Readers discuss what Persona gets right and wrong about high school
Making Time
In the latest entry of our Special Topics In Gameology series on video games and school, Samantha Nelson dug into the time-management aspects of Persona 3 and 4. Down in the comments, Duwease was a little torn on how the games handled spending the ample free time of high-school life:
I go back and forth as to whether the tight schedule to see all the Social Links is frustrating or brilliant.
On the one hand, if you accept it for what it is—that you make choices in life on how to spend your time, and you’ll never see or do it all—that’s an important idea. It does offer an experience that seems to suggest that a social life is not something that can be min/maxed. You have to let go and accept that the chips will fall as they may, and you will miss out on some things. Of course, you can go full optimization and get everything if you plan and scheme and squeeze everything you can into every day, but that feels more like work. It misses the point, both in the game and in real life.
On the other hand, while removing the time pressure would lose that meaning, it would add to the feeling of just hanging out in high school—so much time to kill, doing nothing more important than lounging around a gas station or wandering down to the lake to build a fire and see if anyone else showed up. In Persona 4 especially, with its small town environment, a less strict schedule seems like it would really shore up that feeling. I did resist the urge to optimize my social time in Persona 4, but that feeling was never completely gone. There was always a calculation of “Well, I’d really like to hang out with A today, but if I wait, I can probably get their affinity up a little without wasting a day, and in the meantime get B up as well.” A more accurate experience would be doing whatever the hell opportunity presented itself, because that feels more like high school to me.
Elsewhere, Whovian reckoned the most important thing to learn in high school isn’t time management; it’s realizing the “low stakes shit” that seems important in high school doesn’t matter later in life. Venerable Monk took a pragmatic approach to that idea:
I suppose that depends on what you mean by low stakes shit. If we’re talking popularity, belonging to the right social circles, dating the “right” person, etc.—then absolutely. Those choices won’t follow you through life. Any adult that forms an opinion of you based on your status as a teenager is probably not worth knowing.
But it’s extremely important that we get those frustrating and unimportant experiences as teenagers. A huge part of growing into an empathetic, functional member of society lies in putting yourself outside your comfort zone in your formative years. Beyond the obvious education and legal requirements associated with going to high school, there’s really no better way to learn how other people work.
Teenagers can be huge assholes to each other, and I’d say it’s lot safer (though never perfectly safe; just look at teenage suicide rates associated with bullying and assault) to learn how to deal with such behavior in a school setting than it is to find yourself dropped into the adult world without any of the right tools.
To bring this discussion back to games, the Persona series definitely makes it clear that there’s more to take away from school than a degree and a transcript, but I’m not sure they capture many of the less tangible skills. Developing Social Links is definitely the surest way to building a strong character, but it seems like those encounters only happen for positive relationships and each one can result in a strong friendship. It seems they leave the possibility of folks you’ll never get along with off the table.