[Baquette]

Shadowrun is NOT our future. 

Acatually thats not quite right. Without going into technobabble of alternative dimensions or realitys and time travel: Cyberpunk as a gerne is always about our near, mostly dark and distopian future. From Neuromancer to Robocop, it is not the question if we can blew up the Death Star with proton torpedo in a universe which was stagnant for the last 10 000 years. It is always about a near future and a situation where we can ask ourselves: would I still be alive to see that? And if yes: how would I, my friends, my world reacto to that?

Shadowrun's future lost a whole lot of information and even technology during Crash 1.0,

I doubt that. The crash was 28/29. The last remnants of the virus was purged 2030. 2031 (IIRC we had the first (re)building of the net) and 2034 the 3d neural interactive super advanced Matrix was introduced. Which in itself was a such a giant step that it is like compaing todays SOTA fiber apps with the first phone modem pings decades ago. Whatever happend 2029, we did not loose tech. Otherwise the rebuilding and tech divergence would have been 50 years, not 5.

Frankly, it's a future that doesn't make a lot of sense from our POV, not anymore.  But that's becuase it's not looking at the future with our eyes.  It's looking at the future with eyes deeply rooted in the 1980's, and looking at them with fear.

I suppose I have a totally different PoV. Cyberpunk as a gerne (and with that Shadowrun) is about seeing from this very moment into the (reachable) future and see what went wrong and how we would live and die in such a horrible world. In the 1980s it were the Japanese Keiratsus which introduced the ideas ... today it is Walmart and Gazprom. Looking backwards to the 1980 and reduce Cyberpunk to this PoV is IMHO the direct opposition of Cyberpunk, as is does not check our world and tries to find out what futuristic, social and technological horrors could lurk around the corner in the next 50 years.

As the rootes of Fantasy Games lies in things like the red Box on Dungeon and Dragons and Lord of the Rings, the roots of Shadowrun lies in the 1980s PoV of a dark future and works like Neuromancer & Co ... put reducing the PoV to that timeframe is simply forgetting that Cyberpunk looks into the future, not the past.

SYL

[Bull]

Well, do keep in mind too that while Shadowrun is Cyberpunk, Cybpunk is not necessarily Shadowrun, if that make sense. 

And it's not all strictly "1980's looking forward", but that's the basic mindset we have to ground ourselves in, because that is the heart of the game.  It was 2050 as envisioned in 1989.  Regardless if 2 kg cell phones or wires or any of that make sense to us today, they made perfect sense back then, and that's the first thing to embrace and accept. 

Unfortunately, reality quickly outpaced Shadowrun's predictions, which quickly made it go from "a possible dark future" to a "dark retro-future".  We try and update things here and there when it makes sense, but most of us love the game itself, so we don't want it to drastically change, especially not just for changes sake, and most especially not just so that it "matches our current tech".  SR's world is what it is.  It's still a near future, it's still very recognizable, but some of it is quite silly and not all of it really makes a lot of sense.  That's the game as it was created, and that's the game we fell in love with.

We try and mix the modern and the retro most of the time now, or at least that's the goal, all while trying to recapture that feeling of the dark, dystopian cyberpunk future that Shadowrun gave most of us back in 1st and 2nd ed.  I think the game lost site of that for a while, trying to change itself a bit, so with 5th we've attempted to go back to the roots a little.  The other stuff is still there.  We don't really do retcons. 

And trust me, any time some new technological breakthrough comes along, it gets posted to the freelancer list and we chat about the effect is has, the effects it could have, and where it can apply to Shadowrun.  Sometimes it fits and ideas form.  Sometimes it's something we figure the corps would mothball or horde all to their lonesome selves. And sometime someone can extrapolate some nifty futuretech idea from it, though that rapidly gets harder and harder to do (partially because there's so many games and books and movies and whatnot predicting futuretech, that it's tough to come up with anything original or unique anymore).

But at the end of the day, the question I personally ask myself is...  Does this fit my vision of Shadowrun.  And that's something every SR writer asks himself.  And ultimately, something Jason decides whether or not it fits *his* vision.  Then we go from there.