Reflections on the Disorienting Experience of Playing DDLC

I unfortunately couldn’t make it to class on Tuesday, and playing Doki Doki Literature Club was a very intense experience that left me with many thoughts, so I figured I would write a blog post about my experience playing it and what stuck out to me. The game presents itself as a visual novel/dating simulation, and as one who has no experience in the genre, I found myself not questioning many of its tropes and just going along with a lot of it. The game presented me with overly cute visuals and dialogue, which only made the content warning at beginning of the game mystifying. As the story became established, I quickly followed along with the goal of getting a girl to fall in love with me through the simplest of decisions, like picking words to put into a poem that causes one of the girls’ kawaii avatars on the bottom of the screen to jump for joy the most. This illusion of control was quickly problematized and subverted with the game’s sudden and drastic shift in tone.

There are many things about this subversion that caused me to question my role in playing the game in a way I have not experienced before on quite the same level. For one, it forced me to confront the tension in the relationship between the player character and myself. The fact that the game is a dating ‘simulation’ already implies somewhat of a blurred line between the player-character and myself. When making my in-game decisions, was I trying to get my character to impress Sayori or was I trying to impress Sayori? After the game’s first act, his inner monologue disappeared and the game began to address me directly. This change, combined with the fact that the game kept glitching out and reminding me of Sayori’s fate despite the player-character being unaware of her existence in this new act of the game, placed me in a very disorienting position. It broke the typical frame of identification, and I was no longer unquestioningly taking on the role of the player-character manipulating the responses of the girls in the literature club. I was forced to confront my own perception of the game and its characters as I played it, realizing the problematic assumptions of power and control that undergirded my actions.

Moreover, I was no longer the only one exerting some form of presumed agency. Instead, not only was it obvious that the decisions I made did not affect overall outcome of the game, but the game (or Monika, more specifically) was exercising its/her agency over me. One of the first examples I noticed was through the inability to reload saved states. Another, more striking and disturbing example was being forced to skip through ~3 in-game days as I sat alongside Yuri’s bloody corpse. Could these instances of being forced to reckon with your powerlessness be considered gameplay? I believe they can, not in the sense that I am affecting outcomes in a rule-bounded space outside of reality, but more along the lines of Malaby’s (2007) processual approach, in which games cannot simply be defined by their rules, and should instead be viewed as undergoing constant processes of reconfiguration. In the second act of Doki Doki Literature Club, the game’s perceived rules transformed in such a way that I knew that nothing I did mattered, and the game, with its newly obvious form of self-awareness, was playing me more than I was the one playing the game.