CD Projekt RED Cyberpunk Apology Comes After Inappropriate Twitter Joke

[dar0ck]

A CD Projekt RED Cyberpunk apology has come out of the game’s Twitter after the official Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter account tweeted a joke that many people thought was inappropriate earlier today. The joke, a stereotypical “Did you just assume my gender” joke, brought a lot of critical comments on the account.

While Cyberpunk 2077 takes place almost 50 years in the future, that doesn’t mean that current standards have moved at the same pace. Attitudes may be far more liberal and accepting in the future, but these days when transgender people are still discriminated against, the “Did you just assume my gender” joke can be offensive to many, hence the backlash and the CD Projekt RED Cyberpunk apology.

This isn’t the first time a game has gotten criticism for taking a current or past concept and making it work in the setting. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided during the lead-up to its own release made use of the term “mechanical apartheid”, addressing the forced segregation and persecution that augmented people were suffering under in the game world.

The term got some criticism due to lingering effects of South African apartheid, though it died down fairly quickly. The same will likely be true for the Cyberpunk 2077 joke, but hopefully whoever’s in charge of the account will be more careful when making jokes like that in the future.

While the discussion and the CD Projekt RED Cyberpunk apology may seem more irrelevant when people are augmenting their bodies to absurd degrees rather than changing what gender they were born with into the gender they actually believe they are, we still have a long way to go until we get to the year 2077, and since right now it’s just an artistic vision we have no idea of what the future will actually look like at that point.

We’re likely to see things that are a lot weirder to normal people when Cyberpunk 2077 comes out in 2019 for the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC, so remember to keep an open mind.