Abstract: The lecture will present the aesthetics of Yoko Taro’s Nier : Automata (Square Enix, 2017), the culmination of the legendary DrakeNier series (encompassing the three Drakengard titles plus Nier : Replicant, Nier : Automata, and the mobile »gacha« game Nier : Reincarnation).If contemporary »quality art video-games«—by analogy to »quality art television«—are to be understood as artworks, than one most show how they inherited not only the modern but also the classical art-forms in developing their own aesthetical language in the function of interactivity, thus allowing us to baptize them as a veritable Ottava Arte. Thus, by taking as our starting-point the understanding of video-games as Gesamtkunstwerk (»total work of art«), encompassing all the previous classic and modern art-forms (architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, literature, film), we will focus on these aesthetical aspects of Nier : Automata, broken down into the technical elements of its: world-building (»architecture«), character-design (»sculpture«), level-design (»painting«), soundtrack (»music«), gameplay (»dance«), story-telling (»literature«) and, last but not least, the role of cut-scenes (»film«). The main underlining idea of this analytical endeavor is that Nier : Automata managed to attain not only a devoted cult status among its followers but also to make a name for itself in the pantheon of contemporary quality art video-games precisely because it managed to develop at its fullest all of the mentioned elements in order to provide an immersive interactive experience like no other, thus embodying the aesthetical ideal of a video-game Gesamtkunstwerk.
