The Human Condition to Gamify

Warning: This biog post contains spoilers of Save the Date and Doki Doki Literature Club.

With most of the games in this course, I tend to ask myself the question: What is deemed as success in this game? What are my objectives? How can I complete the game? Whilst perhaps natural, I instantly found myself amused as I worked my way through Save the Date. Part of the games allure to me was it’s inherent simplicity - the protagonist had the simple incentive of going on a date, yet it’s constantly challenged as a result of Felicia’s death. As a result, trying to find meaning in the initial stages of the game was difficult. However, as the game progresses, Felicia asks “What does the game look like, anyway? To me, it just looks like, you know, life. What’s it like for you?” Similar to the Doki Doki Literature Club, the game then begins to take a turn as the protagonist is not just contained within the system of the game, but outside of it. For me, this placed my initial tendency to want to gamify the situations I faced and made me rethink how I went about making my decisions.

I found the simplicity of the game really helped envelope the message of the game within my own inner psyche

Once the game progresses into its increasingly meta commentary, it really struck me to ask to subvert my question of what are my objectives to, as Felicia directly asks, “What are you looking to get out of this?” The games prompted answers all were humorous, yet at the same time, provoked deeper existential thought. I played this game before the Doki Doki Literature Club, and consequently found myself asking what am I trying to get out of Doki Doki as I worked through it. I found this significantly altered my play through experience in regards to how I approached the poems and the narrative - it almost in a way made me less shocked by the twists, as in truth - I didn’t know what I was trying to get out of it initially. As Doki Doki became more meta, I was able to begin to treat the game less of an objective driven mission, and more of an emotional experience.

One central theme that I thought tied both games together was the initial intention of trying to gamify both of the games which must be subverted. Within Doki Doki, I was trying to find a way to win by picking the right words, but became increasingly frustrated. In Save the Date, I become concerned with my inability to Save the Data, and wondered if it even was a possibility. The third answer to ‘what are you trying to get out of this’ is “I don’t know. I guess I just want to get the game to that I’ve won.” To me, this was the most powerful sentiment in the game as it forced me to reconcile one of the key reasons why I consistently tried to gamify Save the Data, but also other aspects in life. I found the metaphor was able to extend to many aspects of life, even academics (with grades / assignments - all with particularly rubrics of what constitutes success), as well as professional jobs (salary is an easy metric to gamify life decisions, as is the prestige of a job). Once these rubrics are diminished, the choices became far more vague and as a result more difficult - it increases the level of autonomy and independence and the objective must be set by the player. As a result, I wouldn’t say Save the Date or Doki Doki were solely conventional in making me think about games, but more so, they made me think about the way I make decisions in my everyday life as a means of trying to get something out of them.