Watching – Better Than Us

Background Noise this week – Better Than Us (2018)

It’s been on my Watch Later list for a while, but finally got into the rotation. I’m a little past halfway through and I’m impressed that it’s been engaging in what probably would have been an 80 minute Black Mirror episode (and it might even have a second season).

It’s made in Russia and the sub is decent but not great. A couple of the characters sound very very very similar. The opening credits has a feel that echoes the most recent Westworld series, contrasting humans and machines and numbers and the ticking of gears along the stripped down ambient musical score.

The time frame is in the near now, with a sleek tech look akin to Black Mirror or Minority Report. There’s some implants but no visible cyber limbs, holographic displays are the norm, drones are ever-present, and the AI displayed by the androids aren’t far from current digital assistants like Siri given a body (like a more mobile Actroid, which hit the scene in 2005 and has gone through a number of improved models since). The androids of Better Than Us are present as menial laborers, assistants, and more than a few used for sex work (right up front in episode 1 there is a talk show discussing if sed with a robot would count as cheating on a spouse).

(left & middle – Actroid, right – Better Than Us robot and actor as android)
Reality is catching up on science fiction pretty quickly

Five primary plot lines weave into each other, bringing together the Chronos corporation looking to profit off a new legislation & robot production contract, a family falling apart, an anti bot gang, a cop with an axe to grind, and Arisa – a prototype with advanced emotional and learning firmware but lacking the Asimov protocols (yes, they name drop Asimov in there) who emotional bonds to the dysfunctional family. As the series progress, some of these merge and new ones crop up like the connection between the family and the head of the corporation and the cop.

Season 2? 

It’s complicated. First off, it’s made in Russia and things got more complicated than usual there during 2019-2020. The plan was for the plot to move to China next but that’s in development limbo last I heard.

Further muddying the waters is that some media refers to season 2 as the second 8 episodes as it was packaged in Russia but on Netflix they put the whole thing into one 16 episode season (and watching it, the season break is pretty noticeable).

Overall Thoughts?

There are some aesthetic choices that I couldn’t help but notice. This is no rain drenched neon nights cyberpunk noir. Most of the scenes take place during the daylight with clean streets and light colored building. The robots have a smooth look to their exoskeleton and the human appearing androids are equally polished, contrasted to many of the humans characters who are disheveled in some way. Pretty much all the primary male characters are unshaven, father Georgy is consistently rumpled in dress and even sharp dressed corporate always has some pretty intense five o’clock shadow. The visuals seem to speak to a future promising near perfection with androids while humans are the messy parts of the world, so was it a deliberate director choice to emphasize who is the better of us?

By episode 16, all the loose ends I really cared about wrapped so I don’t feel much hook into another season exploring the further adventures of Arisa but it’s an interesting world of human-android ethical questions so I’d still likely check it out in due time if another season did come out.

For the Gamer

I have to admit, this is one of those shows that not only had some solid sci-fi themes of ‘what does it mean to be human’ and ‘to what extent should we rely on technology’, but it also inspired me to dig out some of my RPGs books and think about the cyberpunk genre.

The robot smashing gang of the Liquidators come close to a cyberpunk trope. They don’t shun technology and even make active use of social media as part of their agenda. They come out at night, conduct sabotage runs against corporations, and their based out of a poorly lit bar frequented by leather clad patrons. Add some chrome and neon and this is something that could easily have come straight out of Night City.

Meanwhile the shiny megacorporation of of Chronos is out to make money and the director employs his own personal army of mercenaries to carry out his bidding and clean up loose ends. These goons were already on call from the beginning and not just called in to deal with the runaway android. They were part of ongoing actions and executions. Very cyberpunk.

If the game was centered on the Liquidators, then it’s classic Cyberpunk (R Talsorian Games). It’s a gritty anti-corporation mission where the PCs have the opportunity for the big score in revealing the dark secrets of Chronos if they can hunt down the runaway android first. Outside the gang, the core characters of Better Than Us easily slot into the roles of Cop, Med Tech, and Netrunner, while the gang is close enough to Nomads. In some ways I’m reminded of some of the plotlines from the late 80s anime Bubblegum Crisis which had a major corporation creating ‘cyberoids’ to help humanity but were being used as weapons, with only the Advanced Police to fight this threat.

*sidenote, RTG did release a Bubblegum Crisis RPG a few years after the first edition of Cyberpunk. Also, I think I could totally argue that we see the start of Ghost in the Shell have the first seeds planted here.

If the game focused on a crew hired by the corporation to recover the android sounds more like the sleek high roller mercenaries of Shadowrun. Would these runners use subtle action or go in guns blazing with no remorse for the innocents caught in the path? As written, there isn’t much in the way of opposition beyond the mystery of where the android is and potentially the gang also on the hunt or maybe introduce a rival corporate crew to complicate matters.

There’s a number of RPGs I’ve not played but sound like they would fit for these style of game. For mystery and investigation, there’s the Bladerunner RPG which already has the setting rather than homebrewing mechanics for the class investigation games like Gumshoe and Call of Cthulhu. I’m curious how Altered Carbon would work as a system for this as the novel and tv adaptation have a great tech-noir mystery set up. In my humble opinion, Mothership is a nice simple game for mechanics but the mechanics of panic and emotional erosion don’t fit this set up at all. If you wanted to come at it for more the personal interactions (and boy howdy is there a lot of emotional hooks and knives at play with these characters) then Powered by the Apocalypse is bound to have a set of playbooks that would fit like The Sprawl or Deniable Assets. Better Than Us is full of the messy relationships and compromised successes that define a PbtA game.

If anyone out there has a cyberpunk RPG to recommend, I’d love to hear it as the two I’m most familiar with would be the classic Cyberpunk and Shadowrun (earlier editions). Both have got mechanical problems but I have loved those worlds since I first read –

“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel”
-the opening sentence in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer