Part 1: What's Going on in Nier Automata? (Patreon)

I heard about this game, Nier: Automata, and I knew I’d need to check it out, because everything I was hearing about it made it sound more and more intriguing. Everyone seems to think that this game is true art. People who don’t think video games are art think this game is art. People who love video games keep saying this is the most complex and rich piece they’ve ever seen. So what is it?

If I google “Nier” this is what I get so… One thing I can say for sure is there appears to be some kind of unending tidal wave of fanboy boners… thank you anime video games… thank you… so much…

Well that’s weird, but I’m sure there’s more to this game, otherwise people wouldn’t be so hyped about it, art critics wouldn’t be staring into it as if it’s the abyss and it’s starting to stare back into them.

Nier is a series, but it’s like a spinoff of a pre-existing series, which means there are a whole bunch of games I’d have to buy to get the full context here. What, am I made of money? Am I Mr. Dollaroo? I can’t pay my rent even before I give all my money to private investigators to bring me pictures of Adam Driver at the gym.

Luckily this game at least seems to not really rely heavily on this context, in part because it’s the Magnum Opus of the series. Magnum Opus, which loosely translates from latin to BIG WORK refers to the peak of someone’s career, the height of their accomplishments. So, who is the “they” for which “this work is their greatest achievement”?
Yoko Taro, Japanese game developer, famous auteur within the games industry, and bobble-head child-man goon-goblin. What the fuck is this guy?

But wait. There’s an idea that japanese media is somehow less political than western media, or it’s just a bunch of weird fun with no meaning, or that with all the hypersexualised characters that are commonplace in japanese media that it’s just there to pander to fanboy boners and it is devoid of artistic merit, and I have to not just give in to that idea. I have to not give into my prejudice that media with an anime aesthetic is going to be cursed as hell just because anime is cursed as hell.

I have to not give in to that idea.

Okay, look, we’re going to talk about the game, but I have a script in progress… and I’m coming back for you anime. You won’t get away with this, ANIME! You will see your reckoning!

Section 1: What is going on?

What can I say to explain this game?

Ten thousand years in the future, android people - the YorHa - are stuck in a total deadlock in their unending proxy war with the machines. The machines are little kind of cute rusty bobblehead things. I call it a proxy war because the humans created the androids and the machines were created by some sort of alien beings long in the past...

The actual gameplay frantically switches back and forth between 3D open world exploration and 2D bullet-hell play modes...

There’s an army of lady androids all reporting back to the pure, white robed commander. It’s the… dark souls of… Steven Universe…

The story centers around you as 2B, a YorHa military unit and sexy ninja maid… *sigh* and 9S, a scouter unit and hackerboy designed to look like a young boy of maybe 13 or 14.

2B and 9S explore the ruined planet earth fighting various sizes and styles of machines, including sexy shirtless anime men, so hey at least the objectification is being shared around. Feminism achieved! Although the sexy anime men look like androids, which is to say they look like humans, 2B and 9S are instantly sure about calling them machines. They were after all, hatched out of a bizarre machine orgy…

They discover there is a town of pacifist machines that want no part of the war. They also come across A2, a much older YorHa android on the run from YorHa. Adam - that’s one of the sexy machine men, Adam and Eve - kidnaps 9S but then 2B catches up with them and kills Adam, and then 2B and 9S have to fight the grief-stricken Eve, who they defeat, in the process infecting 9S with a logic virus that has been infecting the machines but since 9S hacked into Eve has infected him too.

To escape the virus, 9S is able to hack and transfer his consciousness into a machine body, proving perhaps that machines and androids aren’t as different as YorHa wanted them to believe...

But that’s not the whole game! At the end you have to go play it through again, and this time you play it as 9S, and once you’ve played it through again you reach a new part of the story, where the YorHa all get infected and the base blows up and 2B gets infected and A2 has to kill her, and then it’s all about 9S and A2, and only then do you see the proper title card to the game, like okay, now, at two entire playthroughs and a bit, we are now playing the actual game.

I basically wouldn’t be surprised if after a certain number of playthroughs of the full game - all the routes - Nier: Automata opens up like a puzzle box and reveals the real real game that was hidden all along.

And then there’s all the philosophers? There are characters throughout the game that reference famous philosophers and...

This fucking thing has too many moving parts, it's a nightmare. How can you possibly even begin to write about something like this. I want to talk about a simpler game, this is too much!!

Yoshi’s Crafted World is a beautiful, wholesome, and straightforwardly joyous game. In it, you play as Yoshi, everyone’s favourite soft friend, this time even softer because he’s made of felt! The world you travel through is charmingly constructed out of arts-and-crafts pieces, every item, building, character and scene comprising identifiable elements such as bottle caps, coloured paper or emptied ramen noodle pots.

Every level is intensely replayable, and the game shows awareness of this, because every level lets you turn around at the end and go back through the “back side” of the scenery looking for poochy pups. It’s a striking success of game design that every level can be played forwards and backwards and be fun and original both times.

Together, the fact that the world is made of all this beautiful trash, and the fact that every level is so carefully designed leaves me constantly aware of the people who made the game. I can’t not think about the people who designed the world of this game when everything screams “I was made by someone” even though, ironically, the arts-and-crafts pieces in the game weren’t physically made by anyone, there were all digitally rendered by 3D graphics artists.

Applying a kind of Auteur theory seems like the obvious move when the Auteur is so obvious, but it isn’t really useful to look at why each and every piece of recycled trash was put in its place, instead it is enough to know that they were all put there with intention to create one experience.

Look for example at the level “Be Afraid Of The Dark” where Yoshi enters a dark spooky world, the usual bright colours hidden in gloomy shadow, the only illumination from hanging bare lightbulbs. Right away the whole experience is pretty dang spooky. Then, the first element you encounter in this level is an information block that informs you “If he sees you, run away….” Immediately terrifying. Then the antagonist appears, twice as tall as Yoshi, twice as fast, and wielding an axe, it emits a horrifying scream as it tries to annihilate your fuzzy pal.

I got too afraid thinking about this level. I’m sorry. I need to go back to Nier…

It’s hard to gauge how long games are because of how quickly people play through different games, but oh boy, boy howdy, mama mia, great caesar’s ghost, gosh darn mr. jameson, holy moley bring me that cannoli, Nier: Automata is a long game. It is after all, Yoko Taro’s BIG WORK.

Youtuber Adam Johnston of the channel Your Movie Sucks has been reviewing the film Synecdoche, New York literally for years now. He releases long pieces picking over the central themes of the film and the ways in which the film conveys those ideas, down to the smallest details. He has himself commented on several occasions, even in the reviews, that he feels like the film is swallowing him up, like he’s trapped reviewing it. The problem, I think, is that the film is big, and dense, and there’s so much to look at, but also the film is about a man making a play of his own life, that ends up including himself making the play in the play, and so on ad infinitum. This kind of piece of media is a spiral, a loop, and invites you to chase your tail endlessly, especially if the way you approach it is to pick apart the metaphor wherever you can find it. 

I think I can see the same fear here. Nier: Automata invites you to play it over and over, just to get the basic story. In order to understand what simply happens, you must play it again and again, and then to play all the sidequests that also in many ways communicate the same ideas again on a smaller level, you’d have to play it more times over.
All that to say, if you don’t know what you want to say, if you don’t go into an analysis of this kind of thing knowing what you want to get out of it, you can get lost.

With that said, What’s going on in Nier: Automata?

Section 2: Fr[A]meworks

I think the first thing we need is to find the right framework to actually look at this with. Understanding media through Auteur theory means assuming that everything in a piece of media was done purposefully by one auteur with a particular deliberate authorial intent. The thing about Yoko Taro is, he really doesn’t like people guessing at what his intentions are, he says he “wants games to stand on their own and that he thinks it’s more appealing for players to look at a strange character than an old man” which is why, the bobblehead.

Yoko Taro doesn’t want you to think about him, he wants to make you feel things. In a talk on game design he explained two different techniques he uses: backwards script writing, and photo-thinking.

By “backwards script writing” he means that he always starts at the point where the player playing one of his games feels something, and works backwards. Why are they sad? Well, because a girl died. Why is that sad? Because the character was young, and innocent, and she was happy. It was her wedding day and everyone loved her.

By “photo-thinking” he means imagining scenes in a rich detail, filling in the moment and fleshing it out to build up the world.

So we can see that this is why it’s easy to get trapped in analysing this thing, because it populates every moment of the game with little garbage details. Well, it’s fairer for me to call them ephemera, not garbage, but I call them garbage because it feels like that’s how Yoko Taro feels about them. The details aren’t important because the game is supposed to be an experience.

It’s a mistake to get weighed down with the garbage aspects, the unimportant details, but it’s really hard not to. If you do though, you can’t not end up sounding like a cliche conspiracy theorist in a room full of red strings and post-it notes. 

For example: in this game it’s really AATO: All About The… Circles! The YorHa base that you return to is one huge ring; You use the circle button to interact with very nearly everything in the game; The diagram explaining the history of the aliens and the humans show the earth and the moon and the moon’s orbit. All circles. Then the aliens appear - two overlapping square shapes. Intensely foreign to our beautiful circle existence. Then they send down their machines, which are circles with circles for eyes.

(Incidentally, on some level, it doesn’t matter whether the aliens ever existed in the first place. The aliens are one of the “garbage” details Yoko Taro doesn’t care about.)

The circles are “us” as opposed to “them”, but over time the “them” becomes more and more like “us”, just as it always has done, and on and on, because the circle also represents the cycle, the repetitions of the story and the endless inevitability of it.

And there’s exactly my point: all of that is very neat. It’s very pleasing to see it all fit together like that, but what does it really add to our analysis?

When you have the right framework to analyse it, Nier: Automata isn’t actually very complicated at all, it’s just long, and full of ephemera used to make its central point, and structured in a way that you might not be expecting.

So what is that framework?

If you’re a real Star Wars fan, like me, you will have read this ten page article on the artistry of the prequel trilogy and Ring structure at least three times, and if you haven’t… I guess you’re just not a real Star Wars fan...

Ring structure or Chiastic structure is used to represent the cyclical nature of life - the way that things often repeat and evolve through repetition, and also narratively is useful to make the audience compare and contrast parts of the story that are clearly marked as similar. Chiastic structure is used in religious texts and epic poems, so considering that this game is a BIG WORK that seems pretty appropriate.

The game opens with the words “we are trapped in an endless cycle of life and death”. There is a long introduction before you are first able to save the game, meaning that unless you play the game on the easiest difficulty setting or are just naturally amazing at games (one of which is me) you will certainly die, and start over and over, and we hear “we are trapped in an endless cycle of life and death” every time.

In Ring structure, there are typically two parts where not only will a character go on an arc, but symbolically they will travel a second arc, arriving in some sense at a place they started. Sometimes, as in the case of Star Wars, almost none of the same characters go on the two arcs, but symbolically they are tied together and the “same place” that they arrive at is metaphorical - it is the state of order and peace in the Galaxy rather than a physical location.

In Chiastic structure you also often have loops within loops, chiasms within chiasms, like how the parts of the star wars trilogy reflect each other, or how we're only in the first act of this video and I already made two parts with reflecting crossover scenes. Yeah I bet you felt really smug for noticing, but now everyone's going to just think you got it after I told you like everybody else.

Mehh I noticed Curio was doing a thing. I was already familiar with Chiastic Structure. No you weren't shut the fuck up.

But what does the Ring Structure tell us? Well, put simply, “we are trapped in an endless cycle of life and death.”, but that’s not enough to fully understand this game.
I’m going to cut to the point here, and tell you the core idea of Nier: Automata, and then I want to do a little backwards-script-writing, because to really analyse this game I think you need to understand the message, and then understand how we got there.

In Michael Saba’s excellent essay on the humanist philosophy of Nier: Automata, you will see how Yoko Taro was apparently inspired by a coke ad campaign on the border of India and Pakistan. In the ad campaign participants had to work together to play a game, except one participant was in each country.

Similarly, at the end of Nier: Automata, once you have played the game through on every route and seen everyone’s perspectives, as the final credits roll you have to go through a crushingly difficult bullet-hell shooter, except the bullet-hell shooter is the end credits. You have to fight to destroy the names of the people who made the game.

As you die over and over the game asks you if it is worthwhile to even keep going, sending seemingly disparaging yes no questions like “Do you admit there is no meaning in this world?” but at the same time, you will be presented by encouraging messages from players around the world.

After many deaths you will be offered “reinforcements” and if you accept, additional little shooters appear around you, protecting you and helping you defeat the end credits. When you finally do, you get one more choice. This time, the game wants to know, will you delete all your save data, and in exchange send your shooter to go help someone else defeat the end credits, and finish the game?

In his design talk Yoko Taro said that he thinks when designing a game about the entire realm of possible things you can do in a game. Thinking about this ourselves, we can see that perhaps nothing more perfectly serves as a selfless gesture than deleting your save data, and erasing all your progress. Your progress through the game is all you have in the game, and so allowing your progress to be erased is ultimately giving up yourself to save someone else.

Yoko Taro himself has said that our desire to kill in video games exposes a perfect contradiction, something broken in human beings. We all want a better world, but we need meaning, and destroying things, killing, gives us purpose.

Here we can start to understand the central philosophy of Nier: Automata:
You can find meaning in a meaningless universe, and it has to be better than simpy “us vs them”

Section 3: Com[B]ining, examining, and evolving ideas

Even though the game is built on tonnes of ephemera, of garbage details - even though Yoko Taro’s end goal with is to evoke emotions in the player, this game is still philosophically incredibly rich. Sorting between what the game is referencing because it is intellectually relevant to the game and what the game is referencing because it’s part of the experience alone is a pretty daunting task, like… I went on a full day long diversion into the links between Chiastic Structure and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth and -- did you know Campbell was widely accused of being an anti-semite and called a “romantic fascist”? I did, I did already know that, I just spent a really long time trying to work into my script the point that Campbell was in many ways the Jordan Peterson of his day and that his philosophy and ideas about the prominent archetypes echoing through history naively opened the door for some sketchy semifascistic shit but there’s no sensible way to put that in a video about the anime waifu game so…

The show Kantaro: The Sweet Tooth Salaryman is a peculiar story in which an office worker with a passion for pudding works double hard making sales so that he has extra time to visit Tokyo’s best vendors of sweets and write about their best dishes on his popular - but secret - food blog. Generally speaking, trying the desserts send Kantaro to “sweet heaven” where he has a weird imaginary experience where he… I dunno… turns into a grape or something. It’s a fantastically weird show, and it often feels like it’s transparently just a vehicle for food reviews of good spots to get sweets in Tokyo, but something really bizarre in every episode is that Kantaro will relate back his writings about pudding to quotes from historical figures, including Nietzsche, Winston Churchill and Leonardo Da Vinci.

The use of these references in Sweet Tooth Salaryman are incredibly superficial. They come out of nowhere, they’re so bizarre, and they’re so bizarre because they seem to be forced in only to give Sweet Tooth Salaryman an air of legitimacy it doesn’t really need. The insertion of these quotes is so comical because the show is already excellent in it’s weird food-porn niche: it doesn’t need them.

At the other extreme, in the show The Good Place, (I’m about to spoil the whole of The Good Place btw) another show which commonly references historical thinkers - about once an episode, even - the ideas presented are integrated into the plot and propel characters forward. For example, when Eleanor learns about the concept of “moral dessert” and expecting a reward for doing good things, it reshapes the way that she approaches helping people. However when the characters later encounter Doug Forcett, the only person ever to figure out what the afterlife is like, he himself is doing things expecting moral dessert. His actions are making himself miserable, he’s not doing them because he wants to help and they don’t really improve the world; as the show puts it, he’s a “happiness pump”.

There, the show has taken an idea from being something abstract and esoteric, to being a small plot driver, and on to being a critique of the system that they exist within.

Speaking of critiques of the system they exist within, The Good Place ends up dropping an absolutely fantastic moral critique of our society, and it does so by taking us on a philosophical journey, a journey of ideas. It starts in season one with the setup that Eleanor is incorrectly placed in the “Good Place”, which means she needs to learn to functionally imitate good people, along the way teaching us the audience what good people act like, then with the revelation that they are all in the “Bad Place” the show becomes about escaping their system, and starts to criticise how arbitrary and unjust their moral judgements are. In the third season, with the twist that nobody is getting into the “Good Place” any more, the show demonstrates that modern life is too complex, and that nobody is able to make any net positive moral decisions any more because THERE IS NO ETHICAL CONSUMPTION UNDER CAPITALISM.

With these revelations the show changes the nature of reality to take us on that journey. 1. Here’s how to be a moral person in a meritocracy - okay, got it; 2. This system judges you to be bad - I don’t like this system, I want to be good; 3. This system judges everyone to be bad no matter what they do - I think this system might be broken.

Although at first glance Nier: Automata may appear to be simply name-dropping great thinkers in the way that Sweet Tooth Salaryman does, it actually much more effectively processes the ideas of the philosophers mentioned, and takes the audience on a philosophical journey, like The Good Place.

Nier: Automata similarly shifts reality by revealing more information that we weren’t privy to before. At the end of the first playthrough for example we learn that androids and machines have the same cores driving them, which begs the question what’s really the difference between them?

The philosophers introduced in Nier: Automata aren’t part of it’s philosophical journey per se, or they aren’t necessarily.

Sometimes what happens to the characters in the story reflects on their ideas, as a critique, for example with Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s own critique of established religion becoming conservative and cult-like is demonstrated in the suicide cult of machines lead by a machine called Kierkegaard. This serves as a criticism of Kierkegaard’s own solution to the absurdity of the meaningless universe: a leap into faith. Kierkegaard thinks we should find god in order to find meaning, but he himself condemns organised religion! Useless!

Other references however simply exist as an in-game bibliography. “Here are some of the people we think have good ideas”. Hegel is a perfect example because in the game he’s… just a giant flying ball-robot-centipede…

Whether, and in what ways the creator of a work is familiar with other particular works has been an important discussion in academic philosophy for a long time. In a chapter on Beauvoir and Hegel in A Companion to Simone De Beauvoir, Kimberley Hutchings sums up a long academic back and forth over whether Simone de Beauvoir um… actually read Hegel, or at least whether she had her own interpretation of Hegel that was unique and separate from her partner Jean-Paul Sartre.

This is a discussion around what thought-mind people call intertextuality, the presence of the same ideas in different works. Simone de Beauvoir, famous and well-respected philosopher, absolutely read Hegel, but the debate is around how her works process the ideas present in Hegel’s works. So we could say that Simone de Beauvoir, the person, read Hegel’s work, and that’s very likely true, but just by looking at her work, we could say in another sense de Beauvoir - as in her works - has “read” Hegel - as in his works.

This, handily, might get us around that situation where we want to know what ideas are being discussed in Nier: Automata, but the creator wants us to completely ignore him. We can instead ask “Has Nier: Automata read (for example) Simone de Beauvoir?”

Section 4: Why everyone hates moral philosophy professors

So let's look at Nier: Automata’s philosophers. All the good philosophers get to be there: Marx and Engels, Sartre, Not Ayn Rand, Lao Xiu and Confucius, Simone De Beauvoir, Not Ayn Rand, Kant, Kierkegaard, Not Ayn Rand. You know all the good ones.

There are some ideas that we could probably ascribe to other philosophers too, and in some cases philosophers I’ve actually literally read, like Jeremy Bentham, which would be cool, but if we did that we’d definitely run out of time.

I dunno, we don’t have to talk about Bentham. I went to UCL, so I probably think about Jeremy Bentham much more than normal people do what with having seen his corpse so much thanks jez.

I guess I need to know some basic philosophy.

IF ONLY I HAD A HANDY WAY OF UNDERSTANDING BASIC PHILOSOPHY. Okay, yeah, so I had to learn a lot of philosophy, which is to say a lot of what these philosophers said from watching PhilosophyTube, and from reading simplified summaries by academics, and by using wikipedia as a guide as to where to go learn more… I don’t want to clarify which philosophers I read directly, since I don’t think it’s really necessary, however I also don’t want to represent myself as having read much more than I really have, because I think there’s sometimes an unhealthy pressure on people to have read everything or else be forced out of conversations. 

Remember kids: reading books is good for you, but if you look down on people for not having read the same books as you, people sigh with relief when you leave the room.

So who has Nier: Automata read? Has Nier:Automata read Hegel? No, nobody has read Hegel he’s boring as hell. The end.

Okay, in all seriousness, there is a boss called Hegel in N:A and it is a big bug machine that separates into bits but also reforms to make the whole. It is neat that Hegel is a bunch of parts making up a whole since his most basic lesson was “we live in a society”, and since of course Hegel was a horrifying centipede man.

But the game actually engages with ideas of recognition, the self and the other, and dialectics, all ideas that Hegel is famous for.  In his book Phenomenology of G-G-G-Ghosts, Hegel laid out a theory known as the Master-Slave Dialectic, wherein an archetypal “master” is able to establish their identity in their recognition as the master by a “slave”. This slave is a fundamental other. Their existence establishes the identity of the master because the master needs someone to oppress, whereas the identity of the slave is essentially self-evident, because according to Hegel life is affirmed by confronting death, which the slave does constantly. Therefore the master needs the slave, but the slave does not need the master.
If I’m honest, I don’t really personally rate Hegel. I think that his belief that the whole universe is defined by opposites is for dweebs, and I find his theories on history and how we swing between extremes before settling on the correct answer in the middle oddly naive, however the concept of the dialectic totally owns and it does form the basis for a lot of progressive theory. 

In his video on Hegel, Philosophy Tube explored how Hegel influenced thinkers like Frantz Fanon for example. Honestly, referencing someone like Fanon who wrote Black Skin White Masks (which I extremely do rate) and who talked about race and racism generally might have been a much more apt pick for Nier: Automata. If we’re going to relate back to this central idea, that we must find purpose in life, but purpose in divisions is pointless then integrating at least a nod towards anti-racist theory would have been… nice?

Right after the first fake title card of the game, when you are placed on earth to roam free for the first time, you will have to complete collecting side-quests for two NPCs. One is an android with a faulty leg, who needs parts to fix it and if you get them for him he will become your home-base merchant. The other is the weaponsmith, who also wants parts to fix something before he’ll start trading with you. 

When you bring the parts to the merchant however, he doesn’t want to fix his leg. His leg is the last part of his android body that he hasn’t replaced, and he ponders if I replace this last part, am I still ultimately me? This is a pre-existing conundrum known as the Ship of Theseus - if you took a huge ship and replaced it plank by plank at what point would it stop being itself?

When you bring the parts back to the weapons trader, at first he tells you how much he likes his job, because making weapons means he’s keeping his friends safe. Then, however, he pauses “Although sometimes I wonder, what if my weapons are just making my friends die all the faster?”

These two ideas are placed early in the game to essentially put them in the back of your mind, to put a pin in them. You are bearing in mind, simply put “what is the real difference between one thing and another” and even more simply put “war is bad :(“

The first appearance of Adam + Eve demonstrates right away that there doesn’t have to be any visual distinction between the machines and the androids, and the revelation that the androids use machine cores basically says “well they’re the same on the outside, and the same on the inside, so…?”

So through the first playthrough you’ll have answered this question “what is the difference between one thing and another?” with “maybe nothing at all”. The divisions between us are utterly constructed, even if they have very real effects.

Bringing back in Hegel though, we need to understand that sometimes constructed divisions doesn’t mean group A and group B don’t like each other. Sometimes one is the master, and one the slave. Sometimes the constructed identities of each group are only constructed by one - the one with all the power.

Author James Baldwin once said “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it is necessary to have a 'n*****' in the first place, because I'm not a n*****. I'm a man. But if you think I'm a n*****, it means you need it.” (link:same concept different quote)

In the cases of systemic oppression, both group identities can be constructed, but they are usually constructed not by the oppressed but by the oppressor alone, and not even the whole in-group, but by the ruling class of that in-group.

As Philosophy Tube’s Olly points out “In Hegel’s version the master knows that they are the master whereas various scholars since then have explored the ways in which white people are kept ignorant of how our whiteness might shape our experiences of the world”

Nier: Automata explores this textually too, in showing that ultimately the androids have the capability to utterly annihilate the machines and win the war, but whenever that happens YorHa destroys androids and machines alike with a computer virus and starts over. This is purely hegelian, in the sense that the master in the Master-Slave Dialectic decides that they cannot kill the slave or they will have no-one to recognise them as the master, so they keep them in perpetual suffering.

As I explored in my essay on Spider-Man some groups derive validation from their constructed identities, others, in groups that are told they are invalid, struggle for a sense of validity. Nier: Automata would have us all abandon the validation of constructed identities.

But why?

After all, the game also references Jean-Paul Sartre, famous existentialist, and Søren Kierkegaard, who acknowledged the absurdity and randomness of the universe and said that the solution was to throw oneself into faith. The game is critical of Kierkegaard’s faith answer, but it clearly seems to be preoccupied with the questions of existence and of purpose, after all the main character is literally named “TO BE”.

So, if we are searching for meaning in a meaningless universe, why shouldn’t it be found in the validation of an in-group?

Enter Pascal, the pacifist machine in the machine village who only wants to protect the children. Pascal is of course named after Blaize Pascal, who famously created “Pascal Wager” - essentially we have everything to gain from believing in God, and nothing to lose by not believing.

Pascal, the robot not the french guy, takes the children to hide in an abandoned factory after the village is burned down when infected machines start attacking everything, tearing down the whole machine society. A2 protects the factory but after defeating the infected machines, she and Pascal discover that the children, fearful of the end, have all killed themselves. Pascal begs you, currently playing as A2, to either wipe his memory or kill him. 

You can choose between them, or simply walk away leaving him to his misery, and honestly this is one of the most philosophically difficult choices I have ever been presented with in a video game. If he forgets, and everything is destroyed and starts over and he raised new children in a new village, will he go through this same series of events again? If it happens again, would knowing of this past suffering help him? Could he have even done anything differently to stop this from happening?

We see through Pascal, a tragedy. If only the whole world were like Pascal - the robot not the french guy - then his children would not be afraid. If only the whole world could be as he is, pacifistic, uninterested in fighting.

And then there’s Hegel again. If we are trapped in this state of perpetual hatred towards the other, then we are like the Master in the Master-Slave Dialectic, only defined by the recognition from outside. But in the Dialectic ultimately the slave turns away from the master and focuses on their own labours, on the deeds and fruits of the actions as the definition of who they are. The game also references philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - alright I know you know these guys, calm down. Marx and Engels of course, most famous for writing the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, had a focus on a sort of Dialectic themselves. In fact, arguably the core ideas of Marxism are just the Hegelian dialectic taken out of this strange abstract space where two people are staring at each other and just thinking about existence and into the real world.

In A Thief In Broad Daylight, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek writes:

“One of the reliable signs of political opportunism is what, in parallel with particle physics, one may call political correlationism [...] This happen when particles are split and their spins remain correlated: if I measure the spin of one particle, I automatically know that of the other. Something similar often happens, and happened, in politics. I am not sure which position I should take in a particular political struggle, but when I learn the position of my enemy, I automatically assume the opposite one.”

In the 50s, the American government propagandised against communists by suggesting that they were gay, in order to unite the anti-communists and homophobes in hating one common enemy, the gay communist, although they were a little early because I wouldn’t be born until 1996.

Today this holds true as well, with people like Steven Crowder seemingly obsessed with a black, gay, leftist boogeyman coming to kill him or take his job through affirmative action or… pay for healthcare I guess? Something…

This is of course, an issue with the left as well though. Bad Mouse recently released a video exploring the perspectives of South-West Asian and North African Christians, living in countries where muslim controlled governments are persecuting and oppressing them. Due to the left’s stance against the American far-right, which is typically fundamentalist christian, and sympathy for immigrants, especially muslim immigrants who are particularly demonised, leftists often position themselves as the defenders of muslims against christian oppression. Therefore for these SWANA christians living under oppression by muslims, the most obvious ally in the west would appear to be conservatives championing “Judeo-Christian values”.

The cycle, both the literal cycles of war in the game and the ring structure of the narrative, come to represent the unbreaking cycle of how we continue to form in-groups and out-groups. So Nier Automata ends up being a game all about repetition that is begging for the cycles to end.

It wants us to understand that in a meaningless universe, finding meaning is good, but that any divisions between us might be the most meaningless thing of all. It wants us to stop making those in-groups and out-groups and investing in the validation we get from constructed identities. In the words of the machines, who were about to create a machine that looked perfectly human, “this cannot continue.”

The machines were never trying to invade, or take over, they want to imitate humans because ultimately they want to communicate to the androids that they mean no harm, that they want to make peace, that they are really all the same.

So that’s, basically, What’s going on in Nier: Automata.

Hold up, I think we didn’t properly tackle one of the philosophers referenced in the game.

Has Nier: Automata read Simone de Beauvoir? Uuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2:

Nier: Automata, and Gender