By Kyle Carpenter
The following article is the first of our series of “Long Plays” or LPs, extended critical looks at games and related phenomena. In this, MD contributor Kyle Carpenter examines the Shin Megami Tensei series and its central metaphor of “demon conversation” in order to propose a model for the relationship of gamer to game. If that sounds interesting, welcome to Medium Difficulty, and continue reading after the break!
Shin Megami Tensei, Strange Journeys, and Conversation Partners Who Aren’t Really There.
Speaking with demons is an odd experience. They tend to operate by distinctly non-human logic, reacting in strange ways to everything you say. You have to guess what it is they want to hear most of the time; if you guess correctly, the rewards can be great. If you don’t, well… demons can be less than friendly. It takes a bit of practice, and a lot of luck.
At least, that’s the way that Atlus of Japan portrays the fine art of speaking to devils in their series, Megami Tensei . Premiering on the Famicom and flourishing on the Super Famicom (where the series graduated to Shin Megami Tensei ), this banner title has splintered into a number of smaller offshoots, including the Devil Summoner series, the Persona series, the Digital Devil Saga , and recently, on the DS, both Devil Survivor and Strange Journey . While most of these series do not share the same continuing plot, they do share common elements, the most notable of which is the presence of demons that can be either enemies or allies.
Shin Megami Tensei has been described as Pokémon before there ever was Pokémon , because it pioneered the method of recruiting and fighting alongside what would otherwise be foes. In this case, however, rather than capturing shiny, plasticized animals (already designed to be manufactured into cheap plastics for the grade-school set), you attempt to persuade demons, collected from a variety of different mythologies, to join you. The key method for doing so (in at least most of these games) is to start a conversation with them and convince them to change their minds about you.
Conversation, then, becomes a game system introduced to the typical mode of RPG battle interaction. At the beginning of a random encounter, one has the option to “Fight” or “Talk”; choose the former, and the game is the same Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy ever: choose menu options until the enemy’s ‘HP’ is depleted. If you choose the latter, however, you enter a new mode of interaction: rhetoric.
Of course, as with any game, a very human interaction is reduced to a very simple abstraction. In these games, the demons ask you questions, and you are given a choice of several answers. More than anything, the conversation resembles a multiple choice quiz with immediate responses.
There are several different personality templates for the demons in these games; although they do repeat, the number of different “characters” you’ll discover is actually quite wide. Many of the questions asked will be specific to a particular template, but many are shared. The reactions, however, are wildly varied. The way a demon responds to you depends on several different factors: its template, your “alignment” (determined by your actions in the game), the particular phase of a lunar cycle, and what appears to be a degree of randomization. There is no guarantee that one response will work every time you use it. Consequently, it appears that these demons have a mind of their own. So to speak, of course.
The Devil Inside: Some Key Terms
We’re all familiar with the concept of the demon – the monstrous denizen of Hell who wants to either kill us, eat us, or lead us astray. The root of the word comes from a Greek concept, “daimon,” usually spelled in English as daemon, which is a being that exists between the world of the Divine and the Earthly. In some conceptions, the daemon was a spirit that guided one, moved one to action: an animating impulse, or soul. Today, ‘daemon’ is a computer term, a name for a program that runs invisible sub-processes that allow an operating system to function; in other words, the spirit of the computer.
The SMT series has always been about the cross-section of “demons” and “computers.” In fact, the subtitle for the first few games was “Digital Devil Story,” focusing on demons as virtual entities, and the plot was based around a hacker opening a portal to a demon world. In SMT: Strange Journey , an angel intones, “Technology and Demons… both carry the risk of deceiving their human masters.” If you described the series as “gothic cyber-punk,” then you wouldn’t be far off.
What is the relationship between demons and computers, and why do demons make a handy metaphor for technology? I think the key facet here has to do with the unpredictable “personality” of the machine and how we react to that strange, alien entity. When we make use of a computer, we have to adapt ourselves to it and learn to use the toolset it provides us, with the correct parameters it demands. Anyone who has ever fumbled their way through Word or Excel, trying to find the proper command to format their file in the way they want, knows that sometimes computers ask things of us we don’t know how to provide; sometimes we have to learn their arcane rituals, study them, and adapt ourselves to them in order to use them. Small wonder some people characterize computer use as a “pact with the devil.”
One of the more central interactions in SMT games is demon conversation, and as one guesses at what these strange creatures want from us, one is really learning how to use the program. In these interactions, we make a relationship with two distinct entities at the same time: the representation (the demon) and the system that forms it (the game). While playing, I am speaking with a personality in the game, but really, I am holding a discourse with the computer, attempting to guess the hidden requirements it has of me. In other words, by speaking to the “demon,” I am really communicating with the “daemon.” I ask what the game wants me to do and what it will give me. I adapt to the game’s demands and it rewards me with stronger allies, handy items, and, most importantly, a feeling of achievement for having grappled with the game itself and come out on top. I learn how to speak the language of demons, and as in any good pact, they provide me with riches in trade. Luckily, in this case, the only cost is the time you put in to playing the game, and not your “immortal soul” (although, it could be said that we all know people for whom that distinction has blurred somewhat).
This pact is not the only example of such a relationship in gaming, or even in the world of technology – it is simply a remarkably self-aware one. When you play a game, you’re putting in time to learn its systems, and how to better use them; beating a game is nothing other than depleting the game’s demands of you. Similarly, the world of technological consumption is a kind of trade – you incorporate products into your life in exchange for the benefits they confer. Who can now imagine living without a cell phone or an iPod? Typically, those who never bothered to use them in the first place. You make the deal, and you pay for it with your devotion. No wonder sometimes we are both suspicious and entranced with new trends in consumer electronics, and no wonder games are so often a scapegoat for youth violence; there’s something Faustian about the exchange, no matter how much we enjoy ourselves, because the terms are, in a sense, hidden. You don’t just pay money for a new item; you pay with the part of your life that it begins to, almost parasitically, inhabit. You summon d(a)emons, and they in turn become your “familiars” – beings that become an integral part of your everyday.
This is the exchange that Shin Megami Tensei makes apparent in their “techno-gothic” universe: the use of technology requires the user to adapt and change rather than the technology (who ever heard of a VCR reading a human manual). The symbol of the “demon” suggests power and compromise in equal measure. Of course, the human still retains the upper hand in this exchange; as demons become “obsolete” (no longer able to deal with the increasing pressures of the game they inhabit), one can “fuse” them, discarding two for one new, more powerful demon (here we can note a lamentable difference from the way technology works; I wish I could combine my old iPod with my aging laptop to get a new iPad). However, SMT highlights the fact that there is a relationship of the human to his/her machines, presenting itself through the metaphor of conversation. Could it be said, then, that the daemon is talking back to us, using our language to make its points?
The Devil’s Music: Jazz Variations on a Theme
Not every SMT game has used conversation as one of its mechanics, although they have rarely strayed too far from that source material. In the Digital Devil Saga series, the protagonists are “infected” with demons and transform into them when infuriated. In addition, they become cannibals, needing to feed on the flesh of their enemies to survive. The “pact” is still implied in this new game scenario, but it is played out in a much more traditional, JRPG way; rather than fusing demons into new, more powerful allies, you are developing yourself through the acquisition of experience (points). Interestingly, the cannibal image provides an apt metaphor for the kind of massive slaughter engaged in by these games, where you invariably lay waste to thousands of creatures in the quest to “level-up.” By suggesting that your characters are literally eating their enemies to grow stronger, the game mechanic so typically assumed in other games is exposed as something rather stark and brutal. Digital Devil Saga manages to play with genre conventions, while nevertheless commenting on them (although the message may be diluted after 40+ hours of gameplay).
If SMT has had a watershed moment in the past decade, it has been with the later releases of the Persona series, Persona 3 and Persona 4 . These games have been a breakthrough success for Atlus, and are responsible for meaningfully introducing the larger series to North America. These games retain the “conversation” mechanic developed in previous games, but with a key difference: rather than speaking to demons, you are speaking with people (high school students, actually). These conversations are similar in terms of the game system; befriending your fellow students confers bonuses on fusions you perform, making the day-to-day life of going to school important for combat purposes in the demon world. One of the games’ great strengths is the way they mesh very different game mechanics into an organic whole, so that one can engage in several disparate activities while contributing to the larger goal. Also, in contrast with the demon conversations of the mainline SMT series, your interactions have some interpersonal context; each character you speak with has a definite narrative arc as you grow closer to them, which you follow from beginning to end.
It’s a curious shift in emphasis. Essentially, Atlus brings the gameplay of Japan’s infamous “visual novels,” dating games wherein the player woos several different girls through what are essentially multiple choice quizzes. Many of those games end with pornographic spectacles, the “reward” for having guessed your way through a character’s dialogue tree. In Persona , correctly answering questions contributes to an almost entirely separate game.
It helps that these stories are generally well written, and the characters you encounter in them are rounded and likable. Guessing what they want to hear will allow you to progress more quickly with them, gaining the corresponding benefits within the time limit the game provides – but other than that eventual cut-off, there is no real cut-off for guessing “wrong.” However, in Persona ‘s case, even though you are speaking to “human” characters, it’s important to remember that you are playing a game, not actually going for coffee with a classmate – no one will 100% the game unless they answer the majority of the questions “correctly,” or plan their outings with their “friends” carefully for maximum benefit.
A certain problem arises from this new scenario: the player avatar in Persona 3 (and Persona 4 ) is essentially sociopathic. He ingratiates himself with everyone around him, using their personal foibles to his advantage. Once he has gotten what he needs from a friend (or even a lover – there are implied, unseen culminations of romantic involvement), he cuts them off and never sees them again. Human relationships become a game, a way to further another project; the characters in the game are in no way an end in themselves, but rather tools for furthering your own goals (even if the goal is, predictably, saving the world). Friends, it seems, are there to be used – or, to use the parlance of our times, gamed. Persona deftly switches the demonic emphasis to the player, making one’s own motives and requirements suspect, rather than that of the daemon.
The Silver-tongued Devil and I
The conversation aspect of SMT is really only one more gameplay system, one that can be counted among the Mario jump ‘n’ bump, the Contra run ‘n’ gun, and the Doom turn and fire. It is ultimately a test, a measure of your willingness to play the computer’s game. The key difference is that the metaphor of the conversation highlights the relation we form to the game itself, and, perhaps, our role in forming that relationship. In many games, the form of conversation relies on the rattle of bullets fired, as violence is the easiest mode of interaction to model in an abstract form. Speech manages to obscure its directionality; one cannot mistake the path of a bullet, but one can disguise one’s agenda in rhetoric. Although SMT breaks down conversation to its most elementary components, question and answer, it implies a more sophisticated mode of interaction between player and game. Curiously, this more complex interaction does a better job of illustrating precisely what we are doing when we play a game: we are ingratiating ourselves to it, submitting to its desires, and attempting to guess at its needs in order to fulfill our own.
It is this point where d(a)emonic interaction becomes sinister, as the more one speaks to a daemon inhabiting a computer, the more one has the uncanny sense that this is the basis of all our relationships: are our friends simply used to require a need for affection? Could it be that conversation, discourse and speech are always, in effect, a game? As these questions present themselves, one realizes that this is the consequence of dealing with demons: sometimes, they give us what we want, but in doing so make us realize the folly of our own desire. In speaking with an other, one becomes aware of how little we can be certain about those with whom we speak. By extension, one begins to learn how little we know of ourselves. Perhaps this lesson is the very object of conversation, be it with demons or otherwise.
Kyle Carpenter is a founding member of Medium Difficulty, and currently pursuing a PhD in English literature. He grew up in his basement rec room, passing the controller.
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