-Yasharth Tandon
These days it’s easy to feel like life has become a never-ending fight for survival. Wake up, study/work, take the edge off, go to bed, rinse, repeat. This cycle never ends. So, when the crushing pointlessness of this grind gets you down, it’s only natural to want to indulge in some sort of coping mechanism. It is one of the many reasons why so many people indulge themselves in a medium like video games.
This creates an interesting contradiction: In one context, day to day repetition can be a source of anxiety, depression, and hopelessness, but when we change the context to video games, these repetitive and mechanical acts can have an entirely different effect on how you perceive the world, it gives the fictional world of the game a sense of familiarity and comfort. By changing our perception of reality, video games have the power to help us find joy and purpose in even the most unexpected places.
The game in question here- ‘Nier: Automata’ is one of those few games that thoroughly understands the uniqueness and potential of this weird medium and celebrates it to provide us what might just be one of the most meaningful and moving stories ever told. This is a story about the joy of being alive, a story that could only be told by a video game.
It might sound silly to think at a game like Nier has anything profound to say about these big-picture questions of existence. This is an over-the-top spectacle action game starring attractive goth ninjas, equal parts pitch-black humour, and hyper-violent ballet. Calling the game’s tone uneven would be being charitable. These different tonal elements clash so hard that this game just shouldn’t work and yet when we scratch beneath the surface, a more complicated picture emerges.
Nier invokes and then subverts philosophical concepts drawn from 3000 years of human history both eastern and western. The game’s story repeatedly references famous philosophers and schools of thought, takes them to their logical conclusion, and then deconstructs them using its far-future sci-fi setting.
The question- “What if robots were like humans?” has been asked in fiction many times already, and Nier has no interest in beating this dead horse. This game is far more interested in using its sci-fi premise to interrogate- “Exactly what makes us human in the first place? Our ideals, values and consciousness itself”. The game’s themes ask us a difficult question that has no easy answer. Can we ever resolve the big question about the meaning of life or are we just going to keep clinging to superstitions that provide structure to a meaningless existence?
Nier: Automata is set on earth, but in the far future wasteland of 11945 AD during the ‘14th machine war’. These are big impressive numbers that might make us think there’s tons of lore and history here, but they’re barely explained or given context. The year 11945 is one of the game’s handfuls of oblique references to World War II but these dates are otherwise completely arbitrary, which drives home the mythic and near-religious nature of this long-running conflict.
The game presents us with a world filled with artificial beings where a mysterious plague and invasion of alien machines have wiped humanity from the earth. The last remnants of human civilization are gone, fled to a hidden base on the moon. To beat back the invasion humanity employs ‘Yorha’– an army of advanced combat ‘Androids’ who wage an unending war against the alien machines. The machines are blocky rust buckets that recall vintage 1950s sci-fi films, on the other hand sleek, elegant, and attractive androids are built-in humanity’s image. They’re seemingly identical to their parents with a single shared reason for existence that also serves as their rallying cry – “Glory to Mankind”.
The war between androids and machines raged for thousands of years eventually grinding to a stalemate with both factions locked in an endless back and forth struggle. The humans who created the androids and the aliens who created the machines are all conspicuously absent from this conflict while their children fight their eternal proxy war on behalf of their creators. In Nier: Automata life itself has become artificial.
When the main characters- Yorha androids ‘2B’ and ‘9S’ arrive on earth at the start of the game we soon find that the 14th machine war is nothing like the epic struggle established in the intro. Each quest or cut-scene reveals a new twist- Androids are deserting their posts left to right, falling in love with each other, getting high on synthetic stimulants, and learning how to cook. Meanwhile, the machines appear to have gained a limited form of sentience and are imitating the social behaviour of earth’s former inhabitants, becoming more and more like the advanced androids in the process. As the game progresses, the story gains context and weight from these small humanizing moments and like the plot, the gameplay also functions as a mosaic of smaller details forming a bigger picture.
The game’s story also changes from one playthrough to the next. We play as 3 different characters with 3 different playthroughs. This cycle of repetition provides the player with not only different combat mechanics but also a new point of view and perspective on the game’s plot. Fresh exposition and plot details offer new context and plot interpretations for a story we thought we already understood. Enemies who seemed crazy or psychopathic in one playthrough are revealed to be perfectly understandable and even sympathetic the next time around. The experience drives home that this is an artificial world where nothing has a fixed meaning, and nothing is what it seems.
As mentioned already, Nier not only draws concepts from a plethora of philosophies, but directly puts us under the experimental question of- “What makes us human or creates a conscience?” And with the controller in hand the player directly participates in a dialectical deconstruction and reconstruction of pillars of humanist philosophy. For a better understanding of how a mere video game does that, we need to look at the whole of the work and the sum of the different ideas it’s trying to express…
But for now enjoy a trailer of this beautiful masterpiece:-
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(Yasharth Tandon is a first year law student at RMLNLU. You can follow him on his Instagram handle)
TLP - Magazine of RMLNLU 