Totally didn't keep watching Grumps things.

What gets me a little about Saiyori's deal is that trying to follow her depressive reasoning is headache inducing, but I think she's suffering the same metaphorical headache from trying to make other people happy and minimize her existence in life.

She fixed the headache.

Monika is just Monika. It would probably really screw with her mind if she thought about the fact that the things she accused the other three of being was also true of her. She knows it's a game but she's deceived herself into believing that she's able to act outside that code. She believes that she has discovered free will, but her actions and fate are as predestined as everyone else's.

To be fair to her, she does at least manage to achieve nondeterminism within those confines.

Only diegetically, though. :P I think the real tragedy with her character is that she thinks she's achieved enlightenment only to be woefully ignorant of how purposefully her character was crafted to behave exactly as she does (by Dan Salvado, I mean, not the hypothetical creator of the hypothetical VN this game is supposed to be, story-wise). Also, people who hate her annoy me. It's usually cause they didn't take the time to get to know her at the end.

I will say, though, and this thought just occurred to me last night, I think the way people who play DDLC blind are very often funneled by the game into having almost the exact same reactions at certain parts (I notice this in let's plays because it's the same reactions I was having at those times) is a pretty interesting contrast to Monika's situation. I definitely think there's an undercurrent to Monika's story that's supposed to make the player stop and think about how much free will they themselves actually have.

I, of course, don't believe I have any free will, so having a 1-sided conversation with Monika for hours was pretty ironic. :P

Also, @Quiet: Get out of her head. :|

I'm going to have to ask you what you mean by "diegetically" here. I THOUGHT I knew what it meant and now you've gone and used it in a way that defies my understanding of the term. ^^()

Oh, sorry. I mean in contrast to "mimetically". Diegesis = contained within the fictional bounds of the narrative. "Mimesis" = contained within the broader cultural context that produced the fiction and the subsequent reaction of people's interaction with it.

Or the more common example of music in movies. Mimetic music is the film score, diegetic music is music the characters can actually hear.

Sorry, if I'm being confusing, it's been a good six years since I was in literary theory class, I might not be remembering the distinction perfectly.

Okay, so I DIDN'T misunderstand the word. You were just wrong. ;)

Monika achieves nondeterminism at the mimetic level. While the list of things that she says during that one-sided conversation are predetermined, the choice among them is well and truly nondeterministic, having been selected as a result of chaotic systems outside the scope of the game.

The fact that she'll repeat them eventually doesn't change that?

No, it doesn't, because it's not a cyclic repetition. Every selection is independent of all of those that came before it.

Okay, that's not strictly true. There actually does come a time where the sequence will absolutely exhaust the accumulated entropy, since it's not likely that the game bothers with refreshing the entropy pool after booting up. But that would take a minimum of... uh... *tries to crunch numbers* ... um... okay, that would take so long that there's not even a way to name that number meaningfully. If you could somehow keep a computer running the whole time, it would have gotten about two parts in a googol of the way through the cycle by the heat death of the universe.

EDIT: Okay, so theoretically speaking if you let Monika yammer on for a whole day and do some clever math you can learn enough about the underlying chaotic system to start making predictions about what she'll say next with accuracy better than random chance. Frankly that's probably more effort than it would take to start predicting a human with that kind of accuracy.

EDIT 2: That's assuming that once she starts into her spiel that no other random events are taking place. If, for example, the animation in the background draws on the same source of random numbers, then that DOES reintroduce chaos into the system, and it conceals data that would be necessary to perform the above analysis, which pushes things right back into nondeterminism.

tfw the discussion has reached grad school level
I just wanted to add that Sayori's depression hit very hard to home
also I didn't play undertale in genocide mode because I'd have to mess with the files |D (also kill my friends :((()

Ehehe, don't mind me and Suze. We're geeks. You're witnessing a geek-geek interaction.

Quick, somebody draw a Feynman diagram!

Yeah, I figured your response would be along those lines. I can agree with that (since it's pretty inarguable lol).

I guess, for me, her inability to respond to stimuli from you during your conversation at the end makes her seem more limited. Part of me really wanted a chat box to pop up during that scene. But, it makes sense given the parameters of the world she inhabits.

Well, there are a few stimuli she responds to at that point...

I know, I know. :P

Not computing. What's determining the order she says the pre-determined things?

I get the diegetic. Not getting the mimetic.

A Mersenne Twister implementation with a cycle period of 2¹⁹⁹³⁷-1, seeded from the operating system's entropy pool, which is itself populated by such random variables as the current time, the time since the system was booted, the timing between the user's keystrokes, the variability in the user's mouse movements over time, et cetera.

It's not the best random number generator out there, but the first several hundred outputs are well and truly unpredictable unless you know absolutely everything there is to know about the state of the computer running it.

Suze lied to me about this game, which I can't thank him enough for. I wish I could use words like diegetically. However, I will say this:

Shit's messed, yo.

The tiny hints in the beginning don't really make themselves known until it's too late. It makes you wonder if Natsuki's dad is even 'real' in the game, and if her perception of him is something that is created or magnified simply to adjust her character. If Monika can sense and feel when the game is closed, and reality ceases for her during that time, what of the other characters? Do they simply stop existing once they have exited a scene? Is everything about them just constructs to make them feel and act a certain way? What about Sayori? How does she come to the same realizations and power as Monika? Are the other two caught in the crossfire, or is there a way (not an actual way mind) for them to exist in the same way as Sayori and Monika?
Happiness cannot happen. Pedantic arguments will not prevent their misery.
They have the power to modify and destroy. What else are they capable of?