The Collective Player Experience

My first experience with Doki Doki Literature Club wasn’t through playing the game itself—instead, I came across many reviews and recommendations that claimed, “you should play this game! It subverts your expectations… it’s so meta! I didn’t expect a horror game from DDLC!” I went in knowing nothing about the game’s content. Only that I should not trust the cute aesthetic and simple story. From what I see online, playing DDLC without first being informed of its shocking surprises seems to be a rare experience. Playthroughs are easily influenced by our existing knowledge, and knowing what happens in the game, the player can notice details within the visuals and narrative, ultimately engaging with an entirely different experience than what may have been intended. A less perceptive player (me and my two brain cells) might not notice the hacker files in Save the Date’s game folder, but through viewing other players’ playthroughs, I join a collective play experience: a new game around absorbing information about a game.

Thinking about how Boluk and LeMieux discuss the relationship between spectatorship and play, we could understand that the spectator engages with another form of memory manipulation. Through viewing another player’s adventure, the spectator’s expectations change without directly playing the game. And when we consider e-sports and game streamers, it’s impossible to ignore the money behind the social metagame. What’s so appealing about watching someone else play a game? Do we just want to live vicariously through someone with better equipment and skills than ourselves? I suggest that our desire for human connection drives the social “game around a game” and the economy-game without games.

Streaming and monetization open another “collective player experience'' as the social connections related to the game create this “game around a game”. For the people who build a career from streaming their playthroughs, monetization encourages gamers to deliberately construct a persona in order to play for an audience. We’re probably familiar with some popular Twitch streamers and their loud, exaggerated reactions. Whether or not these reactions are genuine, the objective is simple: produce entertainment for $$$. Viewing streamers as a game in and of itself, the interaction between viewer, audience, and player becomes a social game. Shared reactions to DDLC, for example, produce a community promoting an opposing expectation and contribute to the evolving social player meta around the game. DDLC's reputation doesn't characterize it as a cute romance dating simulator. Other than the people who really do start playing the game without "spoilers", players who have first experienced DDLC through the media surrounding it are playing on another level of awareness.

When money is involved, the reactions and reviews toward popular games will tell us about their themes… and somehow, even when we already know about the surprising “meta” content, our overturned expectations don’t necessarily prevent us from getting emotional validation when playing the game.

How should players react when we expect the subversion of the expectation? Maybe the hype around DDLC’s “meta” tells us about a social gamer’s attraction to validation, or maybe it reveals certain characteristics of its audience. But we know that the ever-changing community around games will both challenge and define normative conventions. With anything that claims to “subvert expectations”, the culture around it seems to create a messy environment in which the player’s perception is always transformed by their interactions with the community. Within popular streaming culture, the exaggerated personalities, money, and click-bait titles all influence and exist around a destructive economic metagame. Using money and attention as in-game currency, the field of social meta brings us closer to each other -- and to capitalism.