Nier: Automata is ultimately a story about meaning
I finished the Japanese action RPG Nier: Automata only recently (about six years too late — and yes, I am a little ashamed of it) with every character and was blown away. The critically acclaimed game from 2017 designed by PlatinumGames is clearly made by a team of developers who read a lot of literature — and in particular philosophy.
And although videogames are a relatively recent medium, their capacity to explore philosophical ideas is not particularly new (think of The Talos Principle, The Witness, SOMA, and many others). However, Nier: Automata is truly an odd videogame, as it treats its philosophical influences much more elaborately — and as a result, makes for one profound intellectual experience.
A godless world
The game director, Yoko Taro, is surely an interesting guy. He defined the game’s central theme as “agaku”, a Japanese word meaning “to struggle out of a bad situation”. Moreover, he said the story “is about love”, which he felt was unusual for a story about robots, which are typically written as non-emotional. Yoko used the androids’ and Machines’ reverence for the long-extinct humanity to show how people’s sense of self and worth is necessarily founded on belief in something else. Moreover, the team used books by Will Buckingham and Nigel Benson, which explain philosophy and psychology in understandable language, as a reference for the narrative. Nier’s developers made their philosophical influences in the game blatantly obvious. For example, the narrative references numerous influential philosophers and thinkers, such as Hegel, Marx or Engels; as well as NPC’s — important characters you meet and do quests for — who are aptly named Jean-Paul (Sartre), Pascal (Blaise Pascal) or Simone (De Beauvoir).
In a scene where Pascal, a pacifist machine, reads Nietzsche, he concludes that:
“Nietzsche was quite the profound thinker … or perhaps he skipped right past being profound and turned crazy instead.”
It seems fitting that the writers gave this piece of dialogue to Pascal, as he himself turns batshit crazy at the end of his character arc.
The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting — with a story is set in 11945 AD. Briefly put, it revolves around a proxy war between human-made androids and an invading army of machines from another world. The “YoRHa” android forces are commanded from the “Bunker”, a reconnaissance base that orbits Earth. Fending off the machines, the YoRHa forces fight alongside pre-YoRHa Earth androids known as the Resistance. Basically, both machines and androids had leaders in the past who they obeyed. For the machines, it was the aliens; for the androids, humans. Alas, during the game, we find out that both aliens and humans were wiped out from the face of planet Earth — an event which basically left both groups to act on their own.
During their missions, the player-controlled androids 2B and 9S discover that the invading machines on Earth are replicating human societies and concepts. The creator, Yoko Taro, wanted to point out that these machine lifeforms were just assimilating data from the old world, but without really understanding it. These ‘lesser’ lifeforms do not fully grasp what human philosophies have to say about the world nor themselves.
This makes for an interesting thought experiment. As both sides (androids and machines) consider their owners as ‘gods’, one of the questions the game asks is what happens when these machines have to live in a world without their gods. For example, for Adam and Eve — the antagonists in the game — their names don’t really mean anything. They just found a Bible, thought “hey, that sounds cool”, and decided to copy them.
Nihilism as an illusion
Nier’s storyline thus resonates with Nietzsche’s famous line ‘God is dead’, a term coined to describe that the disappearance of Christianity would plunge us into a world devoid of absolute morals or truth — a nihilistic event. According to the Christian worldview, the world involves suffering, war, hardship, and despair. Yet humans endure these things because things will be better in paradise. With the “death of God”, human beings no longer hope for life hereafter — since there is no redeeming paradise.
And even though gods aren’t a universal element in all human societies (as there are indigenous tribes without this concept), this question is often psychologically associated with divine existence, as if life wouldn’t be worth living and wouldn’t have any meaning without a god. In Nier: Automata, the androids still hold on to a purposeful divine existence, because it is exactly the Bunker on the moon which commands them. Machines, on the other hand, are generally purposeless but still try to meaningfully organize a society without their masters. But even if the general atmosphere of Nier: Automata feels dreary and hopeless, and most of the characters feel like they are suffering due to a world without “absolute” meaning, its narrative themes are anything but a nihilistic affair.
As so often, the term nihilism has been used and abused — by those who didn’t read Nietzsche close enough. In fact, Nietzsche was not a nihilist at all. Although he did reject the idea of morality as grounded in some supernatural, otherworldly or Platonist realm of Forms, in the end he was merely warning us about a world without fundamental values. Instead, Nietzsche defended certain “higher” values originated from Ancient Greece (such as honor, pride, or prowess), and grieved their transformation to “lesser” values which were brought about by Christianity. He believed that general morality underwent a “transvaluation,” an event that turned everything formerly “good” into “evil” and everything “bad” into “good.” This change happened when Greek ethical life was transformed by Christianity.
As many critics of the game see the game as being nihilistic, I argue that they are blatantly wrong. Fundamentally, Nier: Automata is about ethics, and more specifically the concept of meaning. Again, this resonates with Nietzsche himself — this time as an ethical thinker, who always puts ethics at the core of human existence. Nier’s narrative makes it clear that ethics are the very thing which makes us human. For example, Eve’s life turns meaningless without Adam, and 9S (without his comrade 2B) turns crazy up to the point where he wants to destroy all machine lifeforms. One of the main pillars of Nier’s narrative is thus that ethics can only exist through someone else — through an Other.
Humanistic ideals
There are also some who consider the game a representation of “optimistic nihilism”. Again, this is misleading, as the term ‘optimistic nihilism’ most doesn’t exist in any philosophical literature. Instead, this notion was popularized by such media platforms as YouTube, and in my view, it is a notion wrongly coined by those who don’t really understand philosophy.
Optimistic nihilism apparently is this:
“the ability of a person to create his own meaning after fully accepting that the universe is a large place of meaninglessness”.
Does this ring a bell to any reader even remotely interested in philosophy? Yes, in essence this is a very reductive way of explaining existentialism. In fact, all existentialists share the same starting point: “the universe does not not have any intrinsic meaning”, yet they all (Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus,..) propose different resolutions to this problem.
While I can follow the existentialist (‘finding meaning in a meaningless universe’) perspective to some degree, I’d argue that the developers — perhaps unknowingly — transcended their own narrative vision due to some daring decisions, such as the implementation of specific philosophical themes, the intricate design of the world and the interesting characters and their relation to each other. As such, in the end I believe that Nier: Automata’s particular theme is not one of nihilism (nothing has meaning), nor existentialism (in the face of this situation, we are responsible for our own creation of meaning).
Instead, the game is wondering if a deep, abstract concept such as “meaning” can be understood by lower forms of consciousness. Moreover, the narrative of Nier: Automata cognitively strengthens the idea that human beings’ intrinsic focus is one of “meaning” — and seems to show us that this notion is exactly what makes us human.
Therefore, the overarching theme of this game is clearly rooted in humanistic ideals. Nier: Automata thus serves more as a philosophical thought experiment — one which explores humanistic ideals at the very center.
