Braindance in Cyberpunk: What BDs Are, How Editing Works and Why XBDs Kill

What a braindance is#

A BD records everything the person feels as well as what they see: touch, emotion, thought. A viewer wearing a player or a wreath then lives that recording from the inside, as if it were their own. It is part movie, part memory transplant.

The recording person is a braindancer, and in the 2070s a scroller. In first-person media, the scroller's identity is only revealed if they happen to see their own reflection. In the entertainment business many become celebrities. Plenty stay anonymous, which is a terrible career plan for a face people want to live inside.

Where they came from#

BD comes out of a student project. In 2007 Yuriko Sujimoto, then a PhD student at the University of California in Santa Cruz, recorded her own neural responses to a data chip through a modified cybermodem. The result was a perfect replay of what she experienced, thoughts and emotions included.

The first big use was punishment. She researched BD in the Californian prison system, where controversial experiments found it the first effective tool for psychologically reconditioning criminals. A government contract followed, then Braindance Inc. in 2009, with Militech licensed for military simulators and Diverse Media Systems brought in for entertainment.

Commercial BDs sold fast, but addiction and the cost of making a convincing one kept them from replacing other media for years.

Recording, editing, viewing#

Recording used to need a cybermodem-sized box and special plugs. Raven Microcybernetics later sold a skull-back implant, and by the 2040s the recorder was small enough to hide in a neural link.

A raw recording is unusable. It is full of stray sensations, distractions and things nobody should feel, so editors cut what is unpleasant, boost what is wanted and add what was never there. They can pull out information the scroller was never aware of and make the BD interactive. Editing is treated as an art form, and Judy Alvarez would tell you it is a craft with deadlines.

Playback needs a player. You either jack in through interface plugs or wear an electrode wreath that puts you into a trance. A BD does not work properly on someone unwilling, though the penal system's drug-assisted version is the exception. BD clubs and parlors offer exclusive titles, and the black market handles the rest.

Why XBDs are the problem#

A raw or spiked BD can kill. If the scroller died during the recording, the viewer can die with them. BDs can also reproduce the effects of some Black ICE, including brainwashing, without the viewer ever connecting to the Net.

XBDs are the extreme version: gruesome and bizarre material, sometimes recorded from people forced into it, including murder and the death of the scroller. Dealers sell them on Night City's black market. Mass-market BDs at least carry warning labels.

By 2076 around 90 percent of BDs in Night City contained pornographic material, and addiction hits the poor hardest. A BD lets you live as a celebrity for an hour, and the people who need that most can least afford it. This is the economy behind the glamor: escapism sold to people with nothing to escape into.

BDs in Cyberpunk 2077#

Early in the game, V meets Judy in her workshop beneath Lizzie's Bar in a job called The Information. She puts a wreath on V and runs a calibration BD, the last minutes of a dying Scavenger. Then V and the netrunner T-Bug step into Evelyn Parker's recording of Yorinobu Arasaka's penthouse to pick out the security and the vault holding the Relic. Judy tells V to keep the wreath.

The tool comes back in later jobs. You scrub through a recording, flip between layers of what the scroller sensed, and hunt for the detail that changes the plot. It is the game's detective mode, and it is surprisingly good at making you nervous in a room where nothing is happening.

Judy Alvarez is the person who makes it work: a BD technician who left Clouds for Lizzie's Bar and the Mox. Her connection to the Mox and Lizzie's Bar is worth reading before you get to the Clouds missions.

Fixer's notes#

Opinion: BDs are the setting's best idea after cyberware. They take the genre's old question, what do you do with a machine that lets you live as someone else, and answer with a business model. It is cheap to produce, addictive and easy to weaponize.

At the table, use a BD as a briefing. Describe the job through the scroller's eyes, let players ask to rewind, and plant one detail that only matters later. If you want a deadlier twist, tell them the BD they are about to run belongs to a dead person. See also cyberware for the hardware this runs on, and Night City for the market it sells into.