Another day, another random word has had the -punk suffix crowbarred onto the end of it for no apparent reason. I tried to let it lie, I really did, but it doesn’t escape my notice that everything is punk these days. Cyberpunk 2077 forces you to complete missions that side with cops. Very punk. Dreadpunk is just another word for gothic horror. Whalepunk is a silly name for games like Dishonored which are basically Steampunk but use whale oil instead of steam power. Even Steampunk, one of the most iconic -punk genres, has its issues with the suffix, thanks to its abandonment of the anti-establishment themes of its parent genre, cyberpunk.
Now Starfield is NASApunk. I think only Todd Howard knows what this actually means, because it’s a term he’s made up, as far as I can tell. He attributes it to that midcentury vibe of Starfield’s many spaceships, which admittedly do look like they could have come off the production line in ‘60s America. He says that the game’s vibes harken back to the golden age of space exploration, when the universe was a blank canvas for us to explore and the world was full of hope for the future.
That’s all well and good, but it isn’t NASApunk. It’s not even Atompunk, the existing genre that broadly encompasses this time period. Because it’s not punk. This is my problem with the phrase, and many other uses of similar phrases. I see the NASA, but where’s the punk?
Starfield looks NASA-inspired, sure. That era of science fiction, written by people who grew up with the space race and imagined a future stemming from it, is one of the best, and many of my favourite sci-fi stories come from that era. I see a lot of that in Starfield, the ships give off immaculate Nostromo vibes that make me even more eager to plunder them. But none of this is punk, and it’s wrong to describe it as such.
Read the article linked in the first paragraph for the full history of the punk suffix and how the original cyberpunk novels all had elements of punk in them. They were about young upstarts, regular people fighting against the grain, and were released alongside punk music in the age of rebellion that inspired so many creatives. Steampunk was the first to bastardise the term and leave any punk trimmings behind – no matter how many people try to retrofit punk stylings to the pseudo-Victorian genre in the modern day – and that was the beginning of the end.
You can be a cop in Starfield. I don’t know why you would roleplay in the galaxy’s most boring occupation rather than being, say, a space pirate, but you can be a cop. There is no job in the world, or indeed the entire universe, more antithetical to the punk spirit than joining the law enforcement authorities. But sure, make the rich richer and the powerful more powerful and make sure every struggling citizen tows the line or they’ll feel your wrath in this NASApunk story.
I like Starfield’s aesthetic. I like the shipbuilding, I like the city designs we’ve seen, I love the NASA aesthetic on spaceship bridges. But it’s not punk, and I’m tired of it pretending to be. Microsoft is not some plucky upstart fighting The Man with an anti-establishment game that satirises the plights of modern society. Starfield is a game where we’ll go ‘zoom zoom’ in our little rockets before descending into a grind of a thousand gameplay mechanics in order to mine some copper ore to upgrade our engines.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope Starfield goes fully-fledged punk by the end. I hope there’s a thinly-veiled mission that swings at the Activision Blizzard takeover and another that challenges the status quo of leaving abusive bosses in power, earning millions of space dollars while their workers suffer. I hope that anyone who roleplays as a cop has to reckon with the institutional racism of the space police, and the associated storylines challenge your preconceptions of embodying the swift arm of the law to make you rethink the role of law enforcement in our society. I hope.
I don’t think Starfield will do any of these things. I think it’ll be inoffensive and try to appeal to as many people as possible. Maybe I should give it the benefit of the doubt until I’ve played it, and trust Todd Howard’s word that it will have that punk spirit and not just a facsimile of NASA aesthetics. But I’m not going to. An executive producer at a huge corporation can’t tell me if something is going to be punk or not, let alone one who is trying to sell me his £70 video game. I’ll decide that myself.