Probably the best compliment I can give Nier: Automata at the moment is that I’ve put off writing another log because when I have free time I’d rather be playing the game itself. Granted, a large part of that is because the story hasn’t yet given me much to think about, but it’s important to remember that games can be quality experiences in the absence of a compelling or innovative narrative.
In Nier‘s case, what I’ve found is that I’m actually more interested in wandering the world and taking in the atmosphere. You would think that a game set in the twelfth millennium on a planet that’s been rendered inhospitable to humans would be a dull, lifeless thing, but that’s really not the case. Yes, the dominant color palette runs towards grays, browns, and rusty reds, and everything is washed out by the harsh sunlight, but the effect isn’t to make everything feel sterile like you would expect. Besides the YoRHa androids, there are enclaves of other androids living on Earth who have developed small pockets of community (these folks are generally referred to as Resistance, which I still don’t quite understand because they don’t seem to actually be doing anything related to fighting the machines) as well as factions of machines whose AI has mutated a kind of pacifism. The planet abandoned by humanity because of an alien invasion, while certainly in ruins, has an abundance of, well, not exactly life but something approximating it.
Clearly this is all entirely intentional; from the first time I started up the game, Rachael and I have joked about how it looks like a typical “robots have souls!” story, and the various synthetic creatures running around evoke the idea that sufficiently advanced AI will eventually develop its own form of society. You have machines mimicking humans in various cutesy ways (the machines, with their ball-shaped heads and high-pitched, slightly mechanical voices, are so adorable that I feel a little bad about destroying the hostile ones); in a derelict theme park that some pacifist machines with a penchant for clown makeup have turned into their personal haven, you can watch a machine production of “Romeos & Juliets” based on an ancient human drama (it’s unclear just how much of Shakespeare’s original survives in this world, because there are some… liberties taken with the machine adaptation). The machines are far from the uncanny valley, but they’re clearly in the process of figuring out how to bridge that gap.
Of course, all of this abundant evidence for robot self actualization wouldn’t be interesting without someone to express extreme disbelief, so we have the central pair of 2B and 9S wandering around providing commentary on everything they’re observing. Because 2B falls into the standard Japanese archetype of the emotionless girl, it’s up to 9S to do most of the talking, and he is incessant in his chatter about the machines having no higher purpose to their weird behavior. I’m running around jamming to the music (the soundtrack in this game is comprised of these lovely, haunting melodies) and then 9S pipes up about “meaningless chatter” and I want to say, “Quit being so down on yourself, my dude.” It’s comical how long he holds on to the idea that the machines, who have established their own communes, sworn off violence, and engage in commerce with the androids, are just mimicking random bits of human culture. At some point, the cohesion of the pattern has to be accepted as comparable to human intelligence, but I don’t know where that point is for 9S.
These machines are about to glom together to give birth to a thing because saying “This cannot continue,” over and over while being attacked by hostile androids is totally just random machine behavior.
Actually, 9S’s skepticism brings up an interesting feature of the “robots have souls!” story template. The talk about souls doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re discussing the metaphysical quintessence of a being; it just serves as a useful linguistic shortcut for describing the concept of artificial intelligence being capable of reaching self awareness that grants it an equal moral value (if ‘moral’ is even the right word) with human life. Because it is a shortcut though, you’re always going to have a bit of confusion about the soul thrown in for good measure. What results for this particular philosophical milieu is a spectrum of opinions that end up resembling a horseshoe (I say this with full knowledge that horseshoe theory of ideology is sticky business that often serves to set a false dichotomy between centrism of whatever stripe and ideologies located further at the edges of whatever the set spectrum is) with three primary perspectives: that robots, like humans, have souls; that robots, unlike humans, don’t have souls; and that neither humans nor robots have souls, so there isn’t really a difference between them aside from components. I say it resembles a horseshoe because the folks who say that robots have souls and the folks who say humans don’t have souls end up arguing the same basic position that sufficiently advanced AI is worthy of dignity equivalent with that accorded to human beings.
Anyway, the point I was aiming at is that 9S says a lot of inane things that are designed to highlight his skepticism about machine intelligence. And as far as I know, he follows you around for the whole game.
Things get weird pretty quickly from this point forward.
Catchy Title Goes Here 