Is it too much to ask that the justices actually play some modern video games as they consider this? Probably. One suspects that at least a couple of them already harbor a secret obsession with the likes of Minesweeper, Tetris, Solitaire or Bejeweled — as do so many desk jockeys — but it seems sadly unlikely that many, if any, of them will ever actually sit on a couch with controller in hand.
Yet an interactive experience can never be truly understood through noninteractive video clips. What distinguishes an electronic game from older forms of mass entertainment is that the game must be actively participated in, rather than merely viewed, to be fully comprehended. It is only through a player’s sense of responsibility, direction and individual agency that the pictures on the screen come to assume real meaning.
Now it may turn out that as a legal matter the First Amendment issues involved in this case are so overarching that developing a personal understanding of the actual medium itself is irrelevant. But I hope not. And I hope that if the justices ask their young clerks to bring in one recent game for them to check out they bring in Nier. Nier does many different things at such a high level of sophistication and accessibility that I cannot think of another single game of recent years that more faithfully represents the sheer intellectual breadth of modern video games.
Developed by Cavia of Japan and released in North America last week by Square Enix for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles, Nier is fairly violent. It is often profane. It is also provocative and at times profound in its storytelling, empathetic and nuanced in its characters, exhilaratingly diverse in its game-play design and almost perfectly paced.
Most important, Nier succeeds at fostering an emotional investment in its characters and in its world that gives all of its hacking and slashing and jumping and exploring and puzzle-solving and even its virtual fishing and farming a sense of value and meaning.
When a fantasy setting is described as
“post-apocalyptic,” what usually comes to mind are smoking ruins, mutants and shotguns. Nier has none of those. The main story unfolds 1,300 years in the future, and 21st-century human society exists only as relic. The trestles of a ruined railroad bridge loom over a pastoral landscape as a reminder that humanity, now returned to a subsistence existence, once accomplished great things.
You, the player’s character, are a father whose daughter has been stricken by a terrible supernatural disease. From the simple, elemental motivation of helping her unfolds a tale that reveals the fate of the world and which throws into question the nature of humanity itself. Is humanity a state of being? A state of mind? A state of purpose?
Along the way you garner a motley and entertaining assortment of fellow travelers: a foulmouthed, lingerie-clad hermaphrodite named Kainé; a droll, arrogant floating book named Grimoire Weiss who calls Kainé “hussy” at every turn; and a boy named Emil, who leavens Weiss’s cynicism and Kainé’s anger with a touching (though never quite cloying) earnestness.
In its game-play structure, Nier defies easy categorization. The combat mechanics are basic and easily grasped as you swing swords and sling spells against otherworldly foes (or you can just go kill sheep and wolves in the wilderness for their meat and hides). There are strong role-playing elements in terms of customizing your equipment and abilities. The direction of the main story line is always clear, and yet there is an open (if small) world to explore and several dozen thoroughly optional side quests.
Nier deploys almost every video game convention imaginable; it is strongly influenced from the classics, from God of War to Resident Evil to Fallout to Fable to Diablo to Final Fantasy. And if you reduce Nier to its constituent parts, there are plenty of games that surpass it in each area. But Nier never feels disjointed and it stands as an achievement in using many different styles of gaming in the service of a coherent, compelling whole.
Incredibly, Nier even forces the player to read. Some of the game’s most powerful moments are presented simply as white text on a black screen. In the context of a medium in which almost everything is displayed visually, these prose segments in the form of memories and dreams ignite the imagination and lend the overall experience a rare depth. No game I have played since 1999’s Planescape: Torment has made such effective use of textual storytelling.
In its overall range of styles, the franchise Nier most closely resembles is Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series. The difference is that Nier is aimed at adults. The one area where Nier blatantly falls short is in its graphics — they simply look dated — but great games are rarely about graphics. They are mostly about contextualizing and speaking to various aspects of human existence, even violence, in the service of an entertaining, interactive artistic experience.
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