This text includes major spoilers for the Zero Escape video game series, which is also a fitting opportunity to discuss “spoilers” as a phenomenon of a culture subjected to multiple crises. In regard to popular entertainment, spoilers are a tool to manage how we discuss and possibly experience narratives: we assume that not knowing what will happen in a book, film, or video game is essential for a meaningful first viewing or reading, and that spreading unsolicited information is thus a careless or even malicious act.¹ At first glance, this “fear of knowing” seems at odds with the modern assumption that knowledge in itself is inherently desirable, and willful ignorance effectively unethical. Of course, there are situations in which not knowing the outcome of something might feel preferable: a distressing medical diagnosis; one or another kind of rejection letter. Nevertheless, a distinct logic seems to apply to fictional narratives. If we assume that knowing the identity of a culprit in a murder case would be “good” in real life, why would we want to delay the disclosure of such information in fiction? There are obvious answers to this question. While watching or reading fiction, we are emotionally involved in an ongoing process; we witness a struggle to uncover the truth, to arrive at closure; we marvel at the protagonists’ ability to deal with unforeseen obstacles, or cringe at their ignorance while we are (or wrongly think we are) one step ahead. This is even more true in regard to video games, in which the story progresses according to the player’s decisions and input. As Tobias Unterhuber writes, “[s]poiling a game renders the work a player has invested meaningless and the reward shallow, as it was not properly earned.”²

This would clearly be the case regarding the Zero Escape games, which incorporate mysteries and riddles both into their stories and game mechanisms. At the beginning of the first entry—999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (2009)—several people awaken at a strange place, apparently kidnapped and pressured to participate in a deadly “Nonary Game” in order to escape captivity.³ The protagonist—college student Junpei—and the player sitting in front of the screen need to solve various puzzles to progress through the game on two different layers: The killing game, as experienced by Junpei and his companions, and the entertainment product available for gaming consoles and home computers, which uses an audiovisual interface to represent the world Junpei encounters.

Like many other contemporary games, 999 could be described as an elaborate mediation of a children’s make-believe game. While the latter relies on pretending that our immediate surroundings are significantly more exciting or even perilous than they are in reality (the floor is lava!), the video game provides more or less convincing representations of dangers, including, in the Zero Escape series, particularly gruesome fates for the protagonists if they and/or the players fail to solve the game’s riddles. Interestingly, a game of pretend is a central “case study” in Kendall Walton’s 1990 book Mimesis as Make-Believe, in which the philosopher discusses issues of representation and imagination. Here, it is stumps in a forest being bears instead of the floor being lava. For Walton, the stumps serve as “props” which can then “prompt” the players’ imagination, in this case, imagining and adequately reacting to a dangerous animal as soon as you see a stump in the forest.⁴ They, as he writes, “generate fictional truths.”⁵ While it would be entirely possible to play such a game alone, props are also social. Games of pretend rely on the players’ agreement that the floor is lava or that every stump is a bear, but props can also be consciously crafted and designed—a category in which Walton includes a wide range of objects, from dolls to paintings.⁶

If, as Walton suggests, every fiction is akin to a game and representations are “things possessing the social function of serving as props in games of make-believe,” games about games could serve as a meta-commentary on representation itself.⁷ 999 would then be a complex prop to play a game of playing a game, with the twice-removed fictional game having much higher stakes than the digital entertainment product: we are playing a game of playing a game in which the floor actually is lava. I am not discussing Walton’s theory because I find it particularly compelling, but because it belongs to a larger discourse on paradoxes surrounding the role and function of fiction—which in turn also affect the far more specific discourses of both video gaming and spoilers. One classical philosophical dilemma concerns the so-called “paradox of tragedy,” and the possible reasons for people subjecting themselves to, or even enjoying narratives which arouse—to use David Hume’s words—“passions […] that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy.”⁸ In general, the associated set of paradoxes refers to situations in which people react to fiction in a way that both contradicts and mirrors their reactions to a similar situation in real life. Why do we pity the characters from a tragedy, even though we know they are not real; why do we feel fear while watching a horror movie, comfortable and safe on a couch or cinema seat? Why will children react accordingly to pretend bears and lava pits? Why do I feel positively nauseated just from listening to a piece from the Zero Escape soundtrack, and why don’t I simply avoid doing so, then? Similar questions can be asked about spoilers; this can be subsumed under the “paradox of suspense,” which also includes the reverse phenomenon of people experiencing repeat viewings of mystery movies or horror as suspenseful, despite being well aware of the outcome.⁹ 

In video game discourse, a crucial paradox concerns losing, as discussed by Jesper Juul in the accordingly titled The Art of Failure (2013).¹⁰ Drawing from his experience of playing various mainstream or indie video games, Juul describes how potential failure will effectively strengthen the incentive to continue playing, and to experience it as something worthwhile. Several of his arguments seem particularly relevant in our context. First of all, Juul’s discussion of the emotional repercussions of playing and failing follows a decisively modern concept of economic value, even though he does not explicitly address this. He writes: “To play a game is to make an emotional gamble: we invest time and self-esteem in the hope that it will pay off. Players are not willing to run the same amount of risk – some even prefer not to run a risk at all, not to play.”¹¹ We can surely acknowledge that games are traditionally “risky”; a medieval peasant playing a game of dice would equally “invest time and self-esteem in the hope that it will pay off” as someone failing to beat some hideous monster in the famously difficult Dark Souls video game series over and over again. Yet, in (post)industrial capitalist society, games as entertainment are what one does in their “free time” and thus belong squarely within the domain of the cultural industry. On the one hand, entertainment serves as a counterpart of labor, while still feeding into the flows of goods and commerce—far more than earlier forms of play, video games are consumer products, inseparable from an extractivist, politically, and socially ruthless tech industry. On the other hand, play itself is not the exact opposite of work under capitalism; games can be competitive, stressful, and demanding. Never finishing Proust’s In Search of Lost Time might leave a dent in one’s self-esteem, but in comparison to games, success and failure are conceptually irrelevant for other kinds of entertainment.

For everyone aware of their own involvement in capitalist society (the average age of gamers is currently somewhere in the thirties), this will thus inevitably influence what investing one’s “time and self-esteem” might mean. How does such an “investment” compare to the investment of time in a necessary, but possibly unfulfilling job; how does “risk” in a game compare to the immense environmental and economic risks the same companies that provide much of gaming’s infrastructure take when they gamble on new, disruptive technologies? This becomes even more evident regarding game spoilers, which, to quote Unterhuber again, render “the work a player has invested meaningless.”¹²

The specific meaning of such terms under the conditions of late capitalism not only modifies the experience of gaming, but also the meaning of a game itself, which now can serve as an allegory for contemporary society on account of being a game, being a risk.

In Zero Escape, failure is ubiquitous on a mechanical and narrative level. It is possible and adequately frustrating to fail solving the game’s puzzles—to not know the solution, which can then be rectified by looking up a “walkthrough,” maybe spoiling the joy of eventually finding the correct solution on one’s own. Failing is also what Junpei and the protagonists of the two sequels do again and again to successfully complete, i.e. survive the killing game. Zero Escape’s gimmick is a non-linear narrative, whose branches can be displayed and accessed via a flowchart in the game’s interface. Of those branches, only one will lead to a (fairly) happy ending, but many of the others have to be pursued to gather clues on the “Nonary Game” itself—Junpei and the player thus transcend linear time to successively unlock new plot branches until the “true” one finally presents itself. In comparison to the game’s puzzle sequences, progressing through the branched narrative depends less on the player’s puzzle-solving skills and more on their and Junpei’s dedication to push through another possibly “wrong” path, witnessing ever new atrocities perpetrated against and by the players of the “Nonary Game” during their futile efforts to escape.¹³ This further dramatises the function of trial and error in video games, in which a shocking “Game-Over”-sequence might serve to briefly inform the players that this (i.e., Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft or the titular hero of The Prince of Persia getting mangled by a deadly trap) should not have happened. In Zero Escape, the “wrong” thing is no less part of the narrative than the “right” one, and knowledge is much rather suffered than gained. Such a conflation of trauma and knowledge subverts more naïve understandings of “trial and error,” mirroring post-enlightenment disillusionment. Catastrophic climate change will not allow for trial and error; witnessing the rise of fascism once again will not lead to a better outcome.

In his attempt to solve the paradox of failure, Juul eventually circles back to the classical paradox of tragedy. Initially, both phenomena seem at odds with one another. Even if we can’t claim a meaningful win without the risk of losing, we still aim to win—if I’m bad at solving riddles, Junpei won’t be going anywhere. Obviously, continuous success contradicts a game’s protagonist’s tragic failure, bar singular narrative twists that need to remain exceptions within an otherwise conventional gaming experience (the one dramatic struggle that can’t be won, the protagonist’s death in the finale, and so on). Yet, Juul sees a possibility of reintroducing tragedy into gaming through complicity, through succeeding at the wrong things; his example is Brenda Romero’s board game Train (2009), in which players are tasked with organising train logistics—only to eventually find out they were optimising transports to Auschwitz.¹⁴ And, as he writes, the “experience of complicity is a completely new type of experience that is unique to games, more personal and stronger than simply witnessing a fictional character performing the same actions.”¹⁵

I agree, but would like to add that witnessing can be a powerful act, and an act of either complicity or defiance. Again, this is about unwanted knowledge: The horrific plot twist in Romero’s Train is a different kind of spoiler, one that spoils the fun we already had instead of the one we expect. Furthermore, this provokes questions about the (fun) kinds of success that can be achieved while ignoring possible ethical implications; the term “risk” is decisively less playful in a world in which microplastics pollute everything from the oceans to the human brain, and in which a rogue algorithm can temporarily crash international stock markets. To successfully solve a problem is not an ethical claim per se, and the length of a chain of successful solutions says nothing about its potential to end in disaster. The worst spoiler for humanity’s success story is, of course, an IPCC report.

Towards the end of 999, Junpei and the player realise that there was/is yet another game. In the fictional world of Zero Escape, this first game takes place in 2018, while the second one—the one Junpei participates in—happens nine years later. Much rather an experiment than play, the first “Nonary Game” is meant to test the telepathic powers of nine young sibling pairs, who were kidnapped by a dubious pharmaceutical company and tasked to solve puzzles under extreme stress. According to the company’s plan, the siblings would be separated and arranged into two groups of nine; both groups would then be placed in functionally identical spaces, one an ancient ocean liner at sea (incidentally, a sister ship of the Titanic) and the other a replica of its interior architecture built somewhere in the Nevada desert (incidentally, a preferred site for US nuclear tests until 1992, and possibly again in the near future). Thanks to a transmission of the siblings’ thoughts, one of the two groups is meant to support the other while solving the puzzles. However, things do not go as planned; most of the children can escape, apart from a girl, Akane, who is trapped in an incinerator and unable to solve the Sudoku puzzle needed to open the final door.

Nine years later, Akane is one of the people participating in the second “Nonary Game” alongside her childhood friend Junpei. As the latter eventually finds out, it was Akane herself who kidnapped him and the others as “players” for the second “Nonary Game.” Now, telepathic communication is meant to traverse not only space but also time: The entire game is a setup for trusty Junpei to solve the final puzzle and transmit it to past Akane. Once he does so, narrative causality collapses into a paradox centered around knowing/having known the correct answer. The answer makes the second game both possible and necessary; it is necessary for Akane to survive and possible because of her survival.

Together with more prominent entries like Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the Terminator franchise or various Star Trek films and episodes, 999 belongs to a sub-genre of time travel fiction in which action must be taken because it is already too late (in the two sequels, Junpei and Akane are involved in similar games with even higher, apocalyptic stakes). Such fiction is usually science fiction staged with the respective techy shenanigans, but it might be more fruitful to treat it as speculative fiction, with a clear understanding of the connections between speculation and risk. Whatever outcome such narratives propose (the Enterprise crew does save the whales in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, at least), their implications as fiction are rather pessimistic: We know that things are turning out terribly, and we also know that we won’t stop them, that salvation is a fantasy. Dystopian speculative fiction can still serve as a warning, but this is where games get caught up in another paradox, the “paradox of success”: On the one hand, games excel at creating tension out of nothing (just a floor, just some stumps in the forest), on the other, they are meant to be won. For this, they need clear-cut winning conditions and corresponding mechanisms, which makes them susceptible to naïve solutionism: if things get too dire, surely someone will invent a safe and affordable fusion reactor, right? And in the end, relying on the future to save the present is exactly the scenario of the “Nonary Games,” but—without spoiling too much—this might turn out to be a rather risky endeavor.

Footnotes

1. For a history of “spoilers” and various case studies, see Simon Spiegel (ed.), The Fear of Knowing. Spoilers in Film, TV, Literature and Gaming Culture, Rombach: Nomos, 2025. ↑

2. Tobias Unterhuber, “Spoil the Game, Shatter the World: Spoilers in Games and Play,” in The Fear of Knowing, p. 193. ↑

3. 999 and its sequels Virtue’s Last Reward (2012) and Zero Time Dilemma (2016) were written by Kotaro Uchikoshi and published by Spike Chunsoft. ↑

4. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 37. ↑

5. Ibid, p. 38. ↑

6. Ibid, p. 51. ↑

7. For a general discussion of Walton’s theory in regard to video games, see Chris Bateman, Imaginary Games, Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2011. ↑

8. David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” in Essays Moral, Political, Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987, p. 216. For an overview, see Aaron Smuts, “The Paradox of Painful Art,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 41, no. 3 (2007). ↑

9. See: Simon Spiegel, “On the Origin of Spoilers,” in The Fear of Knowing. ↑

10. Jasper Juul, The Art of Failure. An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. ↑

11. Ibid, p. 22. ↑

12. Unterhuber, “Spoil the Game,” p. 193. ↑

13. For a discussion of branching storylines in videogames under late capitalism that predates 999, see Hiroki Azuma, Otaku. Japan’s Database Animals, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009, esp. pp. 106–16. ↑

14. Juul, Art of Failure, pp. 108–14. ↑

15. Ibid, p. 113. ↑