 The eccentric creator of Nier-Tamada, Yokotaro, designed the game backwards, so it only makes sense for us to start at the end. The final act in the game is you being asked to sacrifice your save data for another player, a player who is now struggling with the insurmountable task of defeating the final boss, the designers of the game. This was inspired by an endeavor by Coca-Cola of all companies, who in their Small Worlds project put special machines in two cities generally at odds to get people to relate to one another on a more human level. What was this gloriously empathetic ending a resolution to though? Well, it's a conundrum posed by 2B right at the opening of the game. As Android's task with fighting robots in perpetuity, you feel condemned to a life of Sisyphean nihilism, constantly pushing metaphorical boulders up a hill. The question does dawn on you though, why? This is the existentialist conundrum, how do we define purpose if it is not given to us, existence precedes essence and all that. Both robots and androids scramble to find purpose in the game, outside war that is. There are children off the forest to enact a feudal order, Bedouins in the desert who replicate what can only be described as self-stimulation, and yes, there is a village of pacifists. Then there are more explicit homages to philosophers of the past. The Beauvoir is a reference to Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born but becomes a woman. She is plagued by vanity of all things, inheriting an anxiety we all share about our self-image. Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, they all get referenced in one way or the other. But the philosopher at the helm of the game, Yoko Taro, gave us this twist. These philosophies are all invalid. The game is a massive deconstruction of the project of inheriting our purpose from anyone, it will only lead to ruin, and hence, in a more literal appropriation of Nietzsche's creed, we kill God, the designers, through an act of empathy. We escape the eternal recurrence, we attain nirvana through love. Yoko Taro is known for strange games, but games that have an undeniable heart to them. From Dragon Guard to Nier, we get a sampling of all manner of strange and wonderful characters. With Nier Tamada though, he finally found a game with critical and commercial success, showing his undeniable talent to the world. What his games are known for though, above anything else, is being subversive. In GDC Talks, he is given on the subject of designing subversive games. He elaborates on how he designs for moments, for specific thematic points he wants to convey, and writes the game to reinforce that culminating moment. He designs backwards, so much of Nier's structure, as strange as it might be, makes sense when viewed backwards. Characters have to have an existential breakdown, so obviously, the proxy war they were fighting at the behest of the humans and aliens, that was all an illusion. They are just sentient AI replicating memes. This brings us to another of his claims about making subversive games. You need to make the player feel as if they have seen everything there is to offer, and then expand the game in ways they never could have known. How does he do this? First, everything in the game that happens mechanically, happens in the fiction. If you die, your mind gets re-uploaded, death exists in the fiction. The ideas of cycle inherent to games, yes, that too is played with, but in brilliantly subversive ways. You play the game once, it was a fun and poignant action game from the perspective of 2B. Start a second game though, these robots you have been slaughtering? Yes, they can love too. Some commentary is given for the entire game, played from the perspective of 9S. Then the third playthrough? Well they might as well have called it near-automata 2, it is effectively a sequel to the game you just played. Not only is this a shocking requirement the game makes of you, it reinforces the theme perfectly. We are in a never-ending cycle of life and death. Yes, literally when we play and replay games, cycles of violence perpetrated by all of us, and the only way out of it? A mandate to do something that we gamers are very seldom asked, sacrifice the very safe data we are so precious in guarding. Subversive games are now a dime a dozen though. We have had many of these moments in games, the would you kindly moment, the cake is a lie moment, the heart of darkness moment. Similarly, they all feature a sudden transformation of what is known, taking the entire gaming community and upending their existing beliefs about free will, about agency, about the validity of our wanton indulgence in violence. These are also moments these games were all built around, through the mechanics or even in the narrative, and these revelations were both hinted at and withheld from the player with expertise. How many times can we have these moments in games though, where the ground beneath us is removed and our assumptions of what we hold true are challenged. It was charming the first time, but is not subversion itself a cliche, wrote writing at this point. If we expect subversion, it is no longer subversive. Subversion has now gone mainstream with a game like Undertale, a game that combines Bioshock with Portal and Spec Ops to create an aesthetic out of subversion itself. It is why people play the game. What these moments really are is meta-fiction, a point when a medium becomes aware of itself as a constructed text and points to itself. In the book Narcissistic Narrative, the author highlights how subversion can be in reference to itself, to elements of games or to the medium at large. But what binds these works is an understanding of itself. Text has become sentient. What is the point of this subversion then? It is a call for metacognition of self-awareness, the kind the androids in near-autometer have attained. It is a piece of fiction asserting cogito ergo sum in the only way it can. It is a reminder that we ourselves need not be too complacent of our place in the world because if we stare at the fragility of our own being, we may not like what we see. In his GDC talk, Occult Game Design, Jeff Howard outlines an equation for what a subversive game entails. This strange equation means that the power of secret significance, of subversiveness, is directly proportional to the apparent innocence and completeness of the surface game. Essentially, things must not be as they seem to invoke the occult. Braid seems like a loving and innocent puzzle platformer, but what lies beneath is a tale of inversion, the likes of which gaming hadn't really seen. However, Occult Game Design goes back way further in our medium, seen in games like Adventure, with the birth of the Easter Egg itself. Occult Design, the design of subversion, happens across both space and time. The structure of Dark Souls world exemplifies the secretive through world design itself. It is a digital labyrinth. Time moves at its own speed in Pathologic 2. The world will go on without you. There is a universe of mystery and suspense that transcends our ability to comprehend it. Jeff Howard even has definitions. A mystery is an overarching hidden theme. A secret is an individual hidden element, and initiation is the process of uncovering this, either voluntarily or guided by the hand of the designer. Game designers are members of an occult, tasked with initiating players into a world of secrets. An interesting idea for what a game designer is doing. Playing games are even somewhat ritualistic. A fact Yocotaro clued into with Nier Automata. However, what's funny is that in many a game, if we do some ritual, perhaps when we find on a forum of some kind, an arcane incantation known as a cheat code, we can reveal things about the world, making magic be conjured. Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And the funny thing about video games is that magic and technology have converged. We have technology hosted games that allow us to cast spells. We can manipulate the world as we see fit. Game designers are occultists and magicians then. So what of players? Dark Souls' world is full of secrets to uncover. Hell, even the main plot needs to be deciphered. And what do players do? They inspect. They engage in exegesis. They do hermeneutics for God's sake. Countless hours of archaeology has been poured into uncovering the lower of games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. People have even made a career out of it. They are high priests of an occult, initiating other players into, you guessed it, a magic circle. Johan Huzinga called play a magic circle, a magical realm bound by its own rules of conduct that could transform the world itself. Play is bound by magic and is magical itself. It is the power to turn anything into an object of play. We were all initiates in the occult practice that imbues all humanity, the phavality and whimsy of play. So as developers, hiding things from players is actually a part of good design practice. It is part of the magic of play itself. It allows players to discover things on their own, replicating what play's function has been since the inception of humanity. So don't tell the player what to do or where to go, like Hollow Knight does to exceptional effect. It will only enhance the player's curiosity. Hide secrets behind walls that themselves are behind walls, and don't worry if the player will ever find it. You are watching this video on YouTube, so you have seen videos claiming to know the hidden meaning of this or that game. Games like Limbo and Little Nightmares are explicitly designed to be ambiguous, to allow for infinite interpretations by players who are all convinced that their interpretation is correct. The initiates in the occult of different games are both gatekeepers and disseminators of this knowledge. You need to invite people into your community of interpretation, but do so by enticing them, not spoiling it for them. Subversion is about playing with the player's sense of understanding and knowledge, about helping them through the process of initiation, by revealing things with exacting precision. In The Witness, certain revelations are even hidden in plain sight, but players need to enlighten themselves before they can see this. In fact, puzzles have historically been associated with divination. Think of the I Ching or the riddles of the Sphinx. They are metaphors for the apprehension of knowledge itself, as argued in the book, The Puzzle Instinct. Puzzles in games though exist in space, time and in narrative. We have to figure out what to do and what it all means. It's a medium about the uncovering of knowledge itself. It is an intrinsically subversive medium. And so near-automata simply shares in this lineage of meta-fiction subversion, interpretation and upheaval. Yoko Taro is a magician the same way all designers are. In fact, all players of games are. Games, as Greg Gostickian argues, force us into realms of uncertainty. Only by playing do we recover our ground. Do we give ourselves some measure of ontological closure. Only by finding this purpose in the magic circle of play do we escape the never-ending cycle of life and death. And perhaps become initiated as gods.