[CONTENT WARNING: Suicide and Self Harm]
Doki Doki Literature Club, by Team Salvato, is an extremely emotional game with content regarding depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide. Despite the content warnings this game gives, the beginning of the game comes off very lighthearted and harmless. However, the game takes a dark turn as you begin to interact with the characters more. In this post, I will explicate how Doki Doki Literature Club breaks a fourth wall between the player and the game in order to make this gaming experience vividly horrific and emotional.
The fourth wall being broken in this game is the wall that detaches the player from the game. It keeps the player one step away from associating a game as a game, a piece of media somewhat detached from realities. Doki Doki Literature Club is in itself, an emotionally difficult to play game, however, once you reach Monika’s ending the game becomes more than emotionally difficult. It becomes terrifying.
By the time you get to Monika’s ending you will have seen the hanging of Sayori and the suicide of Yuri. When you get to Monika’s final scene, she faces you in an empty room, explaining the rules of the game. At this point, Monika’s telling you of her awareness of the game. She explains to you how she can manipulate the program to get what she wants. She also tells you that you could manipulate her file onto a flash drive and take her everywhere you go. By having the game’s character recognize that she herself is in the game, it causes the fourth wall separating the player from the game to break. To take that one step further, however, by giving the player control to take Monika everywhere they go digitally, it causes the player to be consumed by this experience almost as if it were real.
In breaking this fourth wall, Doki Doki Literature Club takes its emotional experience to a new level because it puts the trauma of the video game on your shoulders as if it were really yours. Instead of letting the player play the game at a safe distance, the game character’s awareness of the game makes the play experience seem almost inseparable from reality. By creating character dialogue that tells the player how the game is more than just a play experience and that it can be manipulated outside of the game, Doki Doki Literature Club forces its realism to the player. In doing so, it opens a deeper opportunity for emotional projection of the game events from the player, thus making it the emotionally vivid game that it is.
I like your point about how in breaking the fourth wall the game is better able to engage with players and create a more visceral and emotional experience. To add to the conversation, I would like to suggest that in breaking the fourth wall the game is also able to comment on themes hidden beneath the surface of dating sims games (i.e. obsession, romantic fixation, and insecurity) by urging players to engage with them. Such is seen at the end of the game when Monika is seen adrift in a timeless void. Here, her entire being is centered around you in a way that makes you question why you are the only object of her affection; why, despite your every…
I appreciate your claim that Doki Doki Literature Club “puts the trauma of the video game on your shoulders as if it were really yours.” I found that the game is particularly effective in exploring the functionality of breaking the fourth wall. I often associate this technique with comedy; for instance, I recall actors in TV shows making sarcastic side comments to the audience about other characters or referencing the script. To me, DDLC is novel because it transposes comedic procedures onto a horror game. However, TV shows and video games are not interactive in the same ways; there was something particularly visceral about the player acting as an enabler of the horrors of the game.
I remember someone in…
When I played DDLC, I thought the breaking of the fourth wall was one of the most interesting parts of the game, so I really appreciate your analysis of it! Your point about the elimination of the fourth wall causing the player to feel the traumatizing and horrific effects of the game more strongly is very apt. I think it would be interesting to extend this discussion to what the fourth wall breaks (and the associated trauma) say about the game itself. For me, the experience of finding out that Monika was "sentient" and editing the files of the game itself was so jarring that it forced me to reflect on the game as a whole. I feel like the…
I really like your point about how the trauma of the video game gets bestowed on the player as if it were theirs. The emotional vividness of the game is almost like a protest against other games that try to tell the player that they can do whatever they want but ultimately not be effected by their choices because there is a separation or depersonalization of the game. Here, the player is forced to confront the suicide and self harm that occurs in the game at the face of the manipulator, Monica. They watched all of the drama unfold so there is more of an involvement in the characters due to the fact that the player had to converse with…