(((DOKI DOKI SPOILERS)))
When I finished playing Doki Doki Literature Club on Saturday, I felt like I needed to just sit and stare at a wall for 15 minutes. It's been a long time since I was that deep inside the headspace of a game — or rather, since a game had been so deep inside my headspace. It honestly felt like my mind had been hacked, and I couldn't even try to digest my playing experience because of the after-noise still crackling around the bits and pieces of the game lodged in my brain. I feel like I had been so deeply immersed in its mentality — and yet without completely understanding it — that leaving it left me dazed and disoriented. It was like being forcefully thrust inside the mind of a John Malkovich, and then force ejected back into my own. Did anybody else have this sort of experience?
After a few hours of deliberately not thinking about it, I think I'm a little better-equipped to dissect why the game was so immersive for me. Besides just how emotionally and visually disturbing it was, I think it's also because it directly addressed me (as some person sitting in front of the screen) through metafiction. Sitting at that end-of-world table with Monika, staring directly into her eyes, and holding bits and pieces of genuinely interesting conversation (interesting not for the sake of better understanding the game world, but because some of the things she said were simply more thought-provoking than some of my conversations with real-life people) with her made it feel like the most direct conversation I've ever had with a game character. Even Sans doesn't come close, because he still appealed mainly to my "role" as a gamer rather than beyond it. Monika, on the other hand, talked about vegetarianism, how she didn't know what my gender actually was, the dubious setting of the game, religion, gender roles, her twitter account (which is real @lilmonix3), and casual chit chat. So to bounce off our discussion about identification last week — after the painfully generic first hour, I no longer felt like I was identifying with or even as anyone when playing this game, because it treated me simply as some 21st-century person in front of it, which, well, I was. (So in that way, maybe it's always easier to identify as the player and consequently become immersed in metafictional games, because, well, in the moment you are at least the player it's addressing you as.) Even before Monika's talk, it's almost like I was more listening to the game as it rambled and digressed, than playing it. Or maybe the game came close to playing me? It was like watching the game perform itself. So I think this metafictional direct address certainly dragged me into deeper engagement with the game, although I still feel that doesn't sufficiently explain why I feel like it infected my mind. I guess the fourth wall is a sort of immune system barrier here.
Along this line fall a number of other metafictional media experiences I've had that have left me some degree of speechless (and I'm also curious if anybody else has had experiences comparable to Doki Doki, and what they are?): Mulholland Drive, Stanley Parable (less impactful because the narrator is really mostly powerless in the face of player choice and the game system itself), and Undertale, which I'm just going to digress on below:
After section last Friday, some people stayed behind, and the conversation touched on Undertale's fanbase, which is apparently very intense. There is a practically endless stream of remixes, fan fiction, and AMVs online, and, more interestingly to me, a huge cult adoration for Toby Fox himself. I feel like there are usually cult followings of games themselves, but not so much of their creators. I'm not sure if it's more because of Toby Fox'x single-handed making of most of the game and consequent adherence to the more idolizable vision of the virtuosic solo artist, Undertale's JRPG-style (and "sensei"s generally accrue loyal cult followers), or the traces of Toby Fox himself in the game via the Annoying Dog avatar. Because Toby Fox himself is present in the game as an Easter egg of sorts, he becomes part of Undertale lore, which then makes him more assimilable into the cult following of Undertale itself. But I feel like another part of it stems from how Undertale stages another game for the player, to "hack" it, which operates according to very different mechanics from in-game but then sometimes ties back into diegetic gameplay. What I mean is that Fox rewards players for going through the game files with subplots, hidden scenes, secret locations etc.. For example, on Slack, Samantha revealed the Easter egg where the track that plays after clearing an area in the Genocide run, when played at 1200% speed, becomes Flowey's soundtrack. This sort of self-referentialism brings to mind Mason's talk about how self-involved RPGs are. But this is also the sort of inside joke that deliberately pushes players outside the game — you have to alter the music in a program outside of the game to find out about this. Undertale characters may speak across the fourth wall, but this sort of hacking game takes place directly outside of it. The lore thereby obtained is not just inside the game but also about its making. Because the fourth wall is simply nonexistent, the hand or voice of the game designer is especially clear. However, in Toby's case, this voice insists that this extra-diegetic puzzle-solving is still a(nother) game: I read online that in some file, Toby left a message reading: "Living in a world like this, where people can simply cheat out the answers from the code… your impatience has REALLY damaged you, hasn’t it?" (italicization mine) So quite explicitly, the whole in-game motif of patience extends even outside the game world and into interactions with its code. The result is that successfully digging through this outer layer (or inner, if you think about it in terms of getting inside the code) feels more like a game with Toby himself — you sniff out and pick up the bread crumbs he's dropped behind, and all the extra lore you discover not only add to your understanding of Undertale but also increase your assimilation into a sort of insider clique with Toby Fox at center. So in a way, Undertale is two intertwined games, one in which you play with in-game characters, and the other in which you play with Toby himself. And it is maybe the latter game that makes players talk about Toby with such affection, almost as though he himself is a game character (a boss, on multiple levels). It's a weird situation where the game mediates a more personalized relationship with its creator, and this mediation gamifies the creator at the same time. (Related: Although Doki Doki also has this meta hacking engagement, I feel like the reason why players don't demonstrate nearly the same level of rapport with Dan Salvato may be because a lot of that metafictional relationship gets cathected to Monika, since she's the avatar who stands in for the game designer and overtly prompts the hacking. The Annoying Dog has nowhere as near an indexical relationship to Toby, making the conflation less easy.)
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