Who is Akihiko Kayaba from ‘Sword Art Online’ and why did he engineer a survival game?

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Sword Art Online, Sword Art Online: Alicization, and Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld.

If you were an evil genius who wanted to put together a survival game, you’d have to put quite a bit of thought and effort into the realization of your plans. Not only would you need enough money to fund the creation of an ideal space for the game, but also the foresight to hash out the rules and system through which the players would operate, ensuring that the challenges to be faced were optimal, setting up barriers to prevent any cheating of the system, and preventing any outside forces from interfering in the situation. However, before any of the aforementioned could take place, you’d require something else – a motive. After all, who would throw so much time, effort, and money into something without a good reason? And just like any other survival-game creator, either inside or outside of anime, Sword Art Online‘s first antagonist, Akihiko Kayaba, must have had a serious reason for engineering his virtual-yet-real death match.

So, what motive did Kayaba, the brilliant creator of virtual reality game Sword Art Online, have for this self-sabotaging move? Why did he trap 10 thousand players, his own fans, into a virtual survival game, leading to the real-life deaths (inside the fictional story) of almost four thousand? Was he motivated by malice, insanity, or pleasure, or was it something else entirely?

Reality and genius were his enemies.

As a highly intelligent man with a perfectionist mindset, limitless curiosity, and idealistic fantasies, Sword Art Online‘s Akihiko Kayaba loathed the limitations and rules of the reality he was born into, and thus, longed to create his own improved version. This sentiment is reflected in his stated reason for engineering the survival game in the anime’s first episode, when he calmly informs the trapped players that he’s doing this out of a desire to control the fate of a world of his design. This desire for control is what led him to develop Sword Art Online, losing himself in an escapist “reality” of his own construction. However, once he succeeded in creating the “perfect” virtual reality game, he was no longer satisfied with it, wanting it to be more real. This is where his motive for adding genuine in-game deaths and “real-life” avatars comes into play, thereby achieving his fantasy of merging real life with his game world. Later on in the series, in Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld, a virtual reality version of him admits to love interest Koujiro Rinko that connecting the real and virtual worlds was his dream all along.

Despite his initial claim that he wishes to control the fate of Sword Art Online‘s world, Kayaba’s behavior during the survival game suggests the opposite desire. While appearing as Heathcliff, leader of The Knights of the Blood Oath, he shows excitement whenever something happens to defy the rules he set in place for Aincrad, even if it leads to a disadvantage for him. For example, when Asuna overcomes her paralysis to save Kirito from the game-creator’s death blow, and when Kirito reappears to avenge her supposed death after technically also dying in the game, Kayaba is thrilled that the rules of his own world are being overridden by the sheer power of human will. In fact, in Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld, we find out through Rinko that an emotional Kayaba (before his death in the real world) described Kirito and Asuna’s desperate triumph over the system as a “miracle” he had witnessed. All this suggests that his real problem is a discontentment with the tedium and rigidity of reality, along with a constant need to see something new and interesting, as well as a burning wish to see humans push past their limits and break the established rules.

Ultimately, though, the source of Kayaba’s frustration with reality was his genius. As someone who could quickly grasp complex information and maximize its potential, his intelligence was the cause of his boredom with and discontent in the real world, and hence, his resulting depression. Almost everything had always been too easy for him, and it was difficult to find any serious challenges.

Kayaba’s desire to find a suitable challenger motivates him to pose as Heathcliff during Sword Art Online‘s survival game. While his elitist mentality makes him discount the existence of any mediocre player, he does take an interest in those who show promise of making it to the end. So, setting himself up as the leader of The Knights of the Blood Oath, he settles for “developing” his own future opponents, hoping that at least some of them will be good enough to beat the monsters he designed to challenge them so that someone will be left to face him on Aincrad’s 100th floor. Judging by his reaction to being thwarted by Kirito and Asuna on the 75th floor, we can conclude that ultimately, he didn’t really want to be the god of his own world. Perhaps the entire Sword Art Online survival game was put in place so that he could prove to himself that he was human just like everyone else and, hence, fallible.

The psychology of ordinary people eluded him.

Interestingly, during Sword Art Online‘s first arc, Kayaba and Kirito are both shown to be social misfits who struggle to form meaningful human connections. In Sword Art Online: Alicization, we discover that Kayaba surprisingly had a real-life love interest, but no one else has come forward to claim him since that reveal. Along a similar vein, Kirito is at first very slow to form attachments, taking several episodes to fully warm up to Asuna and Klein (although he does eventually form solid, lasting relationships with a much bigger group).

Ultimately, it’s obvious that the two characters’ social difficulties have a lot to do with their impressive abilities. In early episodes of Sword Art Online, Kirito shows reluctance to get too close to anyone, even before the survival game is announced. He hesitates to reveal his skill level to Klein and outright hides it from his first guild, and only lets Asuna get close after he recognizes that she’s similarly gifted. When he tells her about what happened to his former guild in Sword Art Online‘s 10th episode, he reveals that he hid the truth because he was afraid of rejection, suggesting that he fears the envy of less capable people and that this is the reason for his social isolation. It’s not too much of a stretch to assume that Kayaba, a youthful genius who created the first virtual reality game, has also experienced social alienation for the same reason, his genius having set him apart from his peers from a very young age.

In the end, the critical difference lies in how Kayaba and Kirito decide to deal with this social isolation. Although it takes him a while to get there, Kirito eventually bonds with others through his shared experiences in Sword Art Online, opening himself up to great people once trust has been built. In Sword Art Online‘s 14th episode, his character growth culminates in his emotional speech before the duel with Kayaba, in which he reveals to his friends how much they all mean to him, now fully prepared to risk his life for theirs rather than putting his own survival first.

In stark contrast, Kayaba chooses to deal with his difficulty connecting with other people by studying them like test subjects or virtual robots during Sword Art Online‘s survival game. Nevertheless, his charade as Heathcliff reveals that a part of him wants to be accepted by others as an idealized version of himself—an intelligent, pragmatic leader who fearlessly leads his group into danger to overcome a common obstacle. Perhaps, above all during the game, he seeks to understand why the surviving players even want to go back to the real world, a place that he has always hated and failed to form much attachment to, and opts to experience the second-hand thrill of watching them team up and grow closer for the sake of survival. Still, ultimately, he views the players in Sword Art Online as objects, even the elite members of The Knights of the Blood Oath, who he admits he enjoyed “developing” as their leader.

Ultimately, Kayaba’s motive for engineering Sword Art Online‘s survival game is less important than his actions, which caused the deaths of nearly four thousand players and the lifelong trauma of the remaining number. Even if his virtual self continues to appear to help Kirito and Asuna sometimes, he can never truly compensate for the murders he committed during the anime’s first season.