was dying.

During the investigation, the protagonist became acquainted with the legendary player Ken Zhou. Ken Zhou is the world champion of the real pain competitive game "Good and Evil Showdown", and in the final game, he is hacked by the cynic, loses the defending qualification, and becomes a Ranger, investigating who is plotting against him. He is the protagonist's best partner. The two work together to rescue Fredo, and learn that in a farm game, someone uses a cheat to speed up the production of pumpkins, and the investigation finds that the cheater is a child in an orphanage, and the guardian uses drugs and violence to force them into slavery. The protagonist and Ken Zhou rescue them and inadvertently perceive a more hidden crisis, the "Tree of All-Knowing". Rumor has it that this is the "codestand of the real world", that created everything in the present world.

However, as the investigation deepens, Ken Zhou is dead. He fell from a height in a game suit and was shot several times, but there was neither a fall nor a blood stain. After repeated investigations, the protagonist finally came to an unbelievable conclusion - he was killed in the game, and it was the "Hong Clan" who killed him. The Hong Clan is a clan-like player guild that acts in a secretive and low-key manner.

The protagonist secretly investigates and discovers that the Hong clan is a cult in the name of the game, and what they worship is the "All-Knowing Tree". Members of the group who perform well may be allowed to enter the Omniscience Tree. All those who entered never turned back, which was seen by the tribe as a spiritual ascension. In the Tree of Omniscience, the protagonist encounters an individual named "314", who is neither human nor NPCs, but rather a data-defined fragment of human consciousness. 314 wants to reveal that they are not in the real world, so they need to fuse with the protagonist as a ranger, but are suddenly interrupted by the enemy, and the protagonist falls into a coma.

When he wakes up, the protagonist finds that the world goes back to the state it was a week ago, as if all encounters were just dreams. After re-accepting Haggis's commission, the truth surfaced. It turns out that the protagonist's world is just a simulator, created by Blue Whale Interactive, a real company. The small business modeled itself on the real world by making a sandbox and building a probabilistic system for measuring probabilities, and then using special techniques to create an anthropomorphic consciousness "cyber spirits". In the real world, the economy is monopolized by large corporate consortia, but the birth of the network spirit and the operation of the probabilistic system have enabled Blue Whale Interactive, a small enterprise, to gain a firm foothold, which can not only predict and avoid the difficulties of competitors, but also provide business plans for customers from all walks of life. But to ensure the realism of the probabilistic system, blue whales have stored thousands of rendan seals that carry the consciousness of the living in a digital vault, which is tantamount to imprisoning their souls.

It is not difficult to see that Ranger is not only a fictional profession in "Ranger Detective", but also an "answer" for creators. The Ranger wanders in the present and the imaginary world, but is not obsessed with any game, it represents the value rationality of human beings. Technology has greatly expanded the margins of human freedom, but also brewed a crisis of information quagmire, mental anxiety, and abuse of desire, which is where the risks of the real world lie. Marx once said: "In practice, people should prove the truth of their thinking, that is, the reality and strength of their own thinking, the shore of their own thinking." Only with the rationality of the "Ranger", based on reality, and distinguishing between right and wrong, can we gain insight into the illusion of short-term pleasure and achieve deeper and broader spiritual freedom.