Undertale, Violence and Objectification
Toby Fox’s 2015 game Undertale quickly became my favourite game when I played it early in 2016, and it still holds a very special place in my heart. I’m not loyal to everything I loved in my teenage years, but even though I’ve grown more critical towards Undertale, I find it hard to let it go. The game has many flaws — its combat can quickly grow repetitious, it can rely too much on character quirks over meaningful character writing, and its perspective on video game violence can often become moralistic and confused. The latter point is raised especially often in discussions of Undertale online, and I’ll admit I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time arguing about it with people. This essay presents some of these arguments and defenses in a more formal way, while also conceding to Undertale’s clear and obvious limits. While I can’t separate my personal love for the game from my analysis, I want to take the opportunity to present a more critical reading of Undertale away from the (sometimes blind) love that comes from personal fandom or the non-nuanced critique of the ‘hater’. The main topic of the essay is unpacking how Undertale critiques violence, or more specifically, the relationship between violence and objectification. I usually try to write without spoilers, but as with Higurashi, it is impossible to write about Undertale without giving away its narrative trickery. This essay will spoil all routes.
Undertale is a game that appears to have a glaringly straightforward message. For all its qualities, it’s not a work that is especially renowned for its subtlety. So why has there been so much disagreement and misinterpretation over its nonviolent and pacifist position? A lot of the key discussion about Undertale is whether the game is commenting on pacifism in the real world or whether it is exclusively commenting on violence within video games. The problem is that neither of these readings is especially satisfying.
If Undertale is understood to be a game about how we should practice pacifism and nonviolence in the real world, then the clear issue is that it provides an unrealistic model for doing so. Of course, Undertale is a fantasy story. While situations of conflict CAN be de-escalated in real life, it’s very unlikely that “striking up a friendly conversation” will do much when someone is trying to kill you. To its credit, the game offers up some challenges to its simplistic mode of de-escalation as it goes, but it doesn’t offer any especially realistic situations. This is even suggested within the game itself in Asriel’s dialogue near the end:
“Oh, and Frisk… Be careful in the outside world, OK? Despite what everyone thinks, it’s not as nice as it is here. There are a lot of Floweys out there. And not everything can be resolved by just being nice. Don’t kill, and don’t be killed, alright?”
The “outside world” here has a clear double meaning — it literally refers to “the surface” that the monsters will escape to, but it’s also referring to the real world outside of the game. So even the game itself suggests that its model of pacifism is ultimately unrealistic.
However, if we interpret Undertale as a game SOLELY about video game violence, then the problem is that its metaphor becomes abstract and overly moralistic. Is the lesson of the game that we shouldn’t play video games? Are we bad people for killing monsters in RPGs? There are certainly elements of the game that point to this moralism, such as Sans’ explanations of how LV and EXP stand for “Level of Violence” and “Execution Points”. Personally, I think the game could have done without this scene, and that its presence is a key reason for the misinterpretation of the game. However, I don’t think this is what Toby Fox is trying to say. This isn’t to deny the game’s moralism entirely, but I don’t think a game that amounts to Jack Thompson talking points would have captured its audience’s hearts so strongly.
Undertale is read most satisfyingly as a video game about how the relationship between objectification and violence manifests in the video game medium. For Toby Fox, there IS a clear relationship between video games and violence, but not on the terms of the more popular media debate. The question of whether or not video games cause violence is a fairly useless one, and it has generally been used as a means of scapegoating and ignoring the more significant social and political factors that lead to acts of violence. We don’t typically ask whether or not war movies cause wars. However, the fact that they don’t doesn’t necessarily mean that war movies have no part in the military-industrial complex. War movies typically promote the ideological agendas of their home country, and in some cases, they can operate as a recruitment tool (most successfully in the case of Top Gun). They don’t cause wars, but they do help to maintain a greater structural apparatus and reinforce its values to a wider audience.
In the case of video games, their status as an ideological state apparatus is less direct than that of war films (barring the exceptions of war games such as Call of Duty), but we can see a similar link to violence. If we understand that violence on both an individual and state level is encouraged through objectification, then this is absolutely reinforced through video games. What I mean by ‘objectification’ is the sense that killing another living being is something that has no moral weight because the individual being killed is tantamount to an object. Objectification is not the only force guiding violence in the real world, but it becomes much easier to enable violence when the death of a living being is given no weight, and when other beings (human or otherwise) are only seen as ‘enemies’ or resources who have no interior life. Many video games reinforce this worldview, but they’re far from the only guilty party in this regard. We also see this in action films, horror films, and perhaps most effectively, in the use of real-life footage of violence in news media and social media. Compared to the latter, video game violence isn’t anywhere near as much of a dehumanising force.
However, it is worth thinking about how much of the medium relies upon violence as a mechanic, including games that are ostensibly not ‘violent’ at all. Even a game as innocuous as Super Mario Galaxy rewards you for killing, even when it isn’t necessary to progress. I have no interest in moralising against all forms of violence, especially since this kind of moralising lacks distinctions between differing forms of violence and their power relations. For instance, this moralising has often been used as a way of erasing colonial violence to condemn acts of anti-colonial resistance. However, I do have a moral repulsion to violence being treated as weightless in this way, and it becomes a problem when it is so pervasive in media.
Even for violence that is defensible, turning it into something that is simply fun and exciting strikes me as a very anti-intellectual approach to the ethics of resistance. We might think about Quentin Tarantino’s output from Inglorious Basterds onward, which presents reversals of historical tragedies such as slavery and the Holocaust. In Tarantino’s world, the victimised rise up and gleefully enact violence on their oppressors, up to and including torture. As Will Sloan’s recent article points out, Tarantino’s point of view is not just that violence can be defensible, but that it is good, and that when your enemy is monstrous enough, there is no such thing as being too cruel or too indulgent. In an interview, he mentions a scene in Red Dawn where the characters are debating whether or not to shoot a Soviet soldier, and one of them simply shoots the soldier out of nowhere. Tarantino says “That’s exactly what I would do.” For him, thinking is a waste of time when it comes to ‘the enemy’. This point of view might seem agreeable when applied to Nazis and slave owners, but it’s not hard to draw a line from Tarantino’s view of self-defense as being akin to the binary morality of an action movie to his open support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Israel presents itself as the ‘oppressed’ to Palestinian ‘oppressors’, and as such, the state’s violence comes with the justification of a supposed ‘self-defense’. One can imagine that Tarantino’s anti-intellectual view of violence allows him to buy into this line without reservation, even though the sheer scale of horrific murder and starvation is transparently indefensible. While Tarantino is unlikely to go out and kill someone, his case shows how a view of violence developed entirely out of the simplistic logic of action movies can allow one to support atrocities. The problem is not the content of individual media texts, but that an anti-intellectual view of violence being so pervasive in media deprives many people of the opportunity to think about it critically. Living in this kind of media ecosystem is not the only source behind violence, but it contributes to the force of objectification that enables violence.
Undertale’s critique of media violence is closer to this perspective — its objection is in form, not in content. This is clear from Fox’s interviews:
“The inspiration for the talking system came from Shin Megami Tensei. I feel that it’s important to make every monster feel like an individual. If you think about it basically all monsters in RPGs like Final Fantasy are the same, save for the graphics. They attack you, you heal, you attack them, they die. There’s no meaning to that.”
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It appears that for Fox, there isn’t much difference between a more openly graphic game like DOOM and a far less graphic game like the Final Fantasy series. His primary objection is that most RPGs require us to kill what are, within the text of the game, living beings, but to not think of it that way. Undertale’s goal is to give weight to this violence by placing an extreme emphasis on subjectivity, both in terms of the game’s content and form. Fox attempts to give every monster in the game some sense of personality and interior life outside of your encounter with them. He puts a lot of weight on this subjectivity, and how much you respond to the game will depend on whether or not you find the humour of the characters charming or irritating.
In terms of the game’s form, what’s most interesting is its construction of the player as a subject. Many video games construct a specific subjectivity for us to inhabit. Much of the moral panic around games like Grand Theft Auto is that they ‘train’ us to take on the subjectivity of a criminal. The assumption that video games take ‘pure’ subjectivities and taint them into corruption is obviously nonsense. For Fox, it seems his issue is that many video games construct a deeply shallow, automaton-like subjectivity, given that these games offer us no other option than to proceed with their demands. In this sense, these games arguably ‘objectify’ the player in addition to the NPCs. In contrast, Undertale affirms an ideal human subject. Because you are given the power not to kill, the game assumes that every decision you make is an informed and deliberate one. Essentially, Undertale presents a humanist worldview that affirms the powers of subjectivity and agency. Its critique of violence is held on the grounds that every being has a unique subjectivity, and that human beings have the agency not to kill. This is a worldview we can poke holes in (especially since the game implicitly suggests that the monsters’ subjectivities and the player’s agency are ultimately illusions), but a post-structuralist critique of the game isn’t my goal here.
To go back to the question of whether or not you’re a bad person for playing Final Fantasy, the answer is obviously no. The monsters in Final Fantasy are not alive, and neither are the monsters of Undertale. You are not a bad person for playing the genocide route in Undertale either. The characters in the game think you are a bad person, but if Toby Fox thought that anyone who plays the genocide route has committed an act of evil, then he wouldn’t have designed it. It’s all just a thought experiment: what if a video game world was actually a real world for the NPCs, and how would the average video game player be perceived in such a world? Most players understand this thought experiment, but many misinterpret its purpose. We are not meant to leave Undertale with the idea of “I should never play a Final Fantasy game again because the monsters might actually be alive, and that would be like committing genocide!” Rather, it is an exercise in changing how we perceive the apparent weightlessness of violence in general, and how our attitudes to violence might be changed or, at the very least, unsettled by the recognition of another’s subjectivity. In the case of the genocide route, it is a way of making us directly aware of the objectification that enables us to kill without concern. It is not a game that uses the ethics of violence to critique JRPGs, but instead a game that utilises a critique of violence in JRPGs to challenge our views of violence in the real world.
With this reading of Undertale in mind, we can consider whether it actually succeeds at its goal. I think it does certain things very well, but there are very obvious limitations to its thought experiment, and these limitations mainly stem from the fact that in spite of all its subversions, Undertale is actually quite conventional. The battle system allows you not to fight, but the alternative to fighting is still based around a fairly standard formula. Instead of finding out the monster’s weakness, we find out their interests. Instead of figuring out the perfect attack, we figure out the appropriate ACT. Instead of a landing blow, we land a ‘spare’. The encounters are so brief that most of the monsters are defined by a one-note personality trait. Can we really say that a monster like Tsunderplane has a rich subjectivity outside of the combat encounter? Some of these encounters are charming and funny, but they do suffer from a disjunction between form and content, in that the form limits Fox’s ambitions. And while asking for realism from Undertale might be acting like the DOOM reviewer who asked “Why can’t we just talk to the monsters?”, I do think the vision of empathy here is quite limiting. The effort of understanding another person is arduous and frustrating, since people aren’t puzzles that can be quickly figured out. The system of figuring out the one-note personality quirk and moving onto the next removes the violence, but it doesn’t necessarily remove the objectification.
We can contrast this with one of Fox’s key influences, moon: Remix RPG Adventure, a PS1 JRPG with a similar critique of video game violence. In this game, the player-character is sucked into a JRPG, where they’ve been playing as a ‘Hero’ who goes about killing and destroying everything in his path. The player becomes a separate entity from this ‘Hero’ and must go around the village making amends and resolving the Hero’s destruction. As with Undertale, the critique of mainstream video games is that they place us into a subjectivity that reduces everything we see to points and resources, and both games try to amend this by forcing us to engage with NPCs as if they were real people. moon’s forgoing of traditional JRPG gameplay presents a more radical approach. moon mainly involves getting to understand the daily schedules of the villagers, the way they think, their desires, etc. This design requires a slow engagement with the world of the game, lots of exploration, and the occasional spontaneous discovery. While empathy is still approached as a ‘puzzle’, moon’s NPCs are harder to figure out, and approaching their subjectivities often requires a frustrating effort. I haven’t finished moon for this reason. Unfortunately, I have to admit that while moon is the more radical and interesting game, Undertale is ultimately the one I’d rather play. It would be hard to imagine Undertale achieving the mainstream success that it did if it took an equally radical design approach, but part of me wonders if it would have been a more artistically successful work if it did.
The game’s strengths are far more evident with the main cast and the boss battles. I still find both of these aspects just as charming, exciting and fun as I did in 2016. In particular, I enjoy how the boss battles present a greater variety of ethical dilemmas alongside their changes in gameplay. For example, I think the Mettaton boss battle and the ending you get if you kill him are where the game’s approach to the ethics of self-defense is at its most intriguing. The Mettaton boss is almost the polar opposite of the ethical test you get from the Papyrus boss battle (particularly in genocide, but also on the neutral route as well). If killing Papyrus is the most unjustifiable action in the entire game, killing Mettaton is probably the most justifiable action you can take on the Neutral Route. Undyne and Asgore openly aim to kill you, but they at least have the motivation of freeing the monsters. Mettaton only fights you for no reason other than his own gain and is, in general, the least sympathetic character of the main cast. In particular, the neutral ending you get if you kill everyone except Mettaton is one of the game’s most dystopian, since he becomes the underground’s dictator.
However, killing Mettaton leads you into one of the game’s saddest endings. It is heavily implied that Alphys kills herself from grief, which sets Undyne into a spiral of depression, to the point that she even lacks the motivation to take revenge on you. The neutral endings are often accused of being a ‘guilt trip’, but if they are, this is the most effective one because it’s completely consistent with the knowledge of the characters that the game gives you. We know that Alphys is suicidal, that Mettaton is her only friend (or at least her only friend without the anxiety of romantic baggage), that she has sacrificed a lot to give Mettaton a body, that he can’t be rebuilt or replaced, etc. We know that Undyne loves Alphys but hasn’t reciprocated that love yet, and that without her in her life, she would struggle to have any drive or motivation after losing her job in the Royal Guard and her house as she does in the pacifist ending. Even a stupid asshole like Mettaton has people who love him, and the impact of loss on those people affects their loved ones as well. Does this mean that killing Mettaton makes you a bad person? The game doesn’t tell you this as it might in the genocide routes or the harsher netural routes. But it does give you the realistic consequences of killing him, and demonstrates that even seemingly justified forms of violence create a ripple effect beyond our control. It’s a stronger example of how the game gives violence a sense of weight than the random encounters, because there is a sense of development and interiority given to the game’s main cast that would be near impossible to give to every NPC.
On the subject of self-defense, there’s been a lot of debate on the question of whether or not your actions as a player on the neutral route are self-defense, and are therefore justified. This is because, as per RPG standard, the monsters attack you first via random encounters. However, this isn’t actually ignored in the game itself. There are multiple lore reasons given that explain that most of the monsters are not aiming to attack you, just that their means of communication are unknowingly harmful to humans. This information is only available through books in the Snowdin library, which most players won’t access or see, so it’s not unfair to dismiss this as a handwave. However, even in the encounters, most monsters will become spareable when on low health, at which point killing them is no longer self-defense. And if you’re playing the neutral route, this question will be answered directly in Sans’ judgment. Sans argues that you do have the right to self-defense, but he suggests that if you have some sort of “special power” (referring to the ability to restart time, which applies to both Frisk in-universe and the player), you should use it to do the right thing. Of course, the problem here, as with Undertale’s pacifism in general, is that it is not especially applicable to the ethics of self-defense in the real world, since none of us have the power to rewind time and make things right. However, if we apply the idea of ‘power’ more broadly, then the terms of the game’s pacifism become a little clearer.
Essentially, the game is not suggesting a universalist pacifism, and the fact that the monsters are not held to the same moral standards as humans is actually deliberate, rather than hypocrisy on Toby Fox’s part. The humans are the monsters’ oppressors, and even a human child proves to be more powerful than any monster. So Undertale’s terms of pacifism would not be applicable to an oppressed group fighting back against their oppressor. Instead, the game’s stance is that if you have the power to find a non-violent way, then you should, even if it is the more difficult one. Whether or not you agree with this point of view, I do think it is more nuanced than many misreadings of the game suggest.
While the game is constructed upon an illusion that its characters have a sense of subjectivity and ‘really’ exist in the game-world, it’s also very much aware that we do not actually believe in this illusion, and it constantly breaks it for us. The genocide route is the strongest part of the game’s push-pull dynamic in this regard. The pathos of the genocide route comes from the idea that we are literally destroying this world and the lives within it. But in order to play it at all, we need a sense of remove. We need to detach ourselves from the characters’ assumed subjectivity, and remind ourselves that they are still a set of 0s and 1s. But if you leave the genocide route incomplete, then you have been at least partly convinced by the illusion. For instance, the Papyrus boss battle in the Genocide Route is designed around making as ‘difficult’ a battle as possible without actually having a ‘battle’ at all. It presents us with an ethical test by reversing our position as a player into the one who is being ‘spared’. If you’re too moved by Papyrus sparing you to continue playing, you may not believe he is literally sparing you, but you’re convinced enough at the illusion of his subjectivity to ‘play along’ in some way. But if we kill him, we’ve shattered this illusion, and the ethos of the pacifist route with it. The pacifist route gives us a world where everyone, no matter their background, morality or motivation, can be redeemed. But what about people who refuse to be redeemed, who would only laugh at your open arms? By killing Papyrus, we have become this person. We have upset the terms of the game and found its limits.
Despite the harshness and coldness of the genocide route, it also features the game’s most empathetic scene, and one that depends on the player’s interaction. This scene is Flowey’s monologue in the “New Home” section, where he recounts his backstory. Flowey discusses waking up as a flower and being unable to feel having arms and legs. When Asgore discovers him, hugs him and comforts him, Flowey is disturbed that he feels no emotion whatsoever. Flowey goes on trying to rediscover his sense of compassion and love, but only feels a terrible void of boredom. Upon trying to kill himself, he finds himself resurrected in the garden, and soon finds out that when he brings himself to death, the timeline resets. Flowey starts off by solving everyone’s problems and finding out the perfect solutions. Once again, he becomes bored, especially after recognising that with each reset, everybody will repeat the same actions and speech. This leads him to start killing everyone in the Underground, initially out of curiosity to see what will happen, and later out of the thrill of sadism. Even this thrill eventually fades away and becomes boring after a while, and Flowey remains trapped in the small and limited world of the game.
Of course, Flowey’s plight parallels that of the player, who has likely cleared the Pacifist Route and is now playing out of a desire to see everything. But once again, I don’t think the point here is necessarily that the player is a monstrous sociopath simply for playing the genocide route. What is interesting about the scene is that it is arguably one of the most empathetic portrayals of a psychopath/sociopath in fiction. Note that I use these terms somewhat critically, since they are criminology terms rather than actual psychiatric terms. The psycho/sociopath is often portrayed as a being of innate evil who is simply ‘born that way’. Because their subjectivity is supposedly non-human, most writers take no interest in anything other than their external actions. Part of why this archetype is so popular is because it provides an excuse for lazy writing, since any action can be immediately justified with the reasoning of “they’re inherently evil!” What makes Flowey’s portrayal stand out is the greater interest in his subjectivity and the tragedy of his condition. He can no longer recognise other beings as subjects, even if he wanted to. He lives a life where no action could possibly have any weight or meaning. It’s not that this justifies his sadism, but the monologue expresses the internal horror of this state of being.
This monologue is probably Undertale’s strongest piece of writing, but what makes it especially interesting is how it’s contextualised with the player’s interaction. Again, Flowey’s monologue parallels the player’s experience, but I would argue that this is a means of empathy. Under the assumption that the player has done the Pacifist Route first, they have played along with the game’s conditions that every monster has its own subjectivity. Playing the genocide route requires you to reject these conditions and see through the illusion, even when the game tries to maintain it. We can only play if we detach ourselves from it. While we can stop playing the game and (hopefully) continue to be compassionate people in the real world, Flowey’s subjectivity is permanently trapped in this zone. If we completely detached ourselves from our ability to feel compassion or recognition for the other, and if we could only see others as ‘objects’, how easy would it be to commit violence? If we’ve come this far into the genocide route, we know the answer. This scene is still very moralistic in that it assumes a parallel between the subjectivity that we play the route with, and the subjectivity of a murderer who can only see other beings as objects. But the point of the parallel isn’t to make a direct equivalence, or to say that video games turn us into murderers. Instead, the point is to force us to empathise with this kind of subjectivity. This is Undertale’s most empathetic scene because empathy is not the recognition that other people are ‘like us’, but the recognition of subjectivities that exist outside of what is normatively accepted.
Just as playing DOOM and Grand Theft Auto will not immediately turn us into crazed killers, playing Undertale will not immediately turn us into compassionate and kind people. Viewing all the fandom wars firsthand is enough to convince oneself of that. The game itself concedes that it can’t do this. Like pacifism in real life, it is often doomed to failure. But even a failed act of pacifism is at least trying to show us that another way is possible, that violence is not an innate option or our only option, and for that, I find a lot to admire in it.
