Hey, Wisecrack! Jared here, and today we’re talking about
a game that was seemingly made for us. Perhaps the most overtly philosophical game
ever - "It seems this Nietzsche was quite the profound thinker.” — NieR:Automata. NieR:Automata is game about 3 androids: 2B,
as in or not 2B, the moody 9S, and the jaded A2. Along the way, they fight adorable but lethal
machines, and eventually each other, on a futuristic earth where the line between right
and wrong has taken a vacation and is never coming back. The world of NieR:Automata is crawling with
machines named after philosophers whom you must befriend or behead - mostly the latter. But these wisdom-loving death bots aren’t
always just throwaway characters, they often point toward the complex philosophy at the
heart of the game. At its core, NieR:Automata challenges players
to consider how we make meaning and truth, who we are as gamers, and why video games
matter. Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on the philosophy
of NieR:Automata. This video was made in collaboration with
an awesome channel called Extra Credits. You can catch a link to them and their video
on NieR:Automata at the end of this episode. And if you’re visiting us from Extra Credits,
welcome and be sure to subscribe! Oh, and watch out — major spoilers ahead. The story takes place on Earth more than nine
thousand years in the future and follows two groups of automata. There’s androids designed to hold human
consciousness, but who eventually developed independent thought, and machines, who were
created by the aliens that invaded earth. Androids and machines fight a genocidal proxy
war on behalf of their masters. Though the player mostly controls android
characters, choosing sides is not that easy because by the game’s halfway point, we
learn both humans and aliens have been dead for millennia. "Humans were already extinct when the aliens
attacked." Absent their creators, Androids and machines
are forced to make meaning for themselves, and, if possible, stop seeing each other as
enemies. The fact that both humans and aliens are dead
is not only a central plot twist; it encapsulates the game’s existential philosophy. In fact, 2B’s opening line: "I often think
about the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle, and wonder if we'll ever have the
chance to kill him," might as well have been pulled right from Friedrich “Porn-stache”
Nietzsche, who wrote, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” Now, I know, the phrase “God is Dead”
gets thrown around a lot by internet edgelords, but what did Nietzche actually mean? Before Nietzsche, many thinkers constructed
reality in a similar way: God, Truth, and Reason were all unfallible, unchanging, and
universal concepts, which stood above or outside of humankind, like supernatural forces animating
the world and moving it toward progress. In this view, humans don’t make and control
meaning themselves, it’s some unreachable deity or universal principle which gives human
action meaning. When Nietzche declared god dead, he criticized
any system that locates the source of meaning outside human lives, and popularized the idea
of nihilism. Nihilism is the belief that there is no great
metaphysical force propelling us through the world and making our lives special. Existence can be shitty, and there’s no
grander meaning to comfort us, no puppet master to save us. Now, I know we can find Nietzsche in a lot
of pop culture, but no piece of media embodies it quite like NieR:Automata. Androids and machines think their God-like
masters are literally above them, on the moon and in space, but those Gods are actually
dead — like, rotting for millennia, dead. As we learn from Adam and Eve, machines killed
their alien overlords because they were static and unchanging — much like the unchanging
deities and morals Nietzsche criticized. "Oh, there's no need to fret about them. They were simple, infantile, almost like plants,
I guess you'd say." Humans died after the mainframe holding their
consciousnesses collapses — guess nobody made backups. If 'the death of god' is really about 'the
death of a grand meaning,' then our dead aliens and humans are only one element of the game’s
greater message about meaning. You kill some of philosophy’s biggest heroes,
some characters lose sight of a purpose in life, and the game repeatedly builds meaning
around certain characters or plots and then kills them off, usually by the player’s
own hand. Each time this happens, the player has to
reevaluate where their new meaning, mission, and direction is going to come from. Even YorHa, the android organization, eventually
dies. But YorHa is less like a god and more like
a seedy government. They know humanity’s dead but hide it from
the other androids. Pretty fucked up, right? YorHa perfectly exemplifies the Nietzschian
point that, even once god’s six feet under, society doesn’t just reboot. Political, social, and psychological norms
are left over from prior belief systems, and we continue imposing these meanings on one
another and ourselves. 2B and 9S, spend much of the A and B playthroughs
reassuring one another that machines don’t have emotions or personhood — “They don't
have any feelings. They're just imitating human speech.” — even when all evidence points to the contrary. “Child. Child.” No need for human masters to promote this
idea, they do it to each other. For Nietzsche, the best response to a meaningless
universe and a dead God is to create meaning for ourselves, or what he referred to as self-making. In Nier:Automata, we encounter different machines
named after philosophers engaged in this kind of self-making — each with their own responses
to the meaning or meaninglessness of life. There are quite a few existentialist machines
to be found: Jean-Paul, as in Sartre, Simone as in de Beauvoir, Pascal as in Pascal, and
Kierkegaard as in Kierkegaard. Each philosopher machine offers us a glimpse
into one way of pursuing meaning. Take Jean Paul, the avatar of Jean-Paul Sartre. In the game, JP is basically a dark parody
of his real life self. Just like Sartre loathed institutional recognition,
Jean-Paul is kind of an asshole who ignores his devoted followers except for the pretty
ones and eventually fucks off to the wilderness to find meaning. Nobody really misses him. But before leaving, Jean-Paul highlights the
game’s themes when he throws around one or two famous Sartre-isms, like the existentialist
slogan, “existence precedes essence.” Essentially, rather than some innate nature
determining who we are before we’re born, each individual first exists in the world
and then develops meaning and purpose. It’s all about radical freedom to become
who we are through our actions and choices. In the game, we see this everywhere, as machines
transcend their intended purpose and find new meaning. Even the pods prove that their nature comes
from existence, not a predetermined essence, as they develop self consciousness. “I must look very silly.” In fact, most of the characters in the game
are, as Sartre once suggested, condemned to be free. That’s right: condemned. Because without a higher power or innate nature
controlling our actions, we bear ultimate responsibility for our decisions, even as
morality becomes super ambiguous. And that’s a tough place to be. Just look at machines like this sad Engles
boss who, like many of the game’s characters, is crushed beneath the weight of figuring
out what’s right, and he knows he bears full responsibility for those decisions. The Simone boss, named after Simone de Beauvoir,
a French feminist philosopher, holds a mirror to another aspect of meaning-making. de Beauvoir famously suggested, “One is
not born a woman, but becomes a woman.” As the Simone boss realizes, one way we create
meaning in our lives is by constructing certain gender norms like beauty and femininity. She literally becomes a woman by constructing
herself and cannibalizing other machines to improve her beauty. Both de Beauvoir and her demented avatar teach
us to watch out, lest we become monsters in our attempt to make meaning through gender
norms. Simone’s existential quest for connection
through beauty is highlighted in her obsession with Jean-Paul, which has historical roots,
since de Beauvoir and Sartre were life-long lovers. The character of Pascal packs one of the biggest
Nietzschian punches. Though he’s the avatar of Blaise Pascal,
a mathematician, philosopher, and regular renaissance man, he couldn’t be more different
than his real life counterpart. As the pacifist leader of a machine village,
Pascal puts a lot of faith in the ultimate goodness of machines and androids. But the real Pascal was a bit of a downer. Unlike his idealistic avatar, real Pascal
thought humanity was prideful, arrogant, and unredeemable. Without god, our lives are filled with anxiety
and despair. In fact, we have only one redeeming trait:
"The greatness of human beings consists in their ability to know their wretchedness." But game Pascal comes around to the IRL Pascal’s
viewpoint. In maybe the game’s darkest twist,the peaceful
villagers suddenly start eating each other and when, even after setting aside his pacifism
to defend the children — “I must protect the children!” — they commit suicide anyway. Game Pascal finally understands the wretchedness
of himself and the machine. When he despairs and asks you to kill him
or delete his memory, the player has to face their own wretchedness too and make a tough
choice. Some characters in the NieR universe try to
make meaning through new religions. Take Christian existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard,
who makes an ironic appearance as the worshiped leader of a small cult. Kierkegaard believed the ultimate expression
of one’s freedom is to commit to certain meaning and make it true by manifesting it
in one’s life, which he calls taking a leap of faith. Unfortunately, when some of Kierkegaard’s
followers take literal leaps of faith, it doesn’t turn out so well for them. There are so many other philoso-bosses we
could talk about: Karl Grün, Kant, Engles and Marx, Ernst Bloch, Hegel, even the brothers
Friedrich and August Schlegel. Ro-shi, Ko-Shi, Boko-Shi, and So-Shi, are
the Japanese pronunciations of Chinese philosophers Laozhi, Confucius, Mozi, and Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi was a Daoist philosopher who was
into existentialism way before it was cool. He claimed existence is full of cycles of
light and dark, life and death, joy and sadness. Only by accepting these cycles, including
all unpleasant stuff, can we find contentment in life. NieR:Automata, taking a cue from Zhuangzi,
bakes these cycles right into the gameplay. As an extension of the game’s existential
themes, the mechanics emphasize the role of cycles and repetition in creating meaning. Cycles are everywhere: androids are caught
in the cycle of life and death, repeatedly uploading to the mainframe and getting new
bodies. 2B is stuck in the cycle of killing 9S, and
Pod 153 gives a sad spiel about cycles of life: "Everything that lives is designed to
end.” It’s all about returning to the beginning. According to Nietzsche, cycles dispel the
myth of “progress.” Progress only makes sense if you have a clear
aim, and if you’re cool staying on a path someone else laid out for you. But Nietzsche hates that notion of progress. Instead, we should be critical of claims to
progress that rely on external meaning or our unquestioned notions of right and wrong. The cycles in Automata disrupt this false
idea of progress and meaning, not only within the game universe, but also for the player. In Automata, there is no clear goal, or rather,
goals change throughout the game, and the whole point is that none of the characters
are on a predetermined path. Plus, there’s no straightforward game progress,
players literally repeat certain actions or stories, rather than moving linearly from
one event to the next. The game even ends with the suggestion that
A2 and 9S will be reborn to fight this battle all over again. "They are perpetually trapped in a never ending
spiral of life and death." In fact, relationship between cycles and Nietzsche
are most obvious in the game’s multiple playthrough structure. In Automata, the main playthroughs A, B, C,
D and E are like chapters, carefully sequenced, and building on one another, often repeating
parts of the same plot, but through the eyes, knowledge, and powers of different characters,
and sometimes moving on to the next plot stage. You must the complete A through D to get to
the main ending, E, with the credits, which we’ll talk about in a moment. Automata uses this structure to strip meaning
from the players themselves, and to f**k with the idea of game progress, engaging players
in their own nihilist quest. Consider the difference between the first
and second playthroughs, where you play as 2B and then 9S in parallel stories. In the first play, as 2B, you learn the aliens
are dead and the machine’s we’ve been killing are actually sentient and emotional. Of course, they could have just told us this
straight out, but instead they make us relive every sh*tty thing we did to those poor bastards
and now, we feel terrible about it. The real importance of the first run is to
set up meaning — here’s who you are and why you’re fighting the bad guys — and
then snatch it from us. The point is really driven home by the beginning
of the second playthrough, where you play from the perspective of a machine red shirt. This opening seems designed to trigger the
player’s compassion and rob us of the meaning we used to make sense of our entire first
quest. “Brother, please start moving.” Instead of creating a grand narrative to explain
away pain or loss, or instead of just giving up, Nietzsche suggested we say “yes” to
life. Yes-saying is an attitude oriented toward
the future, that affirms everything from the past without trying to change it. Imagine you had to live the same life over
and over in what Nietzsche calls eternal recurrence. This would be super crappy if you thought
life was about avoiding pain and suffering. But yes-saying embraces suffering and the
lessons it brings us, without glorifying them. The game’s final, Nietzschian middle finger
to progress and ultimate meaning comes in ending E. Here, players literally have to
kill their gods and make a difficult choice between progress, which lets them save all
their data and advancement in the game, and yes-saying, which entails accepting their
mistakes and be willing to start over. As the credits role, and you battle the names
of the game’s designers and creators, which are somehow shooting shit at you, messages
from other players around the world encourage you until you’re finally joined by their
avatars, who sacrifice themselves for your success. And I don’t use sacrifice lightly: as you
discover at the end when you’re asked to do the same, all those avatars are there because
in some other time and place, maybe before you even started playing, other players finished
the game and chose to delete their data and game saves for the ability to eventually help
you, a total stranger, complete the game. Here, we’re asked: what makes gaming meaningful? Do we believe in the myth of progress, that
what makes them meaningful is completing them, saving our data, and having achieved something
once and for all? Or are we yes-sayers, willing to start over,
from the beginning, and make the same choices and maybe even the same mistakes, again? Are we individual automata, who only fight
for ourselves, or is gaming about the lessons we learn and engaging a community? Does one player deserve the sacrifice made
by others? And should we sacrifice ourselves for people
we don’t know or might not even like? What makes gaming meaningful is truly up to
the player. If you affirm progress, nothing happens. But if you say “yes” to suffering and
loss instead, all your saves and play get deleted, and you return to the beginning,
to do it all again. Or maybe you’ll do it differently. “A future is not given to you. It is something you must take for yourself.” See? Cycles! As a game, NieR:Automata itself embraces suffering,
both of its characters and its players. But only in order to tell a powerful philosophical
story, as only an interactive game could. Does it pan out like they hoped? Is the game worth all the feels it elicits
in an attempt to make its point about meaning? Well that’s up to you. But if you’re one of the yes-sayers whose
sacrifice made my journey possible, you should know it means something to me. And part of the reason it means something
to me is because this ending is a rare example of game developers baking empathy into the
gameplay. While video games are, on the surface, all
about saving the world and helping people, most of them lack core components of what
make acts truly empathetic. To learn more about how NieR:Automata breaks
the mold, you’ll have to check out our collaborators over at Extra Credits, who have broken down
the ending in a whole new light.
Jesus this thread is filled with a bunch of gatekeepers.
"I don't like the way he pronounced it" "He got some lore wrong" "He probably just read Nietzsche 101"
The maker of this video obviously isn't a Nier fanboy but I think many of you are missing the point. This is not a video about the lore. For the dips who missed the title of the video, it's about the philosophy. If you picked this game because of it's lore you should have picked another game. To compare it to literature, this is less The Lord of the Rings and more Narnia. Sure the lore is there in as much as a fictional world requires it, but that's not really the focus. It's primary purpose is to be an allegory.
In terms of philosophy discussion, I've been consuming everything I can get my hands on about this game in the past couple of months since I finished it. This is probably the most insightful discussion on the topic I've found except for maybe Bunnyhop's video. This includes everything I've read in this subreddit. Sure, a lot of it is rehashing what others have already said, but
So what.
He also had some original insights and made the clearest connection between nihilism and the game's plot points than anyone else I've found.
Great video if we take a break from stroking our lore epeen.
One minute in and
I wonder what drives these people to make le quirkey lore videos without actually learning the lore of the series they are trying to talk about.
What is it about video essayists and talking in such a grating way?
Even if it is the right way to pronounce it, the way he says Automata bugs the shit out if me.
Finally something that sheds some light on Jean-Paul Sartre
I was always wondering how much the fictional Jean-Paul mirrored his real-life counterpart, whether the IRL Jean-Paul was a pompous womanizer
The cycle/progress thing is bullshit. Two things
Backup savefile.
Even without save backup though, it's not like game progress = real progress. deleting a save file does not mean "embracing suffering." In fact, it is the opposite of it. Deleting a save file is helping someone so it's giving suffering the finger. Deleting a save file IS progress because it's moving past selfish desires for what basically amounts to a trophy on your hard drive in order to give a happy ending to someone else. You already got the ending, but there are people out there who did not get the ending.