Intent and Execution: NieR, Dream Sequences, and Player Experience

Words: 2476 Approximate Reading Time: 15-20 minutes

A game I have been replaying recently is NieR, which is a game that I thoroughly enjoy. Because it’s a game which tries to explore the meaning of telling a story through the medium of video games, specifically. A while back I wrote an essay on the themes of NieR and what it is trying to convey about the nature of perspective.

In my replay, I encountered a particular segment which is something that has been somewhat controversial among players of the game. The sequence received criticism for feeling cheaply made, as though the point was to try and cut costs and avoid creating a more complicated and visually stunning segment. However, the lack of visuals is itself a component of the game’s design – it gets us to think about the nature of dreams and what a “dream” really is within the medium of game.

Although what NieR does is interesting, the criticisms against this section actually make sense. Even if there’s something more complex going on underneath the surface, this section can still feel cheaply made. And it’s that discrepancy between what the game is trying to do and what players get out of the experience that marks what I really want to investigate in this essay. In a previous essay, I explored how the mechanics of a game and the intent behind those mechanics can still lead to a problem where the actual execution of those mechanics may not fully capture that intention or can be at odds with what the player ultimately wants. Just because intent exists and that intent can be interesting does not mean that the intent is inherently correct or good.

So I want to use this particular segment of NieR as a sort of case study in exploring again how intent and execution – or perhaps putting it a different way understanding what an author intends versus what the audience expects – can still create a discrepancy that can make a game or any other product feel or seem “bad.”

This case study naturally requires us to spoil a particular section of the game. This is not necessarily going to spoil any massive plot twists. And so in some sense this essay could be safely read, especially by somebody who isn’t that interested in playing the game (especially since NieR can be something of a rough game to play). But I think it fair to provide that spoiler warning before continuing.

Dream Sequences

In roughly the first third or half of NieR (depending on how you do the counting), there is a section where the player is taken to an area called the Forest of Myth. The Forest of Myth is plagued by an “illness” called the Deathdream. The Deathdream ensnares people, naturally, into a dream-like state which is spread by those people talking to others within the real world. Anyone who is talked to is then ensnared within their own dream. Although this dream can sometimes be shared or communal between other people.

During this section, the player character and one of his party members go to the Forest of Myth and talk to the village mayor. As you might guess, the two characters are ensnared into the Deathdream upon talking to the mayor.

Now, before we continue, there is an important question that needs to be asked. We are already playing a video game, which is a visual medium. So we are already seeing the world that the player character is experiencing with our own eyes. So how does one communicate a dream within that medium?

There are a few ways to accomplish this goal. For example, since dreams are often fantastical within our own minds, you could take the visual medium and use it to heighten the already strange nature of the game world.

NieR takes this idea in a different, although arguably understandable, direction. As the dream starts to take over the characters, the text box at the bottom starts to slowly crawl up the screen. A narration also begins to creep into the dialogue. Rather than the characters simply talking to one another, the dialogue adds in the classical signs of being written like a book. Eventually, this gives way to the characters’ dialogue no longer being voiced and the screen turning black, save for the text. The player navigates the rest of the sequence through the text and occasionally being given a fairly simple riddle to solve. The Deathdream has created what is effectively a text adventure.

The reason this choice is interesting is twofold. First, just like in real life, there is a clear distinction between waking life and the dream. If the segment was played just like the normal game, it wouldn’t feel properly dream-like. At which point it might be more visually appealing, but it would also be unimaginative. This is certainly not the only way to capture that distinction between real life and dream, but is definitely a way to capture it. 

Second, it captures an important aspect of dreams themselves: imagination. The visual element of dreams is something that is created by our brains, and still takes place behind the blackness of our closed eyes. Indeed, we may not remember the visuals of our dreams entirely after the fact, and all we can conjure up are vague recollections, perhaps re-imagining the dream as we think we remember it. The segment thus relies on the player’s imagination, just as a real dream would rely on their imagination.

Thus, as a stylistic and thematic choice, the segment both makes sense and creates an interesting contrast against the rest of the game. Whatever else we might say about this segment, it definitely isn’t thoughtless.

Design Versus Experience

As I mentioned at the beginning, this segment has been criticized as feeling either cheaply made or as though it is in attempt to cut corners. The argument is that if the developers had the funds or time to actually finish the game, they would have put something in there that resembled the normal game.

While it is strictly speaking possible that the developers could have chosen some other method to convey the sense of a dream within the game, this argument fails to fully consider the possibility that this might be a conscious choice by the developers. That just may be the problem that the developers were confronting was not one of time or money, but rather the bigger issue of what does a dream or should a dream look like within the context of a video game?

It would be easy enough to stop here. A video game has been criticized for doing something that seems lazy. It turns out that actually the video game is much deeper and more thought out than the critics claimed. And therefore the game is good and the criticism is completely invalid.

We could try to argue that this criticism is based more around an allergy to reading. The players lack such an attention span that they need flashy fights in order to keep their interest. Or that they are so uncomfortable with the transition from an action RPG into a text adventure that they are incapable of thinking about this segment. As anything other than being sold a bill of goods.

But making this argument would miss that. Even though the exploration of dreams is interesting or compelling in some way, the segment still feels just a little bit off. You’re spending something like 10 to 15 minutes just reading text – and this can be even more if you do the side quests. In a sense, the sequence can even feel at odds with the very concept of what a video game is.

Because the segment I have described before (and the side quests that go along with it) essentially remove the player and their interaction from the game. As mentioned above, the player’s only interaction with the dream is to press the button to continue the text and very occasionally answer a very simple riddle. Specifically, by choosing an option from a small list where the other possibilities are absurd. Or in one of the later cases where the player must navigate a small maze by choosing directions (which then needs to be redone if the player does not escape in time.)

There is some genuine argument that can be made that at this point the nature of a game requires at least some kind of visual representation. Even though these kinds of text adventures were a hallmark during the early days, video games as a medium have evolved to the point that they effectively demand visual representation. And in this respect, just reading text on a black screen does not suffice.

Alternatively, we could present the argument as one where the failing is that the dream sequence does not genuinely feel dream-like. Other games, for example, have presented dream sequences as something psychedelic or otherwise upending the normal progress of the game. For instance, messing with the player’s sense of direction, showing them environments or creatures which are completely impossible within the rules of the game’s own world, and other components of what we perceive to be dream-like. All of this could be done visually.

This all brings us back to the topic of intent and execution. We can certainly point to the intent behind the design of NieR’s dream sequence. But that intent does not erode the fact that the end product still feels off. It does not reflect what we perceive to be the basic rules of a video game, and the process of breaking those basic rules (that is having a visual representation of what is occurring) gives across the sense that this scene is ultimately cheap. After all, why have a fully animated sequence with all sorts of action when you can just write up a bunch of text?

The problem of execution ultimately relies on what players take away from the experience that is given to them. If players feel ripped off, attacked, disappointed, made fun of, or anything similar from a game, that feeling still comes from somewhere. And that somewhere is, at its core, the game itself.

And this is the tightrope that needs to be walked when it comes to game design. Mechanics, story beats, enemy or environmental design, all of these aspects still have to run up against how players experience those things. If the game does not ultimately invite or encourage players to think about these things on a deeper level, when the game is trying to communicate on that deeper level, then the players are likely to take a shallow reading from it all.

Not every shallow reading is the fault of a game designer. Some people are absolutely committed to engaging with media on a surface level at every turn. And conversely, some people will dig into and try and find deeper meaning within the shallowest media. You can never fully control for how people choose to engage with what they consume. But when there are significant discrepancies, like in the case of NieR, between what it seems the game is trying to do versus how players react to the sequence, that suggests that there might be a problem with how the sequence itself is designed.

For example, although NieR is attempting to explore the art of storytelling through the medium of video games, it does not portray itself as attempting to explore what a video game in and of itself is. So much of what NieR does is a series of very standardized game design tropes of both action and role-playing games that read as “normal” about 95% of the time. Why, in the face of this, should any player then take the dream sequence as anything other than a text adventure simply inserted into an otherwise normal game? Why should the player read into the sequence any further than beyond the surface level? 

This question hits especially hard when at a major event point, the game switches to a flashback. This time to tell the story of another main character, through white text on a black screen. But this flashback sequence does not involve the same juxtaposition between the normal game and the text. There is no subtle shift. It is more clearly an attempt to communicate backstory that might otherwise be too much to present as a cutscene – either because of its content or for budgetary reasons. These miniature novels effectively undermine the dream sequences elsewhere. On its own the dream sequence’s choice might have made sense and held meaning, but now put into context with other text sequences it loses that special meaning, because the player sees them as one and the same – just text.

And so understanding any piece of art as an expression requires asking how it is going to be seen by its audience. When a book is read, how will the words on the page impact its reader? That is, what does the author want the impact to be, and how have the components of the book been arranged to create that impact? The same is true for games as well. Merely having an intention is not enough. It is also necessary to think about what people will take away from what they actually see – both from a sequence in isolation, and within the larger context of the rest of the game.

Concluding Remarks

The distinction between intent and execution is so difficult because intent is something that always exists within our heads. If we make something, we know what it means. Everything makes sense. There are a bunch of invisible connections that we get to see that others don’t. Part of communication via art is making those connections visible to others.

And so when a game runs into this problem of people “not understanding,” that is often the fault of the designer. It is a problem of not making those connections visible in some way. Sometimes it might be a problem of not mentioning something relevant that would be the key to unlocking the meaning of a sequence. Sometimes it might be a problem of confusing the audience by throwing in too many details.

Whatever the cause of any particular problem, the root cause lies in a failure to understand one’s audience. To step back and look at how things may appear from an outsider’s perspective. When someone can’t see the world as I see it…how do things appear to them? And from there we can then rework how we communicate to make those connections visible to others.

And I find this particularly ironic for NieR, a game which is ultimately about perspective and trying to see the world through another’s eyes. Perhaps itself an unintentional lesson that communication is always going to be imperfect.