Welcome to the latest installment of our nostalgic chronicle, Memory Pak, where we’ll take a deep dive into some of gaming’s most memorable moments – good and bad.
Ten years ago, Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward was released in the United States. In honor of the anniversary, Kate has some thoughts on the nature of kindness and cruelty to explore…
Of all the psychological experiments, I think my favorite is the prisoner’s dilemma. The principle is simple: two prisoners in separate rooms are asked either to cooperate with the law and surrender the other, or to remain silent. The twist is that their reward, or their punishment, depends not just on what they do, but on what other nobody does. If they both remain silent, they each serve one year; if they both try to expose the other, they each serve two years.
But if one remains silent and the other denounces him, then the prisoner snitch is rewarded with freedom, and the one who tried to protect the other gets three years in prison. It’s a fantastic example of how bad deeds pay off in a society based on good, but also that cynicism and mistrust end up hurting everyone. Obviously, the best outcome for society is for both people to independently choose to protect each other – but it’s easy to see how a year in prison can feel as a punishment when 0 years is on the table.
Writer and director Kotaro Uchikoshi has built his entire career around themes of selfishness, teamwork, human psychology and morality. His second game as director, Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, focuses particularly on the prisoner’s dilemma – both as a mechanical conceit and as a narrative theme. This is perhaps my favorite of the Zero Escape series for that exact reason.
Like its previous game, 999, there are nine characters, imprisoned in a convoluted escape game in which death is the losing condition. Between escape rooms, however, each of the nine characters is invited to participate in a twisted version of the prisoner’s dilemma, called the Ambidex game. Three pairs are created, each with two people voting together against only the third, as seen here:
The additional peculiarity is that the rewards and punishments are not years in prison, but rather bracelet points. Each character in the game has a watch-style bracelet, which counts their points, and everyone starts the game with 3 BP. Get to 9, and you can escape the facility, but if your BP is down to zero… tumors. Oh and only people with 9 BP can escape, and the others are locked away forever. A little worse than prison, isn’t it?
In the same vein as 999, VLR runs on multiple branches, so you’ll be able to see what’s going on for a bunch of different results. People are being murdered just so they can vote “Treason” with impunity; people lie so they can convince their opponents to choose “Ally”. The original prisoner game had none of that – prisoners aren’t supposed to meet between ballots, and they’re absolutely not supposed to do escape rooms with the guy who maybe just betrayed them in order to get a reward.
(The version of VLR, in which there are more than two prisoners, and past decisions can influence future decisions, is called an “n-person iterative dilemma”. That’s not particularly important, just sounds cool and smart.)
The escape room games, and the discussions that take place before and after each vote, are the point of the game. Of course, it’s easy to vote “Betray” against someone anonymous in another room, but having to to confront then, and avoid his wrath, is quite another thing.
Bracelet points only add to that – someone with 1 point left on their bracelet will be completely desperate, and while you can convince them to ally, they know betraying you will drive them further from the abyss. And apparently having 6 BP is something you want to avoid at all costs because anyone in front of you automatically betray you to prevent you from getting 9 BP and leaving them behind. It’s complicated, even before adding the social dynamic!
But you might be thinking, “hey, why doesn’t everyone choose Ally every time? That way they’d be knocked out in three rounds, right?” Yes! That’s right. But it’s in a vacuum, where every character is good, every character has no pre-existing relationships, and every character is trustworthy and confident. Obviously, this is not the case. People have hidden motivations, character traits that make them selfish or cowardly, and in the case of the protagonist, Sigma, he’s seen Ally and Betray people in other timelines.
So you end up with a dead end. No one trusts anyone else, even good people. Because, as the Japanese title says: “Good People Die”.
It’s not entirely true. The Japanese title has a double meaning: it can be translated as “good people die”, but also, “I want to be a good person”, reflecting the two sides of the Ally/Betray choice. The English title was an attempt to reproduce this duality, combining the two phrases “virtue is its own reward” and “gone to its last reward”, i.e. death. “The last reward of virtue” basically means that the only reward for virtue is death.
It seems VLR and its villain, Zero, are telling us that virtue, kindness, and hope are meaningless in a world that rewards evil. The prisoner’s dilemma follows the same maxim, on the face of it. Betrayal has the greatest reward. Nihilism and sociopathy will always win out over kindness and blind trust.
But what VLR and the Prisoner’s Dilemma ultimately tell us is that a world in which everyone does their best, no one wins. An eye for an eye blinds the whole world, as they say. By offering the chance to be evil, to betray another for your own gain, VLR and the Prisoner’s Dilemma end up placing more emphasis on the virtuous option of allyship.
You can feel the relief in-game when everyone chooses Ally – it seemed so unlikely, considering all the tension and fear, but every character chose the option to trust each other, even when faced with the threat of death or being trapped in this place.
When you dig deeper into VLR, you realize that’s not the only time kindness wins out, even in a cruel world – the very bracelets you all wear, which will kill you if you reach 0 BP , injects you with an anesthetic and a muscle relaxant, giving its victims a surprisingly mild death. Even the antagonists – Zero, Dio, and Brother – do cruel things for good reasons. And the game won’t let you go until you find a way for everyone to get what they need and stop any unnecessary cruelty that might occur along the way.
It’s easy to think the world is an evil place, and there are a lot of people out there who are just real bastards, it’s true. But in Virtue’s Last Reward, the ultimate message is not one of suffering, nihilism and sadism; it is a matter of hope. Humanity is painted in shades of gray. We simply have to believe that the inherent kindness present in everyone is what wins out in the end.
What message did VLR leave you? Do you agree with me that humanity is inherently good? Tell me your thoughts in the comments!
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