So I’m playing Persona 5. Like you do.
Persona 5, being a Persona game, has a lot of dating-sim and life-management-sim mixed in with its JRPG. And it’s just starting to hit me how fundamentally weird it is to play at making life decisions in the character of someone who has no personality.
Because that’s what the Persona 5 protagonist is. That’s what virtually every dating sim protagonist is, really. A man with no traits, beyond a sort of general-purpose heroism*. A bland cypher who can say or do anything in order to steer things in the particular direction that the player prefers.
* although, yes, it is very much worth noting what traits are in fact possessed by the “bland heroic nullity” – this is probably an important piece of cultural insight or something, in that it shines a light on culture tropes so fundamental that they go unlabeled
Like…
One of the major decisions, obviously, is “which girl do you date?” And it feels super awkward, because it’s supposed to be about forming a relationship, but there’s no actual relationship to form, because there’s only one actual person involved. One of the two love interests under serious consideration (for me) is an adorkable hikokomori otaku girl with a lot of complicated social trauma, and both my author-self and my thoughts-about-romance self are screaming “she needs to be with someone who shares her interests and who won’t feel crippled by her introversion!” – which is to say, with a fairly distinctive kind of human being – but the game provides no way to be that, or even to be definitively not-that. The other one is a serious brainy class-president Hermione Granger type, and it turns out that she wants to become a cop, and I’m wondering whether this is ever really going to be a problem for my notionally-chaotic-good has-Arsene-Lupin-as-his-spiritual-totem protagonist, and then I realize that I don’t know and I have no way to know.
You go through the game as a sort of walking, pretty-faced avatar of the mouse cursor. It’s theoretically a game about building relationships, but you aren’t enough of a person to relate to anyone, you’re just making choices and grabbing at things that the unseen-god Player finds interesting or desirable or fetish-fulfilling. The whole thing is kind of surreal.
I dunno. I like Persona 5, very much, don’t get me wrong. I like this genre generally. I even understand the appeal of keeping your options as wide-open as possible, of (e.g.) having a blank-cypher protagonist who can reasonably go out with any of the lovely tropey girls you’ve laid out for him. But I’m starting to wonder whether there’s a way to run things so that, as you make choices, you actually define yourself – you acquire traits that are visible in behavior, not just in stats – you close some doors as you open others – you become a person to whom the NPCs can react in a way that feels real.
(At some point, I should probably talk about the interaction of this stuff, narcissistic identity, gender, and the subject/object divide. The dating-sim protagonist is pure subject, which is perhaps here better rendered as “pure Male Gaze,” even given the fair number of games in which “he” is in fact female. He is legible only through his actions and achievements and acquisitions, not through anything tangible and lasting about his self. He is, uh, all verb and no noun. Which means, inter alia, that he has no identity at all. Which seems like it might lead somewhere interesting.)