In Which I NIER-ly Use a Horrible Pun In The Title

Following up on my previous post which offered a quasi-mean-spirited attack on a harmless flower in the guise of a meditation on art, I will praise NIER with such crazed enthusiasm that Seth Schiesel himself will demand I be sentenced to remedial keeping-things-in-proportion camp by the conservative wing of the Supreme Court.

I love NIER. I love NIER so much that I actually cultivated the freaking white moonflower. I love NIER so much I will actually admit that I cultivated the freaking white moonflower in a forum where non-blood relative ladies might theoretically be present (that forum = this blog? Holla!).

If my love for the game were a cumbersome and unwieldy sentence, that sentence would describe how it feels like the designers, fueled by just enough booze to instill the agape of the bar (but not so much that they began insisting that they weren't drunk), and moved, perhaps, by a maudlin tale of ill-starred lovers, sat down to make their assigned hack and slash and couldn't help but fill it with an abiding sadness for the waste inherent in all violence (especially the violence committed by you) tempered with a sense of playfulness implemented with with enough grace to generally avoid trivializing the characters and which, at the end, evokes a deep sympathy for all of us sentient beings and grief for our inability to feel this sympathy when it really matters.

NIER succeeds by doing the exact opposite of what Flower did. Flower set itself a heady, serious goal -- being poetry -- and failed because the seriousness of the goal weighed down the proceedings. Its tone was was hushed and breathless, reverent in the face of the holy muse. Consequently, its ideas are as boring as church.

NIER -- although by no means perfect (the fetch quests come perilously close to turning a perfectly lovely murder simulator into boooooring jogging/boar piloting simulator) -- does the opposite. It starts from a trifling premise and somehow builds into the kind of moving narrative that could only be done in a game. Simply because the designers had something to say and they said it through a video game.


SPOILER AHEAD*


There seems to be a rough consensus that video games as art will use the interactivity unique to games in order to convey meaning. So interactivity becomes the meter, rhyme and metaphor of games. When following this path, there is a tendency to focus on immersion and, as a result, to think that a game must make you feel like you, personally, are the protagonist. In other words games are always thought of as being in the first person. Even when the camera is in the third-person, the narrative, from a literary standpoint is usually assumed be told with the "I" pronoun. A result of this is that it is always the player doing something, not a character in the story. I think this shuts down one of the most potentially fruitful avenues of gaming meaninfulness.

What do games do best? Games can make the player complicit in the actions of the protagonist. Instead of offering the facile Bioware choice between hugging peasants and curb-stomping puppies (which after all allows you to role play, to pretend you are good or evil), NIER shows you how a single minded devotion to an apparently faultless cause can nontheless leadto an otherwise good person to commit atrocity after atrocity out of ignorance. The game leads you to sympathise very strongly with the lead character and his companions as they slaughter the demonic shadows preying upon the remnants of humanity. Then, in the course of the lead up to the final battle, your character learns that you and every other person in the game are artificial, cloned vessels designed to hold the spirits of what is left of humanity; the monstrous shadows that you have been fighting for decades, maybe even centuries. Of course, this twist is not exactly paradigm-shifting; the potential moral ramifications of this revelation are minimized by the seemingly mindless aggresson of the majority of the shadows.

What really elevates the game is the second playthrough, where the player learns, through the addition of new cutscenes and the occasional translation of shadow gibberish into language, that the shadows are much more nuanced characters than we were led to believe, often with sympathetic and even noble reasons for fighting. In fact, we may be the bad guys. We did, after all, slaughter thousands of sentient beings during our first playthrough -- many of them children -- and we will continue to do so throughout the next three. Perhaps we might defend ourselves by claiming we were unaware of the shadows' personhood at the time, but really couldn't we have learned that this was the case? There were clues, after all. Remember the shadow in the library that refused to attack? What about the young girl with the shadow friend you slaughtered? But no, we were blinded by our preconceptions, the same preconceptions underlying countless atrocities; we are innocent of wrongdoing because we intend no harm and, therefore, those who attack us do so out of malevolence alone.

Or maybe you aren't the villain, or at least a villain in the way we tend to find in the traditional videogame narrative. After all you were attacked first; the shadows want "their" bodies back, regardless of whether their bodies agree. You needed to save your daughter from a shadow trying to save its daughter from you. No, no one is any worse than anyone else in this game. There is no evil intent and no villains to carry it out. But neither are there heroes; just tragedy when different forms of life collide.

In short, NIER is a murder simulator that will make you feel, if you let it, the full weight of murder.

* and behind, sort of. It might be oblique enough that what it reveals is only apparent after its already been revealed. Zen koan for the day: If a spoiler can't be identified as a spoiler until one has played the game enough to recognize I am revealing a twist, is it really a spoiler? Probably not.