I was drawn to writing about the 2006 role-playing game
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 (published by Atlus, and henceforth referred to as Persona 3), due to its superficial resemblance to the
Purple Moon game Rockett’s New School, as described by Brenda Laurel in Utopian
Entrepreneur: much of its gameplay revolves around navigating a social community in
school, within the context of a strong, character-driven plot. However, unlike the “utopian” games that
Laurel describes, Persona 3 ultimately devalues its social aspects, fails to create
an androgynous or otherwise “safe” space for female gamers, and at base falls
back on the “hardcore” role-playing game mechanics that have historically
appealed to traditional "hardcore" gaming audiences.
To briefly describe the basic gameplay and plot: in Persona
3, the player takes control of an ordinary teenage boy (the character is an
empty vessel, named by the player and lacking a distinct voice or personality)
who has recently enrolled in a new school.
The player must make and maintain friendships, balance study and social
life, pursue romantic interests, join after-school activities, and try to
maintain a healthy lifestyle (for example, staying up late to study may lead to
tiredness and increase the risk of becoming ill). The player is in control of the character all
day, every day, though the course of a year.
These “daily life” activities only account for about half of the
gameplay, however: the rest is a more traditional RPG, based on battles and
level-grinding. The premise of the plot is that, each night at midnight, there is a secret time period (the “Dark Hour”)
of which only some people are aware, and in which supernatural events happen. The school transforms into a
randomly-generated, seemingly-endless tower full of monsters, and the
characters gain access to their “personas,” representations of their
personalities which can be summoned as combat avatars.
From a spatial perspective, the game is interesting for a
number of reasons. Most obvious -- to
the point where I didn’t notice till mid-way through the game -- is how domestic it is: in comparison to the
exotic frontiers typical of Jenkins’ “Adventure Island” spaces, the gameplay in
Persona 3 takes place almost entirely within a few city blocks. The game moves between the protagonist’s
dormitory, the school, and the immediate neighborhood, and players get to know
the local characters rather well (Jenkins might refer to this as a “Play Town”). Rather than traveling abroad to find
adventures, the game’s characters carve out their story in the secret places
and events of the world around them. As
mentioned in Jenkins, Laurel, and Fullerton et al., the concept of the “secret
spaces” within domestic life is a common trope in female-oriented literature in
games. In this case, the portal to the
enchanted world is represented by the clock, rather than the looking glass or
the wardrobe.
The second spatial aspect of the game is that the secret
world of the “Dark Hour” is an example of what Fullerton would call a narrative
space, “a space imbued with story and mystery to be discovered and uncovered.” The world itself tells a story -- its
mysterious existence (how it came about, its effects on the real world, etc.)
are what drive the central storyline, and the main motivation for the
characters is exploration.
Finally -- and problematically -- the game seems to evenly
divide itself between community spaces (the social aspects of navigating high
school) and combat-oriented spaces (the “Dark Hour,” which, despite its
emphasis on exploration, is also characterized by near-constant battle), with
little relationship between the two.
While success in the former world is dependent on time management and
social instincts, success in the latter is based on repetition and linear
progression -- the player fights endless battles in order to gain levels and
become stronger, enabling him to climb higher in the tower and fight more
battles, etc. Jenkins would call these
the central virtues of mastery and self-control, common in “boy culture”: “Putting
in the long hours of repetition and failure necessary to master a game also
requires discipline and the ability to meet and surpass self-imposed goals.” Clearly there is a division between male- and
female-oriented spaces in the gameplay, and, while progress in the one is tied loosely
to progress in the other (that is, forming stronger social connections during
the day will enable the player to create somewhat more powerful persona
avatars), the link does not feel very powerful; the primary method for
advancement is still level-grinding, which can be accomplished only through
combat.
This form of gameplay also depends on prior knowledge of the
mechanics common to role-playing games, and will naturally exclude those
players not already familiar with the genre (especially given its steep
difficulty curve). Since most games in
this genre are based on high-fantasy worlds -- traditionally exclusionary
spaces in their own right, given their representations of women -- Persona 3
seems to be assuming a largely male audience (though not necessarily a young
male audience). These audiences will be
familiar with combat in RPGs, but not with social simulations; the social
sections of the game are correspondingly far more forgiving (there is no “loss
condition,” and friendships can always be repaired, for example). By contrast, players familiar with social
simulations but not RPG combat will have a difficult time playing the
game.
That said, Persona 3
avoids many of the pitfalls described in “The Hegemony of Play.” For example, as in most role-playing games,
the combat is command- and turn-based, and therefore not dependent on “mastery
of quick reflexes and an ability to solve complex spatial rotation problems in
real time,” which tend to favor male gamers. Its characters also avoid the hyper-masculine “third
gender” archetype common to many games: the main character is fairly
androgynous, the violence is highly abstract (the enemies are the likes of
blobs, or monsters shaped like household objects, and there is no blood), the
sexuality is fairly subdued, and the actual plotline revolves more around
solving mysteries than physical domination (the characters almost never engage
in combat with other people, and even those few encounters always end in
tragedy).
The representation of women in Persona 3 deserves special
mention, however, and I found one mechanic in particular distinctly questionable. Though females comprise half of
the major combat characters, are well-written, and dress reasonably by game
standards most of the time (those are major qualifications: in real-life, their
shortness of their skirts would be fairly ridiculous, and there are several
notable sections where the females don swimsuits, kimonos, etc., and are explicitly
leered at by the male characters), they are heavily objectified in the social
space. In the player’s daily high-school
life, female characters are treated as fundamentally different than male
characters: simply put, males are friends, and females are potential sexual
conquests. The male friends have individual
story lines that eventually lead to a strengthened social connection. The female friends have individual story
lines as well, but they always lead to romantic engagement with the player
(climaxing with a sexual act). In other
words, there are no platonic friends in Persona 3; all cross-gender friendships
lead eventually to sex. Due to criticism
of this problematic aspect of the game, its sequel (Persona 4, which I haven’t
played) allows the player the choice of whether to pursue a romantic
relationship with females.
Though interesting to consider in terms of gender,
especially as it relates to gendered spaces in gameplay, Persona 3 is
ultimately disappointing -- more useful, perhaps, as a first exploratory step
in a new direction, which more “values-based” (as Laurel would put it) game
developers can further explore.
Works Cited
Fullerton, T., Morie, J. & Pearce,
C. (aka Ludica) (2007). "A Game Of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered
Poetics of Game Space." In Proceedings, Digital Arts & Culture 2007,
Perth, Australia, September 2007.
Fron, J., Fullerton, T., Morie, J.
& Pearce, C. (aka Ludica) "The Hegemony of Play." In Situated
Play: Proceedings of Digital Games Research Association 2007 Conference. Tokyo,
Japan, September 2007.
Jenkins, Henry. "Complete Freedom
of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Spaces" The Game Design Reader,
ed. Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman.MIT Press:Cambridge, MA, 2006. 330-363.
Laurel, Brenda. (2001). Utopian
Entrepreneur. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.