NieR and Nietzsche: Conveying Nihilism Through Mechanics

Yoko Taro’s NieR: Automata asks a question most games avoid: why did you pick up the controller? 2B and 9S fight through endless combat, existential dread and several “endings”, only to arrive back where they began. By the end the humans and aliens behind the war are long dead, and the hours of play look pointless while the cycle keeps turning. The androids learn that their human creators are extinct. They are still not free, because another set of humans controls them: the ones holding the controllers.

The player as an indifferent god

Turning on the console is a small act of creation. The player brings 2B and 9S to life, cares about them and feels for them, and in doing so crosses what Patricia Castello Branco calls the “boundaries between the human and the divine”. The player also stays indifferent to their suffering. Their endless, Sisyphean labour goes on because the player wants to keep playing.

NieR: Automata draws attention to this itself. Its non-player machines carry the names of existentialist thinkers: Sartre, Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir. One name is missing.

Friedrich Nietzsche never appears, yet his thinking shapes the whole bleak world. For Nietzsche, in a universe with a god, all morality and meaning come from that god. In NieR: Automata the relationship between player and character stands in for the relationship between humanity and the divine. 2B wants more than to escape her creators. She wants to overcome her god and, in Steven Earnshaw’s paraphrase of Nietzsche, live “according to self-created values”. The opening monologue, spoken almost directly to the player, says it plainly:

Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment? I often think of the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle… and wonder if we’ll ever get the chance to kill him.

The game makes that wish literal. Only when the player, in a sense, dies can the protagonists define their own meaning, and erasing the save data is how that happens.

A spiral of life and death

Every player knows the loop. A character dies, returns, and fights again. NieR: Automata builds that loop into its mechanics with unusual force. The androids are disposable. Battlefields are scattered with the bodies of other players’ androids, a constant reminder of who keeps sending them back. “We’re just soldiers created to die,” 9S says, as if dying were the reason they exist.

2B tries to build meaning through her bond with 9S, but she still serves the powers that decided her fate. Learning that the Council of Humanity on the moon is a lie changes nothing, because the player is still holding the strings.

So what is the point? Simply to play. Each session gives 2B and 9S a purpose they did not choose. Chasing every collectible or the platinum trophy becomes their purpose too, whatever they want.

The master and the slave

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes that “it is the masters who define the concept ‘good’” in order to set the hierarchy. The relationship between player and android fits that idea uncomfortably well. The androids describe the futility and pain of their lives, and the player keeps going, because they are seen as virtual, unfeeling toys: lesser beings made for entertainment. The player’s morality ranks itself above them, so it feels nothing.

Nietzsche saw every relationship as a contest of will in which each side tries to transform the other. Between player and character, the player has always been the master, pulling the puppet’s strings according to the player’s own idea of what is good. The puppet’s only option is to resist. Nietzsche calls this the “slave revolt”: the resentment of the powerless towards those who rule them.

Every game contains some version of this tension. The player wants to keep exploring, clear the side quests and unlock everything; the characters want their spiral to end. NieR: Automata is unusual because it resolves that tension through mechanics as well as story.

A repeating prayer

Eternal recurrence, the return of the same events with their “intolerable physical and spiritual agonies”, traps 2B, 9S and the player alike. 2B is fated to kill 9S again and again. “Over and over, I continue to kill 9S with my own hands. And every time, it feels like a void within me deepens,” reads the script published for the Memories of Puppets concert.

The player shares that repetition. Reaching the true ending means playing several routes and seeing the same events more than once, from different perspectives. The structure is the argument: the player is pulled into recurrence alongside the androids. Ending D, a false conclusion, leaves the player unfulfilled because the characters are too. Facing the last “objective”, 9S laughs and says, “So what? None of it matters.”

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche records the old wisdom of Silenus: the best thing is never to have been born, and the second best is to die soon. Neither is open to 2B. Birth cannot be undone, and death just moves her consciousness into a new body. Only divine intervention can break the cycle.

Digital deicide

“I have come to the conclusion that I cannot accept this resolution,” says Pod 042 during the credits. Protocol requires deleting 2B and 9S’s data so the cycle can start again. The Pod, now self-aware, offers the player a way to save their memories instead. The credits then turn into a bullet-hell shooter in which the player fires on the developers’ names while dodging their fire. It is revenge on 2B and 9S’s behalf, and the symbolic death of their creators’ plans for them.

The fight cannot be won alone. Help comes from a swarm of other players’ ships, and when one is destroyed a message says that someone’s save data has been erased. These are strangers who gave up their own saves so that someone else could reach this ending.

Then comes the choice. The final cutscene does not require deleting the save. Deleting it, though, is the only way to free that particular 2B and 9S. No one will ever play them again. The extinction of humanity on the moon did not free them; the player giving up control does.

Nietzsche held that people can live with suffering but cannot bear meaningless suffering. After eons of pointless sacrifice, the player’s sacrifice finally means something. Erasing the save is a kind of digital suicide that ends the androids’ suffering as someone else’s entertainment. It is “better to have no God,” as Zarathustra puts it, “better to set up destiny on one’s own account”.

A mirror held up

Very rarely does a game turn back on itself and hold up a mirror to the player the way NieR: Automata does. As long as the player keeps 2B and 9S at war, the player is no better than the absent humans on the moon: another careless god who denies them relationships and meaning for entertainment.

The ending stays open. 2B and 9S may fall back into the same cycles of violence and deception. That risk is part of the gift, because freedom includes the freedom to repeat mistakes.

Countless game characters have died for the player’s goals. NieR: Automata asks the player to return the favour. God is dead, and it was not murder. It was suicide.

Sources

• Branco, Patrícia Castello. “Post- and Transhumanism: An Introduction” (2015), 193–195.
• Earnshaw, Steven. Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury, 2006.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Penguin, 2003.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Vintage, 2010.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Vintage, 2010.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
• Bailey, Andrew. First Philosophy, second edition. Broadview Press, 2012.
• Leiter, Brian. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality. Routledge, 2003.
• Kain, Philip J. “Nietzsche, Eternal Recurrence, and the Horror of Existence.” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 33 (2007): 49–63.
• PlatinumGames. NieR: Automata. Square Enix, 2017.
• Yoko Taro. NieR Music Concert: The Memories of Puppets, original script book, 2017.