Persona 3: Reload vs. Introverts
The dissonance between playing a 1P game and its reliance on socializing
Quick intro to Persona
(feel free to skip this section if you’re familiar with this franchise!)
Before I get into the actual point of this post, let me give all of you good folks a crash course in the mechanics of Persona games (or at least the modern, core entries in the franchise starting with Persona 3).
You, the self-named Protagonist, and your comrades fight enemies (“shadows”) by summoning beings (“personas”) that are tied to each of the game’s characters’ different personalities (represented in the game by tarot cards’ major arcana). The Protagonist in each game has the power of the “wild card”, which means, while they have a starting persona that represents their core arcana—the Fool—, they can gain and use personas of other arcana.
One major mechanic of the game is the ability to fuse personas. By combining two or more personas, a new, more powerful persona is born. When a new persona is born, it will gain additional power based on how advanced your bonds (“social links”) are with characters in the game that represent the other arcana (“confidants”). For example, if your combination of personas results in a new persona that is of the Lovers arcana and your social link with the confidant of the Lovers arcana is level 10, the persona will instantly gain a number of levels and abilities.
In order to advance your social links, you must spend time with your confidants. You have two chances to do this every day in the game, afternoons and evenings. When you hang out with them, the player is at times prompted with a series of remarks during their hang. If your chosen responses land well, your bonds will strengthen and gain levels.
Does that make sense? No? That’s okay! I think you’ll understand the rest of the post.
Socially spent
According to the many unofficial Myers-Briggs tests I’ve taken over the years, my personality type is INFJ (introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging). The “introvert” part may come off as a bit of surprise to some readers because I can give off the air of being extroverted in social situations, making me a “social introvert”.
The other weekend was pretty exhausting for me. After a quiet Friday evening, I wound up spending a lot of time with other people. I:
Met with a comrade to rehearse an upcoming public presentation on our trips to Cuba;
Went to another comrade’s birthday party at which I knew no one other than her and my wife;
Met with some other comrades to discuss flyering for a different upcoming public event; and…
Went to a concert at which I knew a number of attendees.
All of these were fun, but as an introvert, they left me spent.
Recently, I’ve spent my recharge time playing the newly released Persona 3: Reload in the evenings. While walking my dog in the middle of that whirlwind weekend, it suddenly occurred to me that the choice to do that created a sharp dissonance:
In an attempt to recharge from having too many social obligations, I play a game that requires me to socialize with as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time possible.
Strong, silent types
I don’t really know how the game’s protagonists do it. It’s not as if they come across as being particularly extroverted.
One of the defining features of the modern Persona protagonists is that they rarely have any in-game dialogue. During social encounters, they mostly observe and listen, and when the player gets a chance to put words in their mouth, they’re typically one-to-three-word responses (and sometimes an awkward ellipses).
When they’re not quietly spending time with friends, you might find them watching a movie by themselves, playing on the computer, or, I don’t know… eating giant mounds of burgers solo.
I love how all of these solitary actions beef up their social stats (charm, courage, academics in P3R) only to then allow them to create more social links that demand even more of their time.
If I eat the seafood full course by myself every night for 3 months straight, surely Kirijo-senpai will notice my intense levels of Omega-3s and agree to let me walk her home.If I devour Special Hagakure Bowls until my blood turns into tonkatsu broth, surely Takeba-chan will be drawn to my skin's newfound fatty chasu-esque sheen.Just trying to mind my own biz!
In my own life, I try—to varying success—not be a slave to my phone. Perhaps my more recent friends may just think I’m an untimely, unreliable replier, but my older friends know that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of text messaging. So as cell phone culture has evolved and capitalism has taken advantage of our extended screen time, I have found myself going crazy with being constantly notified, whether that be by text or by app push notification, grasping for periods of total concentration.
After a few months pass in Persona 3: Reload, every afternoon and evening, our protagonist finds himself opening his phone only to find a mess of notifications, from friends asking to hang out to part-time job reminders to promotional messages from the game’s restaurants. Blood pressure rising.
If you think too much about it, you realize just how much of a social hellscape you’re navigating if you’re introverted. While it’s good that the push notifications are easy to ignore–perhaps easier than in real life because they’re not tailored to your exact preferences as determined by data your devices steal from you—ignoring your friends’ pleas to hang out still isn’t.
It doesn’t feel good to choose, consistently, to hang with those my age rather than with the elderly couple who have taken a liking to me or the little girl who needs a friend to play with in the afternoons because she doesn’t want to go home to the bickering of her soon-to-be-divorced parents.
It doesn’t feel good to first hang with my track club bro that’s having possibly career-ending knee issues only to then pivot to ignoring his texts and spending much less tumultuous afternoons with the cute track club team manager.
That said, it also doesn’t feel good to pretend to want to spend time and empathize with the doofus who’s trying to date his teacher simply out of an obligation you have to maximize the development of your powers so that you may stand toe-to-toe with the game’s world-ending big bad.
Lotus Juice may claim to speak for you as he raps about chillin in his bed and mindin’ his own biz every evening, but unless I want a premature death that will then cause mass destruction, I CAN’T, LOTUS, OKAY!?
Thank god in this iteration of Persona 3 the developers removed the mechanic from the original game where not hanging out with someone for a while pisses them off and makes it extremely difficult to advance your social link. I don’t think I could handle the disappointment of both my digital confidants and whatever goodwill I’m spoiling with my real-life ones when it takes me a week to get back to them.
Peace,
Greg