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[Question] What are the best retro cyberpunk video games (20+ years old)?
(lemmy.villa-straylight.social)
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Maybe I'm just interpreting things differently, but in the original movie, everything was a visual representation of actual computer technology. Like you said, the programs looked like their programmers, and the I/O tower was the interface with the real world. No one "wrote" those visualizations, that's just what the inside of a computer "looked like" from the inside.
Tron 2.0 expanded on this by showing visual representations of the Internet, computer viruses, disk corruption, devices with minimal memory, backup servers, etc. Again, no one created these visualizations, it's just what the inside of computers looked like.
But then Tron: Legacy came along and said "Flynn created this world in his off-hours". I'm not arguing that he created them with god-like abilities from the inside, I'm just arguing that he did create them. It's no longer just "what technology looks like from the other side of the screen", now it's "whatever Flynn decided to create". So now the major plot point is that the ISOs are the one thing he didn't create. So if there's no technological equivalent of it being cloudy or raining within the Grid, we can just say "Flynn made it that way".
I feel like this is wasted potential because we could've had a Tron-style visualization of WiFi, quantum computing, AI, etc. The Grid could've had better graphics with each new movie and it would've made sense in-universe because computing power had increased. But if the Grid is just what Flynn wrote before he died... that's it. That's the Grid. It can't change.
But hey, I hope you're right, I hope they continue with the "visualizations from the other side of the screen" in future movies. But I think Tron: Legacy intentionally dumbed it down for audiences so it became a "trapped in a video game" trope rather than visualizations of actual technology.
I mean, I'm definitely being nicer to it because I have a soft spot for the film, for sure. I tend to give it the benefit of the doubt in that, if the first movie showed us what it might look like when normal users interact with a computer in normal ways, and write programs based on what they want them to do/output, then the second movie is showing us what it might look like if programs were created for the sake of them existing, and they don't necessarily "do" anything for a user on the outside. Like, if I code up program to be a calculator on the terminal, it might look at behave a certain way on the grid. But, if I go into the grid, and create a program that's good at math, would it still be a calculator on the terminal? Or would it more likely do nothing when called, because it wasn't written to take input and produce output on the terminal?
It's an interesting question, and I think it can go a long way to excusing the breakdown of the computer metaphors in Legacy, but again, this is mostly my interpretation, it's not explicitly confirmed by the text itself.
Sadly, I doubt we'll get any more movies exploring these concepts any time soon. Legacy was supposed to be the start of a trilogy, but it didn't make enough money, so the rest of it was canned by Disney. I think it'd me more likely to see some animated/live action Disney+ exclusive series in a few years, when they get tired of churning out Star Wars everything.
In any event, to bring this back around to the original question, I've added Tron 2.0 to my steam wishlist for the next sale, lol.
Haha, and that's all that really matters. 😁
I don't mean to keep this Tron discussion going... but I do want to make sure you're aware of Tron: Uprising already on Disney+ and Tron: Ares with Jared Leto which is filming now.