Today’s piece, I regret to inform you, is going to be brief and rambling: it’s approaching midterms and, while Edgar is technically ready for a book round up, I’m going to be even more exhausted next week than this one, and have asked them to hold off on writing it for a few days.

The state of the world is bad right now. I’ve been thinking about Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty airman who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy, the upcoming election, and the ongoing genocide. While I’m trying to do what little is available to me, I’ve also been working, and feeling burnt out.

A certain amount of retreat from the world is to be expected in this situation. My own retreat tends to be video games.

Recently I’ve been playing through Persona 3 Reload, the updated re-release of a game that I first played back in 2007. Eighteen years on, much of it is fairly familiar. I’ve been connected to the Sony gaming ecosystem for quite a while, and up until the PS4, they were fairly committed to backwards compatibility. As a result, I’ve had the good fortune of being able to revisit these older games when I want to play something but don’t have the funds to engage with something new. As such, the game is still fairly fresh in my mind, despite the fact that it is old enough to buy cigarettes in some municipalities.

Atlus, the publisher, is one that I enjoy the work of, though I have to pick and choose. One team seems pretty dedicated to exploring interesting philosophical ideas – later this year, they’ve got a game coming out that engages with Hegelian philosophy, and that’s part of their pitch – while the other team trades in somewhat questionable conspiracy theories, like the idea that Japanese people might be the ten Lost Tribes of Israel (a sort of British Israelism with cherry blossoms). While I don’t really know if this is an idea that they embrace and put forward, it seems suspicious to me and I only have so much money at a time, so thanks but no thanks.

This whole business, though, is taking on another layer for me because I have a student writing on the game – the original, not the remake.

This is making me think a bit about nostalgia, as many things do, and specifically about the experience of watching a person of another generation engage with something for which you feel a certain measure of nostalgia.

For a variety of reasons – most to do with professional ethics – I’m not going to talk about my student or my student’s thoughts on the subject. Young people learning a new skill should have the privacy in which to do that, and while I might occasionally discuss something one of my students said or did, I try to keep that to a minimum. However, this experience of an intersubjective, intergenerational perspective on nostalgia is one that I haven’t been on this end of before.

Edgar’s comment about *American Gods*, that “you could build a whole guy out of this” also holds true for me here. I encountered this shortly before I began to really consider who I wanted to be as an artist, how I wanted to be as a creative person — and so it exerted an undue influence on me there.

The experience of the other end is one that I’m sure every person has experienced in their youth: being shown a classic film by your parents that worms its way into your skull and changes how you speak and hold yourself, an older sibling lowering the needle on to the record that you’re just about to discover is your favorite album of all time, your mentor handing you a book and telling you that they think you should read it – and the look in their eye that you don’t yet know means that they’ve handed you a time bomb that will blow a hole in your world and allow you to escape somewhere else.

I didn’t introduce this student to this game, so it might not be on the same level as the above, but there’s this feeling of being a link in a chain stretching from somewhere to somewhere else – both ends of the length lost in the distance.

A big part of this experience is the fact that – where appropriate – I’ve attempted to bring in a certain amount of literary criticism to my classes through the back door. This has led to a certain amount of flowering in my classes of discussion of popular culture: I have a list of films and TV shows that my students are demanding that I watch – and there’s been a range of quality there, but it’s a useful thing to engage with. I consider being an ambassador for the liberal arts to be an important part of my job: earlier today, presenting a philosophy research paper as an example text in one class, students misidentified a work on the philosophy of technology and the ethics of automation as being a paper written by an engineering professional.

Please understand me, while I have some concerns about the younger generation, those concerns are less focused on the shortcomings of my students than on their miseducation, a situation created by American educational policy.

Some policy wonks like to talk about the importance of STEAM over STEM – inserting “art” before mathematics – but what I fear is that this attempt to synthesize the human with what is productive is a miscarriage of the mission of a liberal arts education. Being a well-rounded person means knowing about the sciences and mathematics and technology, certainly – but it means, also, being able to recognize that not every question has a simple answer that exists without complication, an easy way to preserve both your conscience and your comfort. Staying in Omelas is certainly an option, but giving to a pro-child Charity and attempting to reform it from the inside because you like your treats is just an attempt to cope with profiting from suffering.

This is, of course, getting far afield from the game that I was discussing at the start of this piece, and I’m not even four hundred words separated from the end of the paragraph I last spoke about it on, but I’m tired and the mind tends to wander.

The themes of the game are the sort of thing that might resonate: there’s a reason it was named as one of the touchstones for the first edition of Geist – it’s a game about death and, to a certain extent, about the ethics of facing it.

As an aside: it handles this in a way that a western RPG simply couldn’t. A western-style RPG on the theme would bring other strengths to the problem, it would explore the nature of the question much more thoroughly, but I don’t believe that it couldn’t really provide a cohesive response to it in the same way. This isn’t, for the record, about the ethnicity or linguistic origin of the design team: Japanese RPGs have their own set of conventions that tend to result in a game being much more “on rails” than a western game. The mechanics are constructed like a finely engineered pocket watch. In comparison, the mechanics of a game like Fallout or Skyrim are less deterministic. The mechanics lead to different design decisions, and thus different aesthetics.

As a result, I tend to find games that are designed in the Japanese style – whether from Japan or designed by teams inspired by games from Japan, because there are a fair number of “JRPGs” designed by teams from the Americas and Europe – more amenable to the tools of literary analysis. The scripts are more filmic or novelistic in construction.

But I seem to be trying to escape discussing this game in the course of writing a piece that closely considers it. The absolute most basic version of the plot is one that Atlus has done a number of times: the central character arrives in a new city, becomes aware of a threat invisible to most people and spends the narrative trying to balance normal life with fighting this invisible, supernatural threat. At the end of the narrative there is a tearful departure and – for most, but not all of the characters – life goes on in one way or another. It’s a formula that they’ve repeated a number of times, remixing elements and elaborating on them in relation to different themes in a way reminiscent of Hiroki Azuma’s idea of database consumption.

As for this game’s themes, it is largely the ethics of mortality, of what we owe one another and what we should do in the face of loss. This isn’t just found in the protagonist and his association with Orpheus, nor in another pair of characters being associated with Polydeuces and Castor – the former of whom lives through the game and the latter of whom dies in a way that might be unexpected to those unfamiliar with the Dioskouroi – but writ small in the minor characters you are encouraged to get to know better and form close connections with. All of them are oriented around the themes of loss and perseverance in the face of it: whether it’s the athlete whose health is failing too fast for him to compete, the young girl whose parents are going through a tumultuous divorce, the old couple fighting to protect the tree that stands as a memory to their dead son, or the dissolute monk who found religion after being abandoned by his wife and son and who now questions the sincerity of his belief.

From this description, it may seem as if I’m saying every part of the game feels the same, but part of what drew me in to it was how it had such a clear thematic focus while still being varied and unique. It’s part of what kept me coming back to the game.

This thematic focus extends to the artwork as well — the concept art of this location brings to mind death through reference to (art deco-styled) elevators, the prominent clock face, the draped furniture, and the monumental scale upon which it is built.

Of course, I’m currently playing through the updated re-release, and so everything is presented in a cleaner, more modern style. Unlike other Atlus re-releases (and, frankly, it’s gotten ridiculous. I’ve seen people who swear they will never buy a game at release, because they know an updated version will come out 2-3 years later: ignoring the fact that these updated versions are not inherently superior to the first release), this one was rebuilt from the ground up, and is a testbed for design moves and technologies they’ll use later. It has made the familiar text strange to me and allowed me to experience some of it all over again. The broad strokes, of course, have remained in my mind, and come back to me when the new version echoes it.

At the end of the day, though, there are limitations to the way that a nostalgia object can work. It’s amazing that they have managed to recapture some of the lightning they bottled with the original version – it’s almost unheard of for that to happen – but it’s not possible to fully turn back the clock and give the audience the same experience entirely.

I say this, partly, because the student about whom I spoke earlier appears to have played the original or one of the earliest re-releases, from sometime between 2007 and 2009 (we’re having some disagreements on the year in the citations.) It would be one thing if they had approached it through this highly polished reconstruction of the original, but the fact is that they played the version I was introduced to the game through.

Now, I get to see them puzzle through the meaning, and discover how deep the well goes – which is an experience that I’m sure my own professors had, though they had the benefit of setting it up and ensuring that it would happen. This just sort of happened, and in my sleep-deprived and overworked state, it strikes me as a significant occurrence, something providential.

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Eternal Return: Nostalgia, Education, and Coming Back to Persona 3