(Almost)Missing Jackie’s Funeral: Cyberpunk 2077
I want to briefly consider with shame how many opportunities I’ve had to make a good first impression and didn’t. On that same note, I observe that I’ve never met anyone by pointing a gun at them, which is how I met Jackie Welles, but I did once compare knives with a man I was tutoring in biology.
Jackie Welles is a mercenary the player will meet early in their run of Cyberpunk 2077. The exact way they’ll meet Jackie depends on which of the “backstory” they decided for their run of the game. I’ve started Cyberpunk 2077 at least five times now, and each time I’ve gone with “Street Kid” narrative arc. I’ve chosen this option because of a dedication/obsession with the cyberpunk genre, so starting as a corpo doesn’t make any sense to me, and starting in the badlands doesn’t make sense either because I already own Borderlands on every platform except Xbox so why play for a game I already own too many copies of. My V’s been a street kid every time, and because I chose this option the way I’ve always met Jackie is when he pointed a gun in my face and told me to get out of the car I was trying to steal.
If my reader hasn’t played Cyberpunk 2077, and would like to avoid spoilers (like my title) and/or references to a videogame they haven’t yet, or will not play, I understand if they decide to skip this essay. But, if you’re a person like me that doesn’t care so much about spoilers, obviously please continue. I should also let my reader know that, unlike many of the other essays on this website, this article is going to be largely reflective on my emotions rather than my intellectual impressions. Again, if that doesn’t seem like your scene please feel free to skip this article and I won’t think anything less of you.
Then again, I won’t know one way or the other if you read the whole thing, so it’s not like it matters anyway.
Jackie pointed a pistol at me and told me to get out of a car I was stealing, or actually trying to steal because things had gone to shit pretty quickly. Literally less than a minute later the NCPD (Night City Police Department) rolled up and they were arresting us both before beating the snot out of us. Less than five minutes later I was resetting my broken nose while Jackie told me he liked my style. And five minutes after that I was watching a montage of Jackie and I shooting dudes, meeting his mom and girlfriend, buying a car, handing a suitcase full of eddies to Padre Ibarra, getting beat up in a bar, shooting more dudes, and setting up in my own apartment. In a short amount of time Jackie became V’s best friend, and outside of the game he had become, to me at least, a human being that I actually liked and cared about.
Dare I utter(or more accurately type into this word processor) that loaded phrase: Jackie became a real person.
The idea that a character in a videogame can be a “real person” is a discourse unto itself and I’ll try to discuss it later. For now, what’s important is that I had, over the course of just a few minutes of gameplay, established an emotional attachment to Jackie Welles, and at least two hours of gameplay later, that connection was only strengthened as I observed that Jackie was not just an interesting character. He was a funny, sweet man who wanted to be more than he was in this life.
Dare I say (or, again, type into this productivity software) that Jackie reminded me of myself.
This ambition is what eventually led Jacki and V to accept a mission from Dexter DeShawn which led us into the top floor apartment of Arasaka tower where we watched the Emperor be killed by his own son. And as we shuffled along the edge of the tower, trying to escape with the shard that would later be revealed to be holding the soul of the rock-star/terrorist Jackie Silverhand, I knew what would happen as soon the helicopter spotted us.
We fell through a roof, and Jackie was hurt.
What’s important to note was that I already knew this was going to happen. I have, as of this writing, been slowly working through Tim Rogers’s 10 hour review of Cyberpunk 2077, and in one of the “chapters” of the video he goes over the length of the plot. I knew that the heist was going to turn sour and that this sequence was going to end in tragedy. I point this out to make sure my reader knows that none of the emotional reactions that followed were because of shock or surprise.
Fighting through the lower levels of the hotel, I hated myself as I chose at least two dialog options that had V yelling at Jackie. And I mean it I really hated myself afterwards. The game gave me the option to remain silent and out of some impulse I ignored the quick-time event (QTE) time bar. When I insulted Jackie’s intelligence in one of the curse-word laden abuses I literally reloaded my save state to make sure I didn’t say such a thing to Jackie. And then I made V yell at him again.
We eventually made it out of the hotel, but by then it was clear: Jackie was going to die, and there was nothing I could do to change that.
And that’s when I started to cry.
Watching Jackie die in the back seat of a car after a botched robbery brought me to tears because I was watching someone, even if that someone was composed of nothing more than pixels and electrical signals, leave me.
And it seemed terribly unfair in a game built so much around the theme and rhetorical structure of choices.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a videogame which prioritizes and emphasizes the importance of choice. This is partly because the developer CD Projekt Red has established themselves as a production company that wants to create videogames built around player choice and how those choices can affect both the macro and micro level of the in-game world. Before this project they had made The Witcher, The Witcher 2: Assassin’s of Kings, and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. These games, apart from being based on the fantasy series of the polish novelist Andrzej Sapkowski, were fantasy role-playing games that offered the player continuous choices in regard to actions and dialog, the implication being that everything the player did and/or said could impact the final gameplay. Cyberpunk 2077 was advertised during its initial pre-release heavily around this same concept. Less discussed is the fact that the game is directed, inspired, and based upon the table-top role playing game Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk Red created by Mike Pondsmith. Any and all table-top games are built around the core element of choice and the results of choices.
In short, Cyberpunk 2077 is, as Sid Meir so brilliantly said about great videogames, a series of interesting choices.
But, there was something no choice could change, and that was ultimately saving Jackie. The player doesn’t get to choose if Jackie Welles dies, but they do get to decide what happens after his death.
And this is what led me initially to tragedy.
The artificial Intelligence Delamain, who is driving the getaway vehicle, detects Jackie’s dead body and asks V what they want them to do with it. The player has the options to have it simply dropped off somewhere, there’s the choice to have it delivered to Viktor (the ripperdoc who’s friends with you both), or to have it delivered to Jackie’s family. Without knowing what would happen in this sequence I told the AI to send him home to his family. Intellectually I knew the implications of each of these choices, and the meta-game impacts were hinted to me. But since this was the first playthrough where I had actually progressed far enough to see them, I have to be honest, there was no real choice other than the last one. I was compelled purely by emotion and I told Delamain to send Jackie home to his mother.
The game continued with its plot points, but eventually the option to attend Jackie’s funeral arrived…Until it disappeared.
It was somewhere between chasing down a psyberpsycho in a parking garage and sneaking into club Empathy to upload a virus that the mission disappeared. The mission in question was attending Jackie Wellse’s ofrenda. For non-spanish speakers, this amounts to a wake or funeral service for family and friends. And Jackie was, again, my best friend.
And I had missed his funeral.
Before I dig into that, I do need to note something important about my life outside of playing videogames. Since I’m working a full-time job, my time to play videogames tends to be a few small hours in the evening when I’m not taking care of domestic issues, spending time with family and/or friends, enjoying the company of my lovely, beautiful, funny, beautiful, kind, and beautiful girlfriend, or trying to finish at least one gosh-darn book every once and a while, I’ve played Cyberpunk 2077 in spurts, mostly doing gigs and missions and just enjoying Night City. I’m used to games assigning me missions and then letting me get to them when and where I can, usually days or weeks after actually receiving the original quest. I refer to this mentality personally as “the Skyrim effect.”
Cyberpunk 2077 is not Skyrim. It will never be Skyrim. You can’t get laid in Skyrim. Or, maybe more accurately, you can’t trigger a sex scene in Skyrim.
Then again mods exist so…
I assumed that like many of the videogames I play, the mission would remain available to me as long as I was playing Cyberpunk 2077. However, the mission disappeared from my logs, and try as I might I was unable to get it back. I tried calling Jackie’s Mom but she wouldn’t answer, and in no short amount of time cold reality surfaced in an honestly devastating realization: I missed my best friend’s funeral because I was too busy working a gig.
And I can’t communicate well enough in words to describe the actual emotions I’m feeling.
I’m literally on the verge of tears writing just these sentences.
This admission shocks me, because it’s honestly pretty rare that a videogame actually makes me cry. With the exception of Final Fantasy XVI, A Short Hike, and Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a videogame hasn’t inspired actual tears from me in some time. I suspect part of that may simply be the games that I’ve played, as many of them were action-adventure or first person shooters which have rarely tried to create an emotionally aesthetic response in their players instead focusing on the rush of adrenaline or general contentment. Likewise platformers rarely, if ever, dedicate significant portions of time to develop an emotionally compelling narrative.
For example: I have never cried at the end of a Super Mario videogame.
Then again I realize typing those words out that I’ve never actually finished a Super Mario videogame to completion. But that’s for another essay.
The death of Jackie Welles, and missing his funeral produced a guilt that was difficult to process because, as I confessed to my girlfriend literally before writing this sentence, I felt more guilt for missing Jackie’s funeral than I did for missing my own grandfather’s.
I don’t write those words without trepidation or even shame. I recognise how it sounds.
The death of a videogame character meant more to me than the death of the man who literally raised my mom.
This is either a damning indictment about myself as a human being, or an incredible statement about Cyberpunk 2077 as a work of media.
Or maybe it’s both.
I knew Jackie’s motivations. Jackie made me laugh. Jackie shared his dreams with me. Jackie and I fought together. Jackie made me angry and frustrated. Jackie fixed my car when it broke. Jackie brought me into his home.
My grandfather was…there, except that he wasn’t. I couldn’t tell you his dreams or his ambitions. He rarely made me laugh, and the only real memories I have of the man were in connection to my mother who is, it’s important to note, far, far more important to me than any videogame character to date. And I’m not just writing that because I know she reads these essays.
(Love you Mom.)
So I’ll note once more missing Jackie’s funeral made cry.
Though here, I must note, this essay takes a bit of a turn because, as the title suggests, I didn’t actually miss the funeral. I only thought I had.
This essay started as one of my Under 500 Words essays, and it would have been finished and published as such. But life, like the Matrix and Cyberpunk 2077, can be full of glitches. I didn’t observe a black cat before the quest suddenly reappeared in my journal of current/optional missions, but as soon as I saw that it had returned as a playable option, I abandoned whatever side-quest, gig, or random encounter I was working on to bolt to the Coyote bar where Mama Welles was waiting for me. I didn’t care that Johnny Silverhand was taking over my body, and slowly killing my brain, the only thing that mattered was looking in Jackie’s garage for something to bring to his Ofrenda.
Which brings me back to choices.
As I noted earlier in this essay, Cyberpunk 2077 continually offers players choices as part of the aesthetic and intellectual challenges. The players are encouraged to think about the choices they make, or simply make them to observe what sorts of reactions they’ll get from npcs in the world of Night City, or how those choices will shift and alter the final outcomes of the game which has multiple endings for the macro-narrative, as well as the micro-narratives scattered throughout the game. With Jackie’s funeral V’s choice is to find something to give to the alter as a final summation and gift to the departed, and while I was on my way I encountered Misty sitting outside of Jackie’s garage. This gave me the choice to talk her into going into the garage, and also the choice to talk her into going to the funeral. I invited her with me to look inside, making sure to pick the most empathetic dialog options I could. I made sure to ask her about every potential item in Jackie’s garage, from the belt his father used to beat him, the copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls(which after consulting reddit appears to be the most selected choice by players), his porn posters on the wall, or the rare unopened bottle of tequila which is ultimately what I chose.
Even the funeral itself becomes a series of choices as the player is given options on what to say, and even to say nothing at all, as they lay their gift on Jackie’s offrenda. Afterwards the player can make choices as to whether or not to speak with the other visiting members of the funeral. I spoke to them all, and encouraged Jackie’s mom to make peace with Misty.
And, it’s important to note that I cried through most of this “mission.” Though calling it a “mission” seems like a disservice to what is one of the most unique videogame scenarios I’ve encountered at this point in my life, and this reflection revealed something to me about the way that I’ve approached videogames as a medium.
It’s not impossible for a work of media to create an emotional response in the person interacting with it. The history of art demonstrates that as long as human beings have created media it has coincided with eliciting emotions in the viewers, readers, watchers, and players. I’ve cried after watching beautiful scenes in films, I’ve cried after reading heartrending passages of novels, and I’ve even teared up looking at works of visual art. But, I’ve resisted crying at videogames because, I suspect, I have kept an ironic distance between them and my emotional self. Despite at this point writing somewhere close to at least 100,000 words in essays and a (as of this writing) undisclosed writing project about the medium of videogames, I haven’t allowed myself to really treat them as works of art that could inspire emotions.
Which, you’ll note, is ridiculous.
Instead I’ve stuck with intellectual impressions because that’s the easiest path. I’m the sort of person who tries to live in the mind rather than indulge my emotions, because, frankly, it’s been the “safest” way to live my life as an adult. There is still the lingering impression that crying at a videogames is silly.
Again, this is ridiculous.
Looking at my response to Jackie’s death, and then almost missing his funeral, and then realizing there was still a chance to say goodbye to this man, there isn’t any familiar or fitting word for it due to the poverty of the english language. Instead I have only a plain statement of fact, which is: I had an emotional response to a software program about fictional people living in a science fiction role-playing game.
And if that ain’t cyberpunk, then partner, I don’t know what is.
Though here, at this point I have to ask myself an important question, or questions.
What was I trying to say here? Or was I trying to say anything?
I guess at the most superficial level, I wanted to communicate that Jackie was a rad dude. Jackie was a legend. I’ll miss Jackie. And I’ll probably cry again at some point in this incredible videogame.
This whole essay was a chance to observe not just the strength of Cyberpunk 2077’s narrative, but also observe the fact that I’ve allowed decades of prejudice and bias about videogames to STILL impact my ability to respond to them in ways outside of intellectual impressions. This recognition of meta-cognition is as much a chance to shame myself and critics of the medium, as an opportunity to remind myself that just because a software program is presented via a computer as opposed to paint on a canvas or images sealed on film, it doesn’t mean I have less a chance to discover another human being buried somewhere in the programming. Jackie Welles appeared somewhere in a series of choices created and then generated through computer code, and I found myself humbled that all of this calculated, seemingly random series had a soul that touched mine, if only for a moment.
Rest in Peace Jackie Welles, I’ll do a shot for you at the AfterLife bar.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
10.21.2024
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