What is a Identity?

As of late, Emma and I have been playing a game called Ghost Tricks for the NintendoDS. The main plot follows a ghost who wakes to find that he has none of his memories. He uses his powers, which allows him to travel through objects and rewind time to save someone before their death, to try to figure out his life and his murder.

*SPOILER ALERT*
At the beginning of the game, the spirit takes on the form of the corpse found in the junkyard. Another spirit implies that it has to be his body as there are no other bodies there. For a while, we were led on to believe that it is our body and form in the world. We were only given a certain amount of information before the protagonist sets off to follow a woman who witnessed the murder. With very limited information, we assumed that the spirit’s identity is the only visible corpse in the opening chapter and he was as innocent as he sounds.

Then we were given new information that makes us question everything. We find out that animals, when dead, can communicate with language. People, when becoming “conscious” after death, can project their image as being someone else until they realize who they really are. That’s when we began to make the absurd theories to explain what was possible: the protagonist was a cat, the protagonist was suicidal. With very few suggestions, we began to question the spirit’s identity because we already have a shaky base to stand on from the beginning. Even a stronger base would have left us questions as it is not definite.

So what makes an identity definite?

From the game, the idea of identity mostly relies upon memory. But as the protagonist has no memory, we gain an idea of his identity from the dialogue he engages with other characters. As more information is revealed to us, more can be said about him. But that alone doesn’t answer his own questions about who he is, so he searches for what he is.

*EVEN MORE SPOILERS*
Then we find out that the image the protagonist takes on is not actually his own, but that of the antagonist of the game. Everything is thrown into a loop because we no longer have even a base to understand his identity from anything beyond what he exhibits in dialogue. But there is still an identity given to us; it just happens that it doesn’t satisfy our questions. Our perception of who the protagonist is always changes from new information yet pivots around what we think to be definite.

We’re still working on what his identity is. (We’re working on finishing the game. It takes a while.) But even with answers, who knows if we’ll take it for truth anymore.