‘‘Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure role-playing video game developed and published by CD Projekt RED, released on December 10, 2020.

You step into the shoes of V, a cyberpunk mercenary for hire and do whatever it takes to make a name for yourself in Night City, a megalopolis obsessed with power, glamour and body modification. Legends are made here. What will yours be?

After customizing your character (with many options available), you are contracted along with Jackie Welles to steal an important piece of technology from the Arasaka Corporation—known as the chip of immortality—by fixer Dexter Deshawn. The duo manages to infiltrate the megacorp and steal the device, but the plan goes awry and Jackie appears to die. After meeting with Dexter, V is betrayed and left for dead in a landfill but manages to survive—possibly in part due to the chip of immortality—and is haunted by the digital ghost of iconic Rockerboy Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves).’

While this game is not perfect (for example, I'm bothered by the lack of independent options for interacting with the world outside of quests, because IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL), this is not a collection meant to praise Cyberpunk 2077 as the best game in the world (moreover since I'm not a gamer!)

Cyberpunk has a standalone photomode which basically makes it feel like your character has its own basic camera or drone. The settings you can apply to the in-game pictures you take include FOV, DOF, various poses and numerous other effects like contrast, vignette, palette/hue adjustments etc.

The story is compelling and the variety of choices in building your path through the game as a character you create is impressive. It is challenging, crude and visually stunning. Glitches make things more funny rather than annoying (at least in my experience) and while the world could be more interactive for a player, as a photographer, it was a different story.

As a photographer "traveling" to this strange, immersive world, my artistic self found cool angles, concepts, textures, colors, violence, absurdity and beauty in Cyberpunk. I took nearly 1000 photos, from which I will eventually present a few hundred of the best.

I felt like an artist experiencing art that was greater than me, made by the collective force of the game's creators rather than a single individual. Its value inspired me to be less of a player and more of myself, experiencing this distant, unreal world through unreal lenses almost as if I actually had a camera in my hand.

I wonder how the meaning of art will change as the definition of what we consider "world" changes.

As for my actual game progress, I'm on the last mission and am currently having difficulty getting past it.