The Disrupted Ludic Self: Aesthetics of Character Switching in NieR: Automata

Ryan C. Wright's paper examines how forced changes between playable characters in NieR: Automata (2017) alter the player's relationship to the game's world. The game's central structural device is that after the first apparent ending, players unexpectedly resume as the androids 9S and A2 and are periodically made to control enemy machines, including the pacifist machine Pascal. Wright argues that existing scholarship on the game has discussed its character switches, its withheld endings, and its shifting control schemes, but has not synthesized theories of perspective, agency, and player-avatar relationships to explain the aesthetic effects of sudden character switching.

To address this gap, the paper adopts Daniel Vella's framework of ludic subjectivity, which replaces terms like "avatar" with the "playable figure" and treats the gameworld as an aesthetic form emerging through play. Wright distinguishes involuntary "figure shifts" from voluntary changes such as selecting characters from a menu, and analyzes three cases: the shift to a small machine tending its fallen brother, the shift to Pascal, and the rapid alternation between A2 and 9S in the penultimate battle. Drawing on Vella's concept of the objective relation of self and on autoscopy from cognitive science, Wright proposes the "disrupted ludic self," a moment of pause or surprise in which the player's newly assumed self comes into view. He identifies three meaning effects within this moment: foregrounding of the body and its affordances, foregrounding of role, and the eventual habituation to plural selves.

The analysis rests on a single game and is primarily theoretical rather than empirical, drawing on close readings and the cited scholarship rather than player surveys or data collection. Wright acknowledges that the disrupted ludic self is not presented as an experience every player will have, but as a positioning encouraged for the implied player. The paper therefore offers a heuristic for analyzing forced figure shifts, with the author noting that further research is needed to test its applicability to structurally different games that use similar mechanics.