Doki Doki Literature Club [M] [Spoilers]
 

So, I played through this a couple days ago and have been completely obsessed with it since. Anyone else?

Also, if you have not played/experienced it, get out. You don't belong here.

I should probably give a trigger warning, but since only people who have played/experienced the game are in here now, that should not be necessary.

If you have not played the game, perhaps go read the trigger warning, and then play it, and come talk to me about it. :P (It is very short. And free.)

Discuss.

Edit: Also, no lame Monika jokes.

FUCKING MONIKAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMM

Your obsession is an extension of mine. :|

You love me so much that I, also, want to die, but this is a thread for serious philosophical, literary, and sociological analysis, NOT cheap memes. :|




mangaisliterature!

Just Monika.

Have you dug into the code yet, or checked out the community for people who have?

There's MORE.

The stuff you can experience just by playing the game isn't all there is to it. You have to fight Monika on her own turf.

can I say how the game freaked me out doubly because my name is Monica???

anyway anytime the screen glitched I died a little

Coda, I am super aware of all that and I have a ton of things to gush about I just didn’t want to start the thread with an essay. Will have to wait til I’m back from the doctor though.

I had a lot of the extra content spoiled for me thanks to Markiplier and GameXplain, but I would have figured most of it out on my own anyway -- after having played Undertale, I would have noticed the trickery with sayori.chr. And once I noticed that, I would have also noticed that the game is written in Python, at which point I would have dived into the source code to look for easter eggs.

Actually decoding the ARG content of the .chr files... I probably would have gotten a couple of them myself. yuri.chr I would have identified at a glance. monika.chr I would have written a script to decode the content. sayori.chr and natsuki.chr would have sent me to Reddit to get help. :P (If left to my own devices, I could PROBABLY have figured out sayori.chr, eventually. I would most likely not have figured out natsuki.chr.)

Can you elaborate on what you meant about Undertale? I don't think I ever got into it enough beyond just playing the routes to have seen whatever it is you're referring to.

But anyway, the ARG stuff is really gripping, obviously, and adds a whole extra level of discomfort and intrigue to the game, but I'm mostly suspending judgment on whether it was a worthwhile addition until its determined whether Dan Salvado is lying about his next game having nothing to do with Project Libitina or not. It seems like the foundation was laid a little too thoroughly for it to just be creepy easter eggs, and if it doesn't go anywhere it'll be fairly disappointing retrospectively.

I have a million things I could say about the game itself, and I have no idea where to even start. I love pretty much every aspect of it, but the parts the specifically shine the most to me are:

1.) Manipulation of and prediction of the player's assumptions about the nature of the game and how it is played. Any time it preempts use of the menus is just amazing to me, in context.

2.) The metanarrative space the story creates where the experiential plot of the game exists in some nebulous feedback loop of the player's own interactions with the fiction, creating an experience unique to everyone who gets the chance to go through it.

3.) The insidious layers of the game's horror. From the trigger warning that doubles as an incitement to profound anxiety over the innocuous act 1 to the way Sayori's death is quickly fading in my mind as a representation of a brutally horrific tragedy that is all too real for a lot of unfortunate people... into something more like witnessing an eldritch event that destroys the sanity of the viewer. The horrific audio cues in that scene and the breakdown of the diegetic reality of the VN setting make me feel this weird flavor of existential dread that has me thinking the true trigger warning should have been for people who are vulnerable to de-realization and delusion. It's appalling, and I love it.

I also like to entertain the analytical lens of everything post-suicide being the visualized nervous breakdown of a teenage boy having his life utterly ruined beyond repair by one of the most awful things any human can experience. I don't think it totally works on that level, but it's definitely interesting to me.

4.) Can we just talk about the way this game has conditioned me to suffer paranoia at tempo shifts or sudden silence in digital audio? My phone popped up a low battery warning yesterday that interrupted my music and I felt my heart start hammering.

It might sound like I was really traumatized by this game but I absolutely love it. The fact that a piece of art/fiction can have this effect is amazing to me. The catharsis this game spawns is just brilliant.

And none of the above is even getting into analyzing the characters, where there is obviously mountains of material to delve into, but I've probably rambled enough for now. :P

Oh wait, just one more point. As I'm sure you're aware from our previous conversations, Coda ( or anyone who's read them), I introspect on subjects like free will, self-consciousness, AI, etc quite a bit, so Monika is just a treasure trove of analysis for me.

I really dislike when anyone dismisses this game as cheap shock value relying on gimmicky meta-scares. While those are obviously what it's best known for, there is just so, so, SO much more going on here. I don't personally know of any other form of fiction that has created this kind of relationship with its reader/player, but I'd love to hear about it if it exists, cause DDLC feels like a revelation to the art of storytelling (and story-receiving!) to me.

In Undertale, after you complete the Genocide route, you can sell your soul in order to reset the game and play again. But if you do this, the game saves a couple of innocuous-looking files to disk that are separate from your save files, which alters parts of the game. Creating new games or resetting your save file won't undo the damage. You have to delete those files (which can be quite challenging if you have cloud saves) if you want to put your game back to the way it was when you first installed it.

Knowing about this put me on alert at the end of DDLC Act 1. From there it's just my natural hacker curiosity.

I totally agree about what DDLC really is. It's really not a shock horror game for the most part. It's a psychological horror game dressed up as a shock horror game dressed up as a visual novel.

Ahh, right, that, I didn't know it messed with the files.

I do think it's really interesting, the difference between how Undertale incorporates its meta by crafting the game world around diegetic powers that resemble game functions whereas DDLC literalizes the game world such that it only consists of two bedrooms, two classrooms, a hallway, and a street, and populated by precisely 5 (6, if you count monster father) people who literally do not exist fictionally when they aren't on screen. (And there's an entire other discussion to be had about the protagonist's presence in the story...)

Huh, that IS an interesting contrast to observe.

So, what's your take on Monika, Coda?

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?

They can create, too. One of the more subtle things that happens is that they can also CREATE new files on your hard drive containing poems, messages, and pictures. The reason it's subtle is because they all get wiped at the end of Act 2, so by the time you've been informed that there's something there to look at, there's nothing there to look at anymore.

I had him checking through the whole game, so he saw them all. I told him that was where they put the lewds to get around Steam's ToS lol.

Oh I saw. I was constantly checking. I also had about 8 saves before I found out that it didn't actually matter. I didn't need saves anymore. She would always be there.

I also really enjoyed/hated that you had to step outside of the game and sort of physically delete her in order to progress. That made it feel more real. B.S. Johnson only dreams he could write something as novel as this.

You have no idea how happy that reference makes me, nor, I think, how appropriate of a comparison it is lol.

Turns out the game also can tell if you backed up your save files and restored them and scolds you for it. :P

That's when she calls you a cheater, right? I remember hearing about another message where she scolds you for looking through all the files to find all the secrets, but I'm not sure where it is. I don't think I saw it myself.

I honestly wish there were more hidden interactions with the game files and the game. It seems like the one place where the budget/development time just fell a little short in terms of what could have been included, especially with easter eggs involving deleting the characters at various points. But, maybe that wasn't part of Dan's vision.

Yeah, she calls you a cheater, erases all of your save data, and resets the game to an unmodified Act 1.

The one where she scolds you for going through her thoughts is never displayed in-game. It's hidden among the other messages she uses in Act 3 and explicitly avoided by the game code as an easter egg for anyone digging in there. It's quite a bit harder to see it in the Steam release because Dan realized he accidentally left the source code in the pre-Steam versions and took it out of version 1.1.0. It's still possible to dig in and see it in 1.1.0 but it takes more effort.

I was hoping for an easter egg if you managed to get into Act 2 with sayori.chr still in place (perhaps by write-protecting the file). I haven't taken the time to check on that yet.

That said, considering the game has a budget of effectively $0 because it's meant to hype up the development team, the amount of content that we have is AMAZING for a free game.

Oh yeah, absolutely. It's a work of genius, and I can't wait to see what their next project is.

But really, Coda, let's cut to the chase here and ask the important question. :|

Who, in your opinion, is Best Doki?