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.
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