a bunch of affluent bazingas with combat drones that are scoring epic hero points for their battle passes and season passes and so on by remotely shooting undesirables
If anything that's toned down from the setting's "corpobrats literally hire mercs to babysit them while they hunt metahumans for sport in the barrens" canon. I feel like Shadowrun and to a lesser extent Cyberpunk are tonally basically the Disco Elysium "mask of capital" quote except the mask has been whittled down to like some novelty sunglasses and still nobody cares, because the average person is so blackpilled that TV stations run liveleak grade videos at primetime on network TV, with the only alternative being Disney grade bottom of the barrel flavorless nostalgia slop.
That is to say you literally cannot be too heavy handed in making the setting a bizarre and horrifying mirror of reality, because that's what it's supposed to be. Write it like it's an onion piece mocking [current fad] and slap some neon paint on there and it's fine.
It starts with a Fortnite clone, where kids compete for fun. Then it graduates to E-Sports and becomes competitive. Analytics tease out players that are unusually pliant and skilled, and diverts them into the E-Sport. Several "special events" have individual or teams of skilled players remotely control drones that hunt shadowrunners for points. Broadcast it on TV/Live Studio Audience/Twitch. The whole thing is controlled by a megacorporation.
Call it Surreal Tournament 2099
My Shadworun campaigns implement a lot of this type of stuff. Like, for example, Taco Bell exists at our table, but instead of being considered low end fast food, it's high end fine dining, as they've continued to use the same ingredients since the early 2000s while everyone has been forced into a soy-based diet.
For some flavor text, I re-wrote a puff profile of Richard Spencer from like 2016 with our in game equivalent head of Humanis Policlub and I honestly didn't need to edit much for it to fit.
It's a setting that works great for exactly this type of thing.
Wasn't Taco Bell winning the franchise wars a thing in Demolition Man?
It was. In that they won the “restaurant wars” and did actually become classy. Our joke was that everything’s gone to such drek that a Taco Bell from today would be a high class experience
