[As Yet Unnamed] Near-Future Concept

[jknevitt]

The date isn't important, but I'm sure we're in the late 21st century. The man who runs America isn't important. The coolest tech-toy, the newest movie, the latest k-pop idol... they're all pretty much unimportant.

What's important?

Well, when the Administration confiscated my watch at West Pyongyang Station - that was important. It's my brother's birthday in two days and the Administration has held him in solitary for fifteen years - that's important. I'm afraid the soldiers will ask for my ID papers again, and they're fakes - that's important. I can't activate my databible because the Army took out the wireless hub across the Taedong when they were fighting the revolutionaries - that's important.

I don't want to become another statistic. I don't want to disappear. They don't care who they take, or abuse, or who they want to hurt, because it's all in the interests of "national stability" - that's important.

I think I'm going to do something important. The revolutionaries need someone who can reprogram the network, someone who knows electronics. I don't want to hurt anyone. I just want to get my brother back. I just want the Americans to leave Pyongyang. Is that too much to ask?

===

This is an idea I've had for a bit. It's North Korea, sometime in the not-so-distant future. A militaristic American administration* has hit North Korea, and overthrown the oppressive regime in place. The country has been pacified for quite some time, but it's clear that the occupiers aren't leaving. Korea isn't free until they can stand on their own two feet.

It's not cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is something from the past, a reaction to the glitz and gloss of the 80s lifestyle. This is something different. What to call it, I don't know. It's high tech and modern and everything the tech catalogues promise us, but that doesn't change the fact that ideology gets in the way of things.

Basically, freedom isn't free. You have to fight for it.



* Yes, I know I'm going to Hell for this.

[greedo1379]

It sounds really cool.  It sounds like a cyberpunk setting except government is the big bad guy again rather than corporations.  Could you go over some more of the setting stuff for me?  Technology level and so on?  I like the way it sounds so far, like a nice sci fi moralist piece of fiction.

[jknevitt]

It sounds really cool.  It sounds like a cyberpunk setting except government is the big bad guy again rather than corporations.  Could you go over some more of the setting stuff for me?  Technology level and so on?  I like the way it sounds so far, like a nice sci fi moralist piece of fiction.

To be honest, I first started thinking about it when I saw the trailers for Ghost Recon 2. :D It's very apropos, I think. I saw that and I thought "Well, if America DID launch a land war in North Korea, what would it be like? Would there be a resistance? What would a 21 year old Pyongyang citizen think?" and there you have it.

I really like the cyberpunk genre, but it's very exaggerated and overblown, especially with regards to technology and the influence of corporations. I just imagined what it would be like perhaps 50 years from now over there.

A point that would be good to make with this setting is that it's not important who is responsible for the war. The Koreans, the Americans, it doesn't matter. what matters is that America is still in North Korea for the long run with no good reason. The setting, I feel, would be best as a low-key/non-violent resistance movement (a la Solidarity in Poland in the 80s), with people just trying to run their everyday lives.

In a setting like this, that would be hard on people, and I think it would get very depressing very easily. Maybe it would model reality too well. Who knows.

[daMoose_Neo]

Heh. To be honest, I don't think the influance of corperations in cyberpunk realms is all that far fetched. Anyone following Microsoft closely can see that- their Pallidum initative, with the support of hardware manufacturers, is scary. Intell already has the chips and codes present in many P2 and above to allow some form of remote access/obeservation. According to some sources, the US Government was even in the initial talks for the process, which would allow companies and authorized users to monitor activities on systems. Corperations wanted it as a blackball system for compromised serial codes for Warez software (and, actually, considering a fair portion of the hard copies of Warez available are Asian in origin, might that be a consideration for you? Companies ALWAYS stand to gain during war of any kind...) while the government was interested in it, of course, for applications on dealing with terrorist cells (this was before 9/11 mind you).

Right now, your major hardware and software manufacturers are in a high amount of control or in compromising observatory positions. May not be a focus for such a game, but there is bound to be an influance, especially if its a captive market.