REBOOTING BRECHT: REIMAGINING EPIC THEATRE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Andrea Rice
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
May 2019
Committee:
Edgar Landgraf, Advisor
Kristie Foell
Clayton Rosati ii ABSTRACT
Edgar Landgraf, Advisor
This thesis highlights the ways in which Bertolt Brecht’s concept of epic theatre pertains to video games, more particularly, visual novels. Digital drama and romance genres (aka “dating simulators”) are known for their “realism” for their ability to make the player feel as if they are interacting with real people. Yet, the deceptiveness is their apparent inability to replicate fully the kinds of social interactions a person can have. The plot structure oftentimes is also rather simplistic: the goal of these games is that the player gets the girl of their dreams, despite any hardships. The horror game Doki Doki Literature Club (2017) by game developer Dan Salvato challenges these genre shortcomings and aspire to make productive, I will argue, a Brechtian notion of epic theatre. Salvato had a love-hate relationship with visual novels. To him, visual novels were nothing more than “cute girls doing cute things” where any tragic backstory or character arc is just another objective the player must overcome to make the girl of their dreams fall in love with them. Like Brecht, Salvato wants to destroy the illusions created by visual novels and shock people into reflecting about such illusions. He created Doki Doki Literature
Club, a horror game disguised as a dating simulator, which takes a critical look at issues such a mental health that visual novels often gloss over and treat as plot points in the story. iii
I would like to dedicate this thesis to my friends and family, for supporting me throughout the
writing process. My cat, Bermuda, who served as my creative muse through much of the
process. My rats, Juno and Minerva.
And of course, Monika. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would first like to thank my thesis advisor Dr. Edgar Landgraf of the German department at Bowling Green State University for challenging me to constantly dig deeper and keeping me on the right track. I truly learned a lot from you, and it has been a wonderful year working with you.
I would also like to thank Dr. Clayton Rosati of the Telecommunications department for not only being a crucial point of reference for this project, but also for being willing to meet with me on such short notice. You were a great help and it was always great to talk with you and discuss at length some of the theoretical things.
I would also like to thank Dr. Kristie Foell of the German department at Bowling Green
State University for also agreeing to be a reader for my thesis and being an excellent source of moral support in the writing process.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
Brecht Today ...... 7
CHAPTER 1: THE GAMES WE PLAY: VISUAL NOVELS AND IMMERSION ...... 12
1.1 What is a Visual Novel?...... 12
1.2 Zero to Hero ...... 24
1.3 Immersion ...... 32
CHAPTER 2: REBOOTING BRECHT: THE BRECHTIAN TECHNIQUES OF DOKI DOKI
LITERATURE CLUB! ...... 39
2.1 Can Video Games Be Political? ...... 39
2.2 Doki Doki Literature Club! ...... 49
2.3 Scene on Repeat ...... 53
2.4 Act Two ...... 56
CONCLUSION: MOVING FORWARD ...... 64
REFERENCES ...... 66 vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 The three main characters of DHMIS ...... 7
2 A still from episode four, where oats can be seen in the background ...... 8
3 A Picture of Hanako From Katawa Shoujo ...... 17
4 The four girls of DDLC ...... 19
5 Monika reacting to Natsuki’s joke by breaking the fourth wall ...... 21
6 A still from the South Park episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft” ...... 31
7 The scene in which Clay comes to realize his role in Hannah’s death ...... 46
8 The menu screen from Doki Doki Literature Club!...... 49
9 The same scene in Act One where Sayori is introduced is replaced by a glitch in Act
Two...... 55
10 Both Yuri’s and Natsuki’s personalities change drastically in Act Two, which goes
unnoticed by the protagonist ...... 57
11 Monika deleting the remaining two girls from the game ...... 60
12 Monika guessing my name (correctly) ...... 61 1
INTRODUCTION
The years following WWI were a tumultuous time for Germany between increasing hyperinflation and growing social tensions. Yet, it was also a time of decadence and art flourished with the emergence of new forms and mediums for art, which had been influenced by the development of film and photography. The theatre was no exception. Epic theatre was developed out of the desire to pull society out of its current state of despair and bring about social change. Initially developed by Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), who had been influenced by the Dadaist and German agitprop uses of art to affect social change, it was expanded upon by
Bertolt Brecht (1893-1966), who would develop his own theoretical and practical aspects. At the time, the role of the theatre was primarily a place of entertainment that carried with it the potential for instruction. Dramatic theatre however — in the tradition of Aristotle — was too passive of an experience that focused more on pleasure and catharsis rather than presenting a conflict to the audience that could make them reflect on the state of their own society.
Aristotelian drama was not equipped to handle this desire ass it wa too passive of an experience for the audience that did not require them to think critically about the social or political conditions of the play they watched. “Critical” in the context of epic theatre refers to the act of creating a working framework which gives the audience a point of reference they can use to identify social injustice within a society that is constantly reinventing its class struggles.
Brecht refers to German drama (prior to Hitler) and how the themes of class conflict, war, etc. were presented in a manner that did not readily make their socio-historical underpinnings apparent to the audience. Instead, these themes were used for their aesthetics rather than for the statement that could be made and were only representational of society and social struggles but 2 could not be influenced by society itself.1 The audience was therefore only invited to identify or empathize with the protagonist’s struggle. According to Brecht, the dramatic theatre caused the spectator to say: “Yes, I have felt like that too – Just like me – It’s only natural – It’ll never change – The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable – That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world – I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh”. By contrast, the epic theatre spectator would say of the performance: “I’d never have thought of it – That’s not the way – That’s extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s got to stop –
The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary – That’s great art: nothing obvious in it – I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.”2 Brecht opposed the use of catharsis in theatre believing and instead wanted a theatre form that not only stood apart from dramatic theater, but also used the stage as a platform for instruction. He believed that, rather than art being the mirror that reflected society back to the viewer, art should be the tool used to mold society.
During the Weimar years he developed two different modes of theatre: satirical and pedagogical. Brecht’s satirical productions, as seen in pieces such as The Threepenny Opera and
The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, were meant to be entertaining and appeal to a larger, bourgeois audience. The great irony of these plays is that, while the bourgeoisie found entertainment in these performances, they were still meant to expose the corruption and contradictions in a bourgeois, capitalist society. This was also why Brecht chose opera as the style in which these plays would be performed, as opera was a hallmark of bourgeois culture and
1 “A Short Organum For The Theatre.” Brecht on Theatre: the Development of Aesthetics, by Bertolt Brecht and John Willett, E. Methuen, 1978, pp. 183 2 Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Translated by John Willett, Hill and Wang, 1964. pp.71
3 one which forbade the audience from being too critical of the performance itself.3 On the other hand, his pedagogical plays or Lehrstücke such as Mother Courage and Her Children and The
Good Person of Szechuan were meant for a smaller audience; one that was more interested in the political motivations behind the work.4
One great obstacle stood before him: the stage. In theory, the stage in dramatic theatre served as a barrier separating the audience from the performance and creating its own microcosm upon which it existed independent of the spectator’s reality5 and of which it remained completely unaware; the audience was merely a bystander in the performance. The “fourth wall” preserves the illusion of a world separate from the spectators. Scenery and lighting were important to putting the audience in a position where they could easily suspend their disbelief and feel as if they were witnessing the events as they happened; and music was meant to “set the mood” for a scene to inform the audience on how they should feel. Actors fully embodied their characters to further the believability; and the audience itself, the observer, would be disregarded or at least never directly addressed during the performance, otherwise that would be considered a “break” in the fourth wall. Conversely, the goal of epic theatre was to alienate the audience from the performance to a point where they could not simply enjoy the play as a work of art and instead would have to reconcile with the conditions upon which the performance was commenting.
Brecht developed what he called the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect or simply “V-Effekt”).
It became the most versatile tool in his arsenal as it served a wide range of functions and took on
3 In his essay “The Modern Theatre is Epic Theatre” Brecht explains in more detail why opera was to be used for Mahoganny, and the methods he used in making it an alienating experience for the audience. 4 “The Life of Galileo and the Theory of Revolution in Permanence.” Bertolt Brecht Political Theory and Literary Practice, by Betty Nance. Weber and Hubert Heinen, The University of Georgia Press, 1980, pp. 60–61. 5 “The naturalistic stage is in no sense a public platform; it is entirely illusionistic” Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. Translated by Anna Bostock, Verso, 1998, pp. 4 4 many different forms. Many of Brecht’s plays broke the fourth wall in one way or another. In writing as well as on the stage, it was common for an actor to address the audience directly as seen in the epilogue from “The Good Person of Szechuan” in which, after coming to the realization that there are no good people in Szechuan, the audience is urged to find an example of a good person to appease the gods in the real world. This call to action at the very end of the play places the responsibility of discovering how a person can live a morally good life in a world that is fundamentally corrupt. For the stage, set and costume changes would occur in plain view or at least partially obscured to reveal its inner workings as opposed to being fully obscured by a closing curtain or the blackening of the lights like they would be in a dramatic work.
Epic theatre relied on the use of social gestures (Gestus), which referred to an attitude or the single aspect of an attitude that could be expressed in words and actions and were meant to signify the relationships between characters and conditions. John Willett, who translated
Brecht’s notes on theatre in an anthology aptly titled Brecht on Theatre, defines Gestus as having the combined meaning of both ‘gist’ and ‘gesture’ and therefore chooses the obsolete English word ‘gest’ which means ‘bearing’ or ‘carriage’ when translating Brecht’s notes. The adjective form, based off Brecht’s term gestisch, is translated as ‘gestic’. While the concept is not unique to Brecht’s praxis and had been previously used by other writers such as Lessing as being something distinct from Geste or “proper” gesutres, the nature of gest in these works though avoided an analysis of the performative aspect of gesture. For epic theatre, gesture was meant to highlight the socialized — and inherently performative — underpinnings of language that were often taken as being innate to the human condition.
The term does not always refer to the physical sense of gesture but can also point towards archetypal relationships between characters as well as the repetition of key words, actions, and
5 phrases. In Brecht’s writing on the theatre, he explains the function of Gestus in an essay titled
“The Street Scene.” In it, he describes the way a bystander may recount an accident they had witnessed earlier to a group of spectators. They do not embody the people involved in the incident, but instead they gesture toward them and may take on a multitude of roles in the process to tell their story. The spectators who listen to the retelling are left in a position where they can either criticize or confirm the events, learn from them, or form their own opinions based on the bystander’s account. Gestus therefore, is contextual and influenced by the current social paradigm of the spectators rather than that of the play, and ones that they could observe as being identificatory of a specific social condition. For example, the look of a hunted animal is a form of gest, but what makes it a social gest is when it is placed in a context that shows how such an expression is the result of a person’s actions which liken them to such an animal. Alternatively, showing a character who is tired and hunched over from long work hours can become a social gest when the intent behind such an action reveals how the conditions of the working class can lead them to feel weak and tired. Gestus was just as important for the actors as it was for the audience. Just like the witness in Brecht’s street scene who recounts the events of an accident, the actor in an epic theatre production merely presents themselves as they were to the audience rather than embodying a character for the sake of performance. Brecht instructed actors to simply quote their lines, to repeat the incidences of the production. Actors would often also take on multiple roles in the production, rehearse their dialogue “out of character,” and include stage directions with their spoken dialogue. This created characters that forbade the audience from identifying with them, and that the actor simply propped up on stage for the audience to make their own judgements about. Characters in Brecht’s plays were meant to be representational of ideas and as such, the actor was merely supposed to “present” conditions to the audience rather
6 than act them out for the sole purpose of entertainment. For example, the corporate boss who smoked a big, fat cigar and treated his workers poorly was meant to be representation of all corporate bosses.
Similarly, music had meaning that went beyond emotions and as such, was also gestural in Brecht’s plays. As previously mentioned, music in dramatic theatre was made to move the audience toward strong emotions and was there for the enjoyment of both the audience as well as the composers. In this context, the music elevated the text and worked in tandem with both it and the setting to create a cohesive scene. Brecht points specifically to Wagnerian opera and the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (‘the integrated work of art’) as Wagner and his contemporaries composed music meant to excite the audience. Instead, Brecht wanted to separate the different elements of the opera — the music, the text, and the setting — so that each element could stand on its own. The individual elements now had the ability to work against each other and fight for dominance in the production. Of course, neither Brecht nor epic theatre represents a single moment in time.
Though Brecht could not have possibly predicted the developments in digital and visual media, his theories were influential for media theorists commenting on an ever-evolving medium. In the 21st century, Brecht’s contributions are still present, if not in name, then at the very least in theory. There are of course the references to Brecht in pop culture with covers of his more popular songs such as The Alabama Song by The Doors, Mack the Knife by Bobby Darin, and Pirate Jenny by Nina Simone. However, this does not quite address how Brecht’s theories on epic theatre itself have evolved to deal with the conflicts and social issue of today. 7
Fig.1. The three main characters of DHMIS (from left to right): Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and
Duck6
Brecht Today
Breaking the fourth wall as a convention has become a popular trope in contemporary media. It is being employed in Blockbuster movie productions from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
(1986) to Deadpool (2016); and the Marvel comic (first released in 1991) where the hero of the same name constantly breaks the fourth wall to remind the reader that he knows he is in a comic book. As a narrative device, it is often used to relay information to the audience that the character may not be aware of. Alternatively, like Brecht, other creators use techniques like alienation and fourth-wall-breaking to make a social commentary. In the 2011 surrealist webseries Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, a series that closely resembles children’s TV shows such as The Muppets and Sesame Street, the brightly-colored puppets and pedagogic messages often
6 Sloan, Becky and Joseph Pelling, directors. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. YouTube, YouTube, 29 July 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C_HReR_McQ. 8 found in children’s media are subverted to show how the messages in said media can become corrupted by corporate interests and advertisement. Each episode starts off like any typical children’s show would, by introducing the three characters — a red humanoid person, a yellow male puppet, and an anthropomorphic duck — to the lesson of the episode and its teacher.
However, the teacher of each lesson suggests that there is a specific way that these concepts must be applied for them to be valid. In the first episode, on creativity, an anthropomorphic notepad sings a song to show the trio all the ways they can be creative. It starts out innocently enough as the notepad explains to them how they can use their imagination, but as the song continues the notepad begins to subtly suggest that there are limits to creativity and self-expression, such as when it tells the yellow guy that his favorite color is not creative enough or when it destroys his painting of a clown.
Fig.2. A still from the fourth episode, where oats can be seen in the background7
7 Sloan, Becky and Joseph Pelling, directors. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared 4. YouTube, YouTube, 31 Mar. 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9FGgwCQ22w. 9
At the end of the episode, the fourth wall breaks to reveal that the three characters are on the set of a TV show. The dissolution of the fourth wall causes the show to devolve into a nightmarish montage where the music becomes increasingly dissonant and the characters feverishly dance around the production set while rolling human organs in glitter. Later episodes suggest that corporate influence has corrupted the messages of the show and that the whole thing has become a way for companies to better market oat-based products to children. The alienation of DHMIS lies in its use of these childlike characters and themes which invoke a sense of nostalgia or familiarity in the viewer. They would never associate such an image with surreal horror or consumerist corruption but would also never question the latter’s role in children’s media or how it affects the messages being presented to children. Of course, mass media has progressed beyond passive forms of consumption and into more interactive ones with the development of mobile devices and digital media.
The message behind Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared also comes at a time when video sharing services like YouTube have become increasingly popular in distributing children’s media. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this of course, YouTube’s use of autoplay and a machine- learning algorithm which tries to show the viewer videos with similar content or titles based on what they choose to watch makes it easy for young viewers to sit and watch a constant stream of content without any regard to who puts these videos on the site or what their motives are, but because a child may not know how to navigate away from irrelevant videos which can lead them down a rabbit hole of content that they should probably not be viewing. At some point, the child may go from channels that do produce family-friendly content and feature cartoon characters such as Elsa from Disney’s Frozen or Spiderman to that which features disturbing content 10 featuring those same cartoon characters in violent or sexually inappropriate situations and using figures such as Adolf Hitler while still labeling themselves as “child-friendly” content.8
Video games present an even greater challenge since they put the player in direct control of the image, and their heavy reliance on themes of war, violence, class struggle, etc. for aesthetic or cathartic purposes again does not invite the player to contemplate the deep sociopolitical implications of the game’s narrative. However, like with other forms of media, video games have the potential to be just as instructive. Dan Salvato’s visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club!
(DDLC for short) takes cues from other visual novels such as Katawa Shoujo and Love Live! to create a psychological horror game that confronts how superficial visual novels are when it comes to tackling sensitive subject matter such as mental illness and abuse and how interchangeable they all are. Similar to DHMIS’ use of nostalgic, childhood aesthetics as the backdrop for its commentary, the game initially sets itself up to be a regular dating simulator complete with the cute, whimsical aesthetics often found in other popular titles of the same genre such as Clannad and Love Live! but then quickly devolves into a psychological horror story following the death of one of its characters. The game’s world and characters begin to glitch and warp and the music subtly grows more dissonant as it tries to move on as normal with the absence of one of its characters. It challenges a cultural phenomenon of mainstream media that uses mental illness and disability as a plot device that simplifies the complexities of human
8 Wamsley, Laurel. “Is YouTube's Algorithm Endangering Kids?” NPR, NPR, 27 Nov. 2017, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/27/566769570/youtube-faces-increased-criticism-that-its- unsafe-for-kids. The controversy surrounding YouTube‘s algorithm exposing children to inappropriate content was a phenomenon dubbed “Elsagate” as it often featured people dressed as characters such as Elsa from Frozen or Peppa Pig in sexual situations or being killed in a variety of ways. After getting picked up by a number of news outlets, it prompted Youtube to monitor more closely the kind of content which is labeled “child-friendly, but also put a spotlight on how machine-learning can easily be manipulated. 11 behavior and emotions into easily identifiable concepts and platitudes and forces the player to confront those beliefs in a world where their choices have no meaning.
The following thesis will examine more closely the mechanics of games that challenge the use of socio-politically charged themes and aesthetics for the purpose of creating a narrative.
In my first chapter, I begin by defining what a visual novel is and their significance as both a medium for visual storytelling as well as how the conventions of the genre can be used to either reinforce cultural paradigms or undermine them. I then move on to discuss more broadly the nature of immersive play in video games and how the function of immersion continues a cultural phenomenon first identified by media theorists in the 20th century with the popularization of visual mass media (e.g. television and film) and advertisement. I do this by discussing the concept of distraction as it relates to Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Walter
Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and through this, relating it to how video games fit into today’s late capitalist system. The second chapter analyzes how video games contribute to much broader sociopolitical discourse relating to the romanization of violence and mental illness, and further expand on the previous discussion of how they can be used to challenge current social paradigms. To do this I will do a more in-depth discussion on
Doki Doki Literature Club and how the game can be read as a Brechtian critique of visual media and the larger cultural phenomenon of romanticizing mental illness specifically. In the conclusion I will argue how games and other forms of visual media can be used for similar purposes moving forward. 12
CHAPTER 1: THE GAMES WE PLAY: VISUAL NOVELS AND IMMERSION
1.1 What is a Visual Novel?
A visual novel (or “VN” for short) is a type of interactive video game that focuses more on narrative and character development rather than action to drive the story in a similar style to the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 70’s and 80’s.9 Many feature branching storylines and a series of endings — sometimes categorized as being either “good,” “bad,” or “neutral” endings-— that change based on how the player responds to certain situations or lines of dialogue. An example of a typical path-changing choice would be the decision whether to comfort a character during an emotional situation or to hang out with one character over another.
Prioritizing interactions with one character over others and responding favorably to their dialogue also has greater influence over how the story progresses. In some visual novels such as
School Days (2005), which gives the player a limited amount of time to respond, even the player’s failure to choose can change the outcome of the story. Unlike traditional video games, which often feature fully rendered, voice acted, high-definition cutscenes and grant the player full freedom of movement within a 3D environment, visual novels often feature static characters
(called sprites)10 and backgrounds that only change when the scene changes. Most if not all the in-game dialogue, action, and narration takes place in the form of hypertext, or scrolling text that
9 Choose Your Own Adventure was a series of books in which the player would read a short passage and at the end had to make a choice that would correspond to another page in the book. The player would do this until they reached an ending. Packard, Edward, and R. A. Montgomery. Choose Your Own Adventure. Bantam Books, 1979. 10 In computer graphics, the term ‘sprite’ was used to describe an independent object that is meant to be a part of a larger image such as the image of a character that would stand independent of the background. In the 1980’s and 90’s, before 3D games which use polygons and 3D rendering instead, adding character sprites to the game’s source code was the most popular way for developers to integrate character models into the game. For more information, see Tech Terms. Christensson, Per. "Sprite Definition." TechTerms. Sharpened Productions, 10 February 2012. Web. 20 March 2019.
While still considered a niche market in the US and Europe and generally more popular in Japan where they originated, visual novels have steadily been increasing in popularity in the
West over the past several years with greater connectedness to online communities centered on
VNs and the popularity of visual novel style game elements in titles such as Phoenix Wright: Ace
Attorney and Mass Effect. Many popular visual novels have been adapted into anime and made available on commercial streaming sites such as Crunchyroll and Netflix; meanwhile, smaller independent teams of translators have worked alongside communities to put out English translations for lesser-known titles that may never see an official commercial release for years if ever. Digital game distributors such as Steam also make accessing these titles much easier by giving developers a platform to make their products widely available. Furthermore, video games such as ATLUS’ Persona series feature a blend of traditional roleplaying game elements such as a 3D world and dungeon crawling with the hypertext and slice of life elements of a visual novel.
This demands the question: What is the appeal of visual novels and who do they appeal to? How do they compare with traditional video games? And why have they gained such a cult-like following over the years?
Since the release of Pong in the early 1970’s to the present day, video games have continuously been the subject of scrutiny by society. Studies on the effects of playing video games began to spring up largely in response to a shift in youth culture as many children and
11 Lu, B. R. I. A. N. "Hikikomori: The Need to Belong and the Activation of Narrative Collective- Assimilation through Visual Novels." Journal of Interpersonal Relations, Intergroup Relations and Identity 7 (2014): 50-61. 14 adolescents began flocking to arcades after school. However, most of this research focuses on the negative effects of video games — especially trying to establish a link between adolescent aggression and violent video games — since their easy accessibility to children meant a higher chance of exposure and desensitization to graphic content. The first response to this moral panic was the creation of the Electronic Software Ratings Board (ESRB) in 1994 following the release of Mortal Kombat in 1992. Furthermore, their attribution to tragedies such as the Columbine and
Sandy Hook shootings have only fueled the global debate on whether violent video games correlate to violence in young people and have caused. In 2017 the American Psychological
Association (APA) assembled a task force to review the literature on the relationship between aggression in young people and the influence of violent video games. Young people (especially young males) are typically the focus of these studies because of how exposure to violent or otherwise explicit material and environments impacts development. Therein lies the issue. While the conclusion drawn by the task force points toward a strong correlation between violent video games and violent behavior in young people, it is confounded by other outside factors such as race, disposition, class status, and so forth which may also have an effect on a young person’s disposition toward violence. This is not to say that this research is not relevant or important when discussing the regulation of video games and how a large consumption of explicit, graphic material may have some influence over a young person’s views on violence. But identifying one sole factor as the prime reason for the increase in youth aggression misses the point of how neurobiological and environmental factors also play key roles in how young people handle violence. Additionally, research into the positive social and cognitive benefits of playing video games is a relatively new field of study by comparison. 15
In a 2014 study by the American Psychological Association (APA), gaming was found to provide both children and adults with an environment where they could safely explore emotional and social experiences and simulate their consequences. Both visual novels and roleplaying games are quite good at this since both often offer the player an array of good and bad choices that lay out the ways in which a person could respond to a certain situation, but also tend to mark for the player which option is the most ideal one and which ones would elicit a negative reaction.
Video games also provide children with the opportunity to develop important problem- solving and team-building skills.12 Games have also become more social and communicative with many multiplayer games featuring chat and messaging functions that enable the player to talk to other players or with their teammates. Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games such as World of
Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV have also created environments in which the player can interact more casually with other players, while also giving them the option of playing by themselves if they so choose.
Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken posits that the appeal of video games lies in their idealized versions of reality that entice and motivate the player to carry out tasks. In the same breath McGonigal clarifies that gamers simply do not “reject” reality, but instead find satisfaction and comfort in games that they do not get from real life. Similarly, visual novels offer a special escape for the player by transporting them to a world where they can find comfort and companionship in a safe environment. In both cases, the word ‘escape’ does not simply refer to the idea of moving between physical and digital worlds, but also refers to immersive play’s use of catharsis. This factor will play an important role in assessing how gaming plays into a larger phenomenon, and how it can be used for a Brechtian critique of technical and narrative
12 Granic, Isabela, Adam Lobel, and Rutger CME Engels. "The benefits of playing video games." American psychologist 69.1 (2014): 66. pp. 1 16 conventions in gaming in the second chapter. Where they differ is in the role of the player and the goal of the game. In a traditional game you are the hero of the story; a larger than life character who, despite sometimes looking like an ordinary person, usually possesses some extraordinary powers or performs extraordinary feats. A classic example would be World of
Warcraft, which boasted over 12 million subscribers at its peak in 2010. In WoW, the player cultivates an online avatar by choosing from a list of races and classes and is then thrown into the world of Azeroth where they become one of the most powerful and celebrated people in the game.
In a visual novel the player often assumes the role of an average person, typically a high school student or young adult, who has no special abilities or attributes. Equally, the basic premise of most visual novels is, by comparison to other video games, rather mundane. Take
Katawa Shoujo (lit. “Crippled Girls”) for example. In this novel you play as Hisao Nakai, a high school student who is transferred to a school for special needs students after he experiences a sudden heart attack and is diagnosed with arrhythmia. When he first arrives to the school, he is apprehensive about his condition and his ability to live a normal life but when he meets and befriends a diverse cast of characters who are also living with various disabilities ranging from blindness to missing limbs, he slowly learns to accept his condition and through these characters he learns how to live with his disability. 17
Fig 3. A picture of Hanako from Katawa Shoujo
Unlike traditional games, which are generally fast-paced and provide the player with the instant gratification one gets from defeating a difficult enemy or finishing a quest, visual novels are slower and rely on building up the tension of the story for a greater climax and resolution. They feature more believable and relatable characters and do not shy away from featuring realistic portrayals of heavy-hitting subject matter, from heartbreak and abuse to depictions of mental illness and suicide, which are placed front and center in the game’s narrative as conflicts which the player must help resolve. In Katawa Shoujo one of the girls the player meets and can romance is a girl named Hanako (as pictured in Fig.313). Hanako has severe burns on the right side of her body following a house fire that kills her parents. As a result, she is very shy when talking to new people, preferring the company of small groups rather than large crowds, and suffers from severe depression and anxiety. This is expressed in her dialogue, which is often
13 Katawa Shoujo. PC, Four Leaf Studios, 2012 18 conveyed as a stutter or the use of ellipses between words. Much of her story arc in the novel revolves around Hisao trying to help her become more comfortable around him and make her depression more manageable.
On the one hand, giving attention to issues that are difficult to talk about in real life let alone portray in a dignified manner in a video game is a socially admirable thing to do, yet many critics of visual novels still argue on the other hand that using such heavy subject matter is mere window dressing, another obstacle that compels the player to act in order to get a girl to fall in love with them. In doing so the game downplays how serious these issues are, given that they can be resolved by simply saying the right thing to the character, which plays to a normative mode of thinking in which platitudes on love and intimacy are regarded as the best solution to grappling with complex emotions. In Katawa Shoujo, each character’s route in the game reveals more about their personal backstory and their own hardships in dealing with their disabilities. As previously mentioned, Hanako’s route specifically centers around her scars and the depression and loneliness that come as a result of having such a prominent disfigurement. Yet, this tragedy gets overshadowed by the fact that she is still a romanceable option for the player. Therefore, her shyness is played up to be a cute, defining personality trait, that is meant to appeal to the player despite her appearance, which is seen as an obstacle that Hisao must be willing to overlook in order to love her. This makes for a rather superficial experience that only romanticizes disability or mental illness for narrative convenience.
In 2017, taking cues from visual novels like Katawa Shoujo and Love Live, Dan Salvato created Doki Doki Literature Club! (‘DDLC’ for short) out of a love-hate relationship with anime and the visual novel genre. He found that the trope of “cute girls doing cute things,” while sometimes the main appeal of a show or VN, could also be off-putting to those who were not 19 into anime and made for rather vapid playing experiences that did not fully consider how something like depression or abuse would actually affect a character.14 DDLC is a short (~6 hours total gameplay time) free-to-play psychological horror game disguised as a regular dating simulator.
Fig.4. The four girls of DDLC (from left to right): Natsuki, Yuri, Sayori, and Monika15 It features a nameless male protagonist for whom the player provides a name and an all-female cast consisting of four girls: Sayori, Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika. Each girl is designed to fit a certain character type typical to the genre. Sayori is your childhood best friend, Natsuki is the stubborn, bratty type, Yuri is shy and mysterious, and Monika is the popular girl. Yet, despite their generic appearances and strict adherence to visual novel stereotypes, the girls also have
14 In an interview with Kotaku, Salvato explains that the aesthetic detracts from any serious conversation on mental illness, and that by taking advantage of it to make the player confront more uncomfortable subject matter and inspire them to help others. Jackson, Gita. “Doki Doki Literature Club's Horror Was Born From A Love-Hate Relationship With Anime.” Kotaku, Kotaku.com, 20 Oct. 2017, kotaku.com/doki-doki-literature-clubs-horror-was-born-from-a-love-1819724999. 15 Doki Doki Literature Club!. PC version, Team Salvato, 2017 20 very real insecurities and problems that are hinted at in their dialogue and poems they write that become more prominent as the game progresses. Sayori is the most notable in the first act as she suffers from and exhibits many of the subtle signs of depression (e.g. oversleeping and unnecessary guilt).
DDLC is broken up into two main acts plus the endgame. The first act is the dating simulator portion where the player interacts with the other club members and writes poems (as seen in Fig.5 above) for them using a list of words that are meant to appeal to one of the three girls who cheerfully bounce up and down when the player selects a word they like. Even from this moment, the player will notice something is off about the game. Monika is suspiciously absent from the girls you can potentially appeal to during these poem writing segments despite having the option to interact with and show her the poems they had created, and the list of words the player can choose from when creating poems range from cute and simplistic words that one would expect to see in a visual novel of this genre such as “kitty” and “party” to dark and disturbing words like “depression” and “suicide,” the latter two appealing to Yuri and Sayori respectively.
Toward the end of the first act, Sayori admits to the player that she suffers frodepression, and by the end of the act she confesses that she loves the protagonist. This marks the first major choice the player must make, who either has the option to confess their love to her or remain friends. No matter what the player chooses, Sayori kills herself the next day and her character file is literally deleted from the game. This forces the player to start over by deleting all their saved progress and marks the beginning of the second act, the psychological horror portion.
From that point on the game tries to continue without her, but because she is pivotal to certain 21 plot points and triggers certain scenarios in the game,16 the game’s world begins to fall apart.
What makes DDLC unsettling is not just its disturbing visuals or the tension building of the first act, but rather the implications behind them. The game takes a Brechtian approach to the visual novel genre by never letting the player fully immerse themselves in the story or identify with the protagonist they play as, and instead forces them to navigate a world that is cognizant of its own falseness and is filled with characters that are not real or realistic. By Dan’s own admission, he does not even consider the protagonist to be a “real” character and instead views him merely as an avatar that the player uses to interact with the girls.17
Fig.5. Monika reacting to Natsuki's joke by breaking the fourth wall18
16 Sayori is both the character who initially convinces the protagonist to join the literature club as well as the character who steps in when Yuri and Natsuki begin to fight. 17 In Dan Salvato’s AMA (‘Ask Me Anything’) session on Reddit he explains that the protagonist is given so little focus because he is supposed to represent a typical visual novel protagonist and is a self-insert character through whom the girls are meant to interact with the player. This is later reiterated in his anniversary stream on Twitch. 18 Doki Doki Literature Club!. PC version, Team Salvato, 2017 22
DDLC knows it is a game and wants to make sure the player knows it is a game by using techniques that are reminiscent of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, in which the stage was treated as a platform for scene and costume changes would appear on stage and characters in full view of the audience and actors would frequently break the fourth wall to address the audience directly.
In the first act these small interactions, such as Monika telling the player to save their game or her being aware of the fact that the game is in English, sound more like satire since it is not uncommon for a game or show to poke fun at the fact that it is one, but these self-referential jokes remain just that, jokes.
In the case of DDLC, this joke is a slight jab at narrative conventions characteristic of the genre such as how puns and jokes often get lost in translation when going from Japanese to another language like English. Yet, it also highlights the irony of the game since it did not need to be translated to English prior to its release as it already is an English title made by an
American, but still is set in a Japanese style high school and uses aspects of Japanese culture. It also shows how out of place Monika is among her peers who all have Japanese names that have symbolic meaning related to their personalities and interests whereas the name Monika means
“advisor,” both a reference to her position as club president — and therefore the game’s main authority figure — and her ability to manipulate the game’s files. These techniques will be explored in greater detail in a later chapter.
Another element that makes visual novels such a popular medium for storytelling is that they introduce an aspect of player agency to the game not found in games with a linear plotline.
All video games create agency for their players as they allow the players to make choices on behalf of their character, but the nature of this choice is defined differently by different games.
For example, in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the player can choose to not react to an enemy 23 attack, but not doing so would more than likely result in a game over and cause the player to start from a previous save point. Conversely, the player could choose to join a group of rebels or join the king’s army, which would open them up to certain quests, but overall this choice has no effect on the endgame. Visual novels are unique in that most choices have an influence on the outcome of the story. As mentioned earlier, many visual novels feature branching story paths that are affected by the player’s responses to certain lines of dialogue. The player could choose to hang out with one character, which would increase their relationship with them, but this may in turn weaken their relationship to other characters. These choices can also grant them access to certain scenarios and endings that are only available by following a certain string of dialogue options or by interacting with certain characters more favorably than others. This seems very formulaic, and it is, but despite how formulaic this is, what makes visual novels appealing is that the experience can theoretically be tailored to the player’s preferences. This not only makes them feel as if they have a say in the outcome, but it also adds a lot of replay value to the game. Some video games, such as ATLUS’ Persona series, use a mix of linear gameplay elements such as a
3D world and (mostly) linear storyline with this quasi-slice of life style of gameplay where the player must balance saving people and defeating monsters within the time allotted with their own free time where they can choose to play through additional storylines and scenarios (referred to as ‘social links’) which give the player the opportunity to learn more about the people in their life and strengthen their friendship with certain characters. Social links are mostly beneficial from a strategic standpoint as they either unlock special moves for party members, increase the experience gained from fusing new personas the player can use in battle, or upgrade and unlock personas once the player reaches the end of a social link story arc. 24
These romance plots, however, are optional for the most part and only benefit the player from a strategic standpoint as they either unlock special moves for their party members in combat or more powerful personas that the player can use in battles, but aside from that these romance plots have no real influence on the outcome of the game itself. In Persona 4 you can even try to romance all the available female characters without it having any negative effects on the outcome of the game. Yet, despite the obviously strategic reasons for wanting to utilize this feature, players also tend to use the free time element of the game to create ideal lives for themselves and develop emotional attachments to the characters they interact with. This seems to beg the question what purpose do these game elements serve form a purely emotional standpoint?
1.2 Zero to Hero
While visual novels can be found in almost any literary genre, from drama to science fiction to even horror, the most popular genre and style of visual novel is romance. More commonly referred to as “dating simulators,” in these games the protagonist—typically a young male who is still in high school—meets a colorful cast of female figures whose personalities can be reduced to a handful of character types: the shy and mysterious girl, the peppy or cutesy girl, the popular girl, the hotheaded/stubborn girl, and so on. Personality-wise the protagonist, by comparison, is relatively neutral aside from being a generally nice and mild-mannered guy; yet somehow all the girls in his immediate circle all have the potential to fall in love with him from the moment they meet. This is not without reason. Implementing a character with too much personality would make them harder for the player to relate to, therefore creating a character that is essentially “blank” from the beginning gives the player the opportunity to project themselves and their own feelings onto the protagonist. This does not stop developers from critiquing or 25 attempting to deconstruct these conventions, however. School Days, a visual novel by developer
0verflow that is designed to be more of an interactive anime than an actual game, is a deconstruction of the harem genre that many VNs fall under.
It primarily follows a love triangle between Makoto Itou and two female students,
Kotonoha and Sekai, the former being a girl he meets on a train and subsequently falls in love with, and the latter being his friend and the more tomboyish of the two. They are accompanied by a cast of several other girls who round out the cast of characters Makoto encounters and can become romantically involved with, but they are not the focus of the game. The first act of the game revolves around Makoto trying to win the affection of Kotonoha with the help of his friend
Sekai. However, in helping her friend, Sekai realizes that she also has feelings for Makoto. This marks the beginning of the game’s central conflict. It is unique in that its bad endings are highly violent and involve one of the two female leads either killing themselves or Makoto out of jealousy. The most infamous, and the one that the anime adaptation uses, involves Makoto being stabbed and then decapitated by Sekai. These scenes are unsettling and disturbing to watch, but they are not meant to scare the player to the same degree that Team Salvato’s Doki Doki
Literature Club does. Instead, School Days posits itself as a critique on what would really happen if a high school boy found himself surrounded by a group of girls who all implicitly want to be with him. But School Days is a flawed critique of the genre largely due to its adherence to narrative conventions.
As previously mentioned, School Days is unlike most visual novels in that it is more of an interactive anime rather than a true novel. From a gameplay standpoint this presents no problem as the user interface of the game is easy to use, but where the game fails is that the player is not so much making choices for Makoto as they are trying to steer him away from making poor 26 decisions. Makoto himself is an intentionally flawed and unlikable character too. Visual novel protagonists are inherently indecisive, blank-slate characters by design because they are meant to act as a vehicle that the player can project themselves onto, but they also have the opportunity to grow as characters as the story progresses and leave very little room for the player to remain so undecided on which girl is their favorite. School Days does not offer any such redemption for the character and instead the game becomes a ceaseless back and forth of Makoto constantly questioning his feelings for either Kotonoha or Sekai, or any of the other girls he can potentially become romantically involved with. The game wants the player to fail, and to many that takes away the fun of trying to do the right thing and not cheat.19
Other critics of the visual novel genre argue that the medium’s adherence to simplistic character types creates fan incredibly unrealistic portrayal of real-life relationships and are nothing more than a self-indulgent power fantasy for the player. Sales numbers show that fans do not seem to mind this and would probably even say that the self-indulgence is widely the point of visual novels.20 A 2015 government survey reported on by Japan Times found that nearly 40% of single Japanese people were uninterested in a relationship and considered them to be
“bothersome.”21 Dating simulators and other virtual relationships, on the other hand, were
19 Eisenbeis, Richard. “School Days HQ Is a Beautiful, Shocking, Yet Flawed Title.” Kotaku, Kotaku.com, 21 May 2013, kotaku.com/school-days-hq-is-a-beautiful-shocking-yet-flawed-tit-5937487. Eisenbeis’ review of School Days describes it as being a “play to lose” game because in order to truly get the full experience of the game, the player inevitably has to lead Makoto to making poor decisions. 20 In 2015, the English translation of Clannad briefly beat out Call of Duty as one of the top selling games on Steam. Additionally, a Kickstarter campaign to localize the visual novel Muv-Luv — which originally had a goal of $250,000 — closed with over $1,255,444 in pledges. For references see, Hansen, Steven. “Clannad Visual Novel on Steam, Briefly Outsells Call of Duty.” Destructoid, 2015, www.destructoid.com/clannad-visual-novel-on-steam-briefly-outsells-call-of-duty-322273.phtml. Lada, Jenni. “Why a Visual Novel Raised $1.2 Million on Kickstarter.” PC Gamer, 2015, www.pcgamer.com/why-a-visual-novel-raised-12-million-on-kickstarter/. 21 Glascock, Taylor. “The Japanese Gamers Who Prefer to Date Videogame Characters.” Wired, Conde Nast, 20 Nov. 2017, www.wired.com/2015/10/loulou-daki-playing-for-love/. 27 viewed more favorably. The Guardian cites another government survey conducted in Japan that found that- about 30% of single women and 15% of single men admitted having fallen in love with a fictional game character;, which is higher than the data for those men and women who had admitted to being in love with a pop star or actor.22 At first glance, the data and these reports may seem laughable, but they might reflect the situation of young people today, and should make us ask why so many see merit in finding companionship in the virtual world. The most apparent answer is that they reduce complexities of real-life romance—scheduling dates, cultivating relationships, communicating — as they simplify or completely remove such difficulties and instead replace them with easy-to-identify personality types and choices the player must make.
According to a visual novel fan on the blogging website, Tumblr, who goes by the name
“Serensama,” visual novels are appealing because they allow the player a chance to live out their fantasies in a safe environment that they have control over. They give the player the opportunity to indulge and seek out partners that they would maybe never consider pursuing in real life and they can do it without scrutiny.23 Serensama’s comment is also backed up by a study done by
Brian Lu on Japanese hikikomori. While the concept of social withdrawal disorders is not specific to Japan, “hikikomori” (meaning “withdrawal”) is a phenomenon specific to Japan largely affecting young men between the ages of 15 and 39 years old in which the person voluntarily withdraws from social interactions and isolates themselves either partially or completely from the outside world.24 They are not employed, training for employment, or
22 McVeigh, Tracy. “For Japan's 'Stranded Singles', Virtual Love Beats the Real Thing.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 20 Nov. 2016, www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/20/japan-stranded- singles-virtual-love. 23 Serensama. “Just a Random Musing.” Tumblr, 2017, serensama.tumblr.com/post/167531019659/just-a- random-musing. 24 Kato, Takahiro A., et al. “Hikikomori: Experience in Japan and International Relevance.” World Psychiatry, vol. 17, no. 1, 2018, pp. 105–106., doi:10.1002/wps.20497. 28 enrolled in school, and will only consider leaving their home for things such as food. Lu cites that the reasons why these people may become reclusive are often tied to inadequate social relationships in childhood or adolescence especially as it pertains to parent-child relationships, bullying, and a strong fear of rejection or judgement from others. Hikikomori need a sense of belonging, but the real world is perceived as a hostile environment and participating in it opens the person up to criticism. Staying inside becomes much more appealing, but this is of course counterproductive to satisfying their need to belong.
Lu refers to the concept of "narrative collection assimilation” which describes the process by which the player assimilates into the narrative they are experiencing. In this sense, the afflicted person is provided a place where they can fulfill their sense of belonging without the fear of rejection. This is quite simple to accomplish too, given that the player experiences the narrative from a first-person view which makes it easier for them to put themselves in the protagonist’s shoes and make decisions based on how they personally would react. Additionally, the player is reduced solely to character actions to drive the narrative forward and the love interests available to the player are often broken down into easy-to-follow character types and personalities that tend to take the guesswork out of how one might react to a certain situation.
They also provide the player with rewarding experiences wherein they get to embark on an emotional journey with fun and memorable characters that they get to know at an intimate level; something they do not get to experience in real life. Their replay value means that, even if the player does not get the ending that they want, all they must do is start the game over and try for the ending they want. Even the most stubborn, seemingly hard-to-get characters can be persuaded to eventually fall for and confess their love to the player with enough time. They are a gateway to a world in which the player is the master of their own fate, a fate that may be 29 unattainable in real life due to certain constraints. The perfect partner is but a few clicks, $40, and a 4GB download away.
The mass appeal of visual novels can also be explained by the shifting trends in digital and consumerist culture that has been induced by the ubiquity of technology in people’s everyday lives, which has also marked a shift in the ways people interact with each other. Video games have become a cultural cornerstone within the past decade, generating over $30 billion in revenue as of 2017 according to the Entertainment Software Association25 and their ability to motivate people to take on otherwise tedious tasks has piqued the interest of businesses and educators alike who wish to implement gameplay style elements to motivate people to work harder or to supplement the learning process. In “Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” Patrick
Jagoda describes gamification as the process by which gaming elements become increasingly more prominent in non-gaming activities such as doing housework or checking into locations.
This includes apps such as Habitica, in which the user creates a character as if they are in a roleplaying game and treats the task of forming positive habits or breaking bad ones as if they are quests. The player is rewarded with virtual gold and experience points that level up their character for reinforcing good habits, while continuing to support bad habits causes the player to lose health points.
Jagoda extends the concept beyond apps and proposes that gamification is a phenomenon in which gaming becomes the dominant mode through which people experience life.26 He invokes the concept of “spectacle” initially proposed by Guy Debord, in which life becomes
25 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry. The Entertainment Software Association, 2018, www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EF2018_FINAL.pdf. pp.10 26 Jagoda identifies gamification as “a condition of seepage through which game mechanics and objectives come to constitute the work, leisure, thought patterns, affects and social relations of the overdeveloped world” (Jagoda, 116) 30 increasingly mediated by representations and images in a society that is dictated by mass consumption. Debord was not just referring to media and the mass consumption thereof when talking about the spectacle, though that is perhaps the most prominent example one can turn to and the one best suited for talking about video games. Rather, the spectacle could be extended to commodity and commodification within a capitalist mode of production and how the compulsory consumption of such skews people’s relationships with each other. The spectacle to Debord also defined a process through which the dominant paradigm of a society was made manifest through the use of images, which dictate the norms in a society; and a society that increasingly relies on technology in everyday life — from social media to smartphones and laptops — expands in hitherto unseen ways the spectacle of consumerism that is capitalism. For Jagoda this meant that gamification would inevitably become an integral part of society and the lens through which people interacted with their environment and each other. Of course, unlike Debord’s interpretation of the spectacle, which relied on more passive forms of consumption such as television and advertising, videoe games ar an interactive medium that can be tailored to suit the needs of its user and relies much more heavily on user-generated content than an earlier form of spectacle that Debord described. They take the process of mediation a step further using immersive play.
There is of course a distinction between the society of the spectacle and a more gamified one, however, as the society of the spectacle calls for the prohibition of activity that does not benefit the ruling class, whereas video games seem to challenge that with its necessity for consumer participation. While a more immersive form of consumption integral to video games may afford the user the ability to create their own content or directly affect their own surroundings, they still operate within the dominant mode of production in a similar fashion to 31 mass media and are still subject to reinforcing a dominant paradigm in which leisure cannot exist apart from the capitalist system. In an earlier form of the spectacle, this paradigm was understood as the transition from ‘being’ into ‘having’ — via the acquisition of commodities — and then later into our current society of ‘having’ to ‘appearing’ in which abstractions manifested as commodity. Jagoda expands this process to incorporate ‘appearing’ into ‘interacting.” Video games also further blur the lines between the real and virtual world by placing the control of the latter directly into the hands of the player. Immersive play therefore marks the increasing integration of the machine and the human body, and one which demands a constant engagement with the medium.
Fig.6. A still from the South Park episode "Make Love, Not Warcraft"27
27 Parker, Trey. “Make Love, Not Warcraft.” South Park, season 10, episode 8, 2006. 32
1.3 Immersion
Immersion. The word alone conjures up a certain mental image in one’s head. The artist completely focused on their craft. The musician totally lost in the moment of their music. In the context of video games however, immersion seems to take on a variety of meanings. In the broadest sense of the word, immersion is often linked to the idea of escaping from real life and slipping into an idealized version of reality. It seems to imply that the act of playing and immersing oneself in a game is a somewhat somatic experience for the player, and that the people who partake in this do so because they cannot handle the real world. This would make sense when one considers how someone so engrossed in a session of a game like World of
Warcraft appears to tune out the world around them for several hours and seems to have trouble readjusting to the real world once they log out or become reclusive altogether. This is a stereotype and only speaks for a fraction of immersive gameplay experiences. Immersive play is a much more nuanced phenomenon. Many of the negative connotations of the word “immersion” come out of research that reinforces cultural stereotypes of video games that label them as a waste of time and the people who frequently play them as lazy or addicted in the most serious cases. South Park mocks these critics in an episode titled “Make Love, Not Warcraft” where the kids become addicted to the game to stop a high-level player from killing lower level players.
The punchline of the whole episode is that the CEOs of Blizzard do not play these games themselves because they have lives and that people who spend all their time playing these games have no life and are all morbidly obese and acne-ridden. In more recent years Fortnite’s popularity among school-aged children has become the subject of similar scrutiny by both 33 parents and the media alike.28 This is also backed by the World Health Organization’s decision to include “gaming disorder” in its 2018 International Classification of Diseases.29 The caveat that many simply looking to dismiss video games overlook however, is that gamers do not simply
“escape” from reality and that video games provide players with an experience and sense of fulfillment that is desperately missing from reality. Earlier skeptics of video games would probably scoff at that assertion and argue that if gamers are so dissatisfied with real life, clearly, they should work more to change their circumstances rather than escaping to the virtual world.
And yet, this is rarely the case. According to a 2018 census by The Entertainment Software
Association, gamers in the US account for roughly 50% of the total population with people over the age of 18 accounting for more than 70% of the gaming population.30 Furthermore, the average gamer is approximately 34 years old.31 When taking into account both online and worldwide gaming communities, the overall gaming population increases. What this data suggests is that not only are most gamers adults, but the likelihood that someone knows at least one person who plays video games is 1:2 and that gamers are a diverse group of people ranging from college students to parents and spouses to even company CEOs. What is even more
28 Feeley, Jef, and Christopher Palmeri. “Fortnite Addiction Is Forcing Kids Into Video-Game Rehab.” Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg, 2018, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-27/fortnite-addiction- prompts-parents-to-turn-to-video-game-rehab. 29 “Gaming Disorder.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, 14 Sept. 2018, www.who.int/features/qa/gaming-disorder/en/. While WHO notes that this is not a disorder that effects a large amount of people and is more of a warning to people who frequently play games to curb their play time, the decision to still consider it a significant issue predicates people’s concerns on how harmful gaming can be. 30 According to the ESA website more than 150 million Americans play video games. This number was compared to census data provided by the US Census Bureau, which estimates that the US population is approximately 328 million. 31 The average age for all gamers is based on the average age between males (32) and females (36). 34 apparent is that these are people with goals and ambitions, so what is it that gamers identify as missing from real life?
In Reality is Broken, McGonigal details the ways in which video games fulfill the need for satisfying work that is often missing from real life. Video games are fun, reality is not, and a capitalist society makes it difficult for someone in the workforce to take joy in their work as the worker is alienated from their work and from the act of production. While McGonical does not explicitly reference Marxist theory as the basis of her argument, video games seem to offer up a solution to an issue that Marx identifies in relation to labor. For Marx, what made work alienating was that it reduced the worker to the product he had a hand in creating, but the worker could not realize himself in the act of production and he could not enjoy the product of his labor.
Video games on the other hand, while they can be considered work and sometimes offer up a challenging task to the player, are participatory and provide the player with a feedback system with which they can check their progress towards their goals and receive an immediate response
— both positive and negative — from the game whether it be a game over screen or leveling up that informs the player on their progress. They are satisfying work because the player is better able to thrive on the effort they put into the game and can realize themselves in the work they put in either by completing the quest or level and collecting their rewards, or by beating the game altogether.
However, video games are still products of capitalism and as such, the relationship between the player and the means of production is merely a façade. Despite this, it does not prevent the developer from giving the player the tools they need to affect their own awareness of society and given that games are such an interactive medium for storytelling or for sharing ideas, the onus lies with the developer on how they wish to use their product. This is what makes a 35 game like Doki Doki Literature Club, a game from a genre that essentially commodifies human emotion and interactions, such a standout as it challenges how society’s mass consumption of tragedy can be detrimental to how it is perceived in the real world. Other game scholars such as
Aaron Smuts who have written about immersive gameplay view it not so much as an escape from the real world itself, but a momentary release from the things that make everyday life difficult. At first this may seem paradoxical considering that ultra-violent video games are some of the most popular games on the market.32 It may also seem contradictory given that games portray worlds more chaotic than the world they are trying to take a break from and that games also tend to feature tedious tasks such as level grinding, where the player must fight monsters repeatedly or do other tasks in order to level up their character before progressing to the next area, that might seem more like busywork than entertainment. To this, Aaron Smuts proposes the rich experience theory. According to his theory, people seek out novel experiences in order to get “relief from boredom,” where boredom can refer to the monotony of everyday life.33 Much like the role of theatre, visual media like film and video games offer an outlet for strong emotions such as fear and pity. Another way to understand the importance of immersion and its function in gaming would be to think of it in terms of its relationship to spectatorship.
Prior to the development of video games, media theorists were more preoccupied with how newer forms of media changed society’s perceptions of art as well as the function art itself served. In Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he
32 Data provided by the Entertainment Software Association notes that the top selling game in 2017 was first-person shooter Call of Duty: WWII. Furthermore, the two most popular game genres are shooters and action games which make up almost 50% of all sales. For more information, see Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry. The Entertainment Software Association, 2018, www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/EF2018_FINAL.pdf. 33 Torner, Evan, and William J. White. Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role- Playing. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2012. Print. 36 details the ways in which technological reproducibility, the ability to copy and mass distribute a work of art, had divorced the artwork from its aura as it was now able to be put on display for a much larger audience. Aura in this context can be understood as the uniqueness or authenticity of an object in relation to its position in space and time.34 Before mechanical reproduction, before film and photography, artwork was beholden to its function in ritual or as religious iconography.
With the development of mass media, the importance of a work of art now relied more on the way in which it was received by the audience, or as Benjamin referred to it, its exhibition value.
This was not a bad thing per se, but the loss of art’s aura was not without certain ramifications.
Art now played a different role in society that relied less on its function of upholding tradition. More emphasis could be put on the exhibition value of a work of art, but it was also as a vehicle for promoting new ideas. Film was especially adept at this since it had the ability to capture the audience’s attention through the use of a camera lens, which directed their focus on what they should pay attention to, making for an experience that could be both entertaining and revolutionary as it had the potential to disseminate ideas to a much larger audience in a shorter period of time. Film places the audience in the position of a spectator and a critic, albeit a
“distracted” one as Benjamin describes it, that retained the potential to pick up on habits and could be instructed on how to act. Jaeho Kang defines the phenomenon of distraction in greater detail in his work Walter Benjamin and the Media. Distraction in film worked in a similar fashion to catharsis in dramatic theatre in that it was incompatible with any deep contemplation on the part of the viewer. Much like montage, the constant moving back and forth between stages and areas in a game made it to where the player remained simultaneously engaged and pacified in the narrative but was still subconsciously open to habit-forming suggestion.
34 Benjamin, Walter, et al. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduceability, and Other Writings on Media. Belknap, 2008. 37
Much like its predecessor, theatre, film often served as a mirror reality using set designs and special effects to put the audience in the mood and better help frame any judgements they could make. Unlike theatre and artwork, film’s constant jump cuts and camera movements made it so that the audience could never fully immerse themselves in the world which it had created, but still remained in a state of shock (both astonishment and paralysis) due to the fact that they are persistently subjected to new images in real time. Film could much more easily focus in on the finer details of the human form and put their minute movements on full display for the audience, inviting them to carefully examine what was before them. Theatre did not have this luxury and instead relied more heavily on the use of illusions since the spectator in the theatre was more of a passive bystander in the production and could therefore much more easily immerse themselves in the performance. This is of course where Brecht’s epic theatre comes in as it too strips away the veil of mysticism that theatre wished to hold onto.
Video games, it would seem, occupy a unique space between film, theatre, and artwork which combine elements of all three to deliver a unique experience to the audience. They require a multitude of teams to bring the vision to life and give the game an artistic quality that is pleasing to the player similar to the way the artist paints a backdrop to fit the scene or a set crew constructs a production set to immerse the spectator in the performance. What makes them more analogous to film, however, is that the individual elements of the game must be seamlessly stitched together to create a cohesive final product. The artwork, music, and characters all work together for the purpose of aesthetics. Things like glitches and broken game mechanics are often regarded as immersion-breaking and take the player out of the moment.The player experiences the game from the perspective of the hero and the availability of special effects, sound mixing, and lighting coupled with the ability to often experience the game environment from multiple 38 anglese ar all employed to suspend the player’s disbelief and further immerse them in the game; what was once an illusion now becomes a substitute for the player’s own reality. Yet the experience of a game played from a third-person view is slightly different from a first person one given that the player in the former merely guides a character to their goal, and the latter more readily puts the player in the shoes of the character. While not as passive as a theatre production, the player is kept at arm’s length from the game world even when they are in direct control of the character.
Where games seemingly differ is that, while a person watching a film is only limited to seeing whatever the camera is focused on, video games let the player explore their environment to some degree by allowing them to control the character’s movement and the camera itself.
Even a simple side-scrolling game such as Super Mario Bros. allows the player to move left and right or jump up. Items that the player may need to progress are strategically hidden within the game to encourage the player to explore their surroundings in more detail and in many cases uncover more about the game’s world. Yet the difference is largely surface level. Immersion is still a form of distraction and in the sense of immersive play, a more advanced form of mediation that still leaves the player open to suggestion by the medium. However, video games do this by aestheticizing even such issues as class struggles, war, genocide, and so on, to let the player be the hero of their own story, but just as quickly are ready to deny having any political inclinations.
The response, Benjamin argues, is to politicize art. 39
Content warning: This chapter involves the discussion of potentially triggering subject matter such as rape and sexual assault, suicide, and self-harm.
CHAPTER 2: REBOOTING BRECHT: THE BRECHTIAN TECHNIQUES OF DOKI
DOKI LITERATURE CLUB!
2.1 Can Video Games Be Political?
The politicization of art can refer to any work that comments either directly or indirectly on any social injustice, institution, or idea. By politicizing art, the viewer is often placed into a position in which they must confront provocative and sometimes uncomfortable messages being posed in said art and evaluate their meaning in the context of society. For theatre practitioners like Brecht, this of course meant deconstructing theatre so that the audience could not fully identify or empathize with the characters and instead was made to view the performance dispassionately. In the 21st century, artists such as Banksy use methods such as culture jamming in order to subvert consumerist messages. Where does this leave video games then? Game creators are no strangers to introducing politically-charged conflicts. Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises in the gaming industry, dives into themes of war and military to comment on existing power structures and the morality of the military. Games such as Deus Ex and Bioshock present themselves as some of gaming’s most profound critiques on how capitalism exploits people’s fears of technology and race to better control them or how an unchecked libertarian government is doomed to fail, respectively. Both games provide a hands- on experience to such atrocities and force the player to confront these systems head on or make morally dubious choices that they must later reflect on. Yet, despite video games being a potential platform that makes players reflect critically on how their actions affect the game and 40 make them better at recognizing such injustices in the real world, there is still a great aversion by both game developers and gamers alike to putting overt political messages in games.
Take Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 for example.
The game is set in the not-so-distant future in a war-torn version of Washington D.C following a civil war and the collapse of American civilization in the wake of a viral outbreak of smallpox. The US government has been overthrown by authoritarian and fascist groups and it is implied in one of the trailers that gun owners had a greater chance of surviving than those who did not own guns. The plot seems to be inspired heavily by current world politics, but make no mistake, this game is not making any political statements as stated by the game’s creative director, Terry Spier. In a 2018 interview with Polygon, Spier denied that the game was in any way trying to make an explicit political statement, instead insisting that the game’s own premise is a much more feel-good story about people coming together in hard times to rebuild society while exploring a new environment. Any attempt to make Spier commit to taking a political stance on the game’s premise is met with him awkwardly avoiding the question and downplaying the game’s own plot.35 This is puzzling given that both gun ownership and rights along with the growing fears of fascism and authoritarianism in the US — both the radicalization of fringe groups and within the government following the 2016 election — are currently among the most divisive topics circulating in the media and that Ubisoft, the team behind the game, seems to have no issue with using the aesthetics and imagery of political unrest to tell a redemption story.
It is even more puzzling given that the catalyst for events of the first game, The Division, involve a terrorist plot in which the virus is spread around through infected money during Black Friday,
35 Hall, Charlie. “Tom Clancy's The Division 2 'Is Not Making Any Political Statements'.” Polygon, Polygon, 12 June 2018, www.polygon.com/e3/2018/6/12/17451688/the-division-2-is-not-making-any- political-statements. 41 one of the biggest consumer holidays in the US and implicitly demonstrates how consumerist culture will ultimately lead to the downfall of a capitalist society. The political undertones of the game are unavoidable too, since the game is set in America’s capital and in one instance requires the player to take back the White House from the enemy.
Another more recent example would be an incident in March 2019 where Steam decided to pull a visual novel style game titled Rape Day from the site and no longer allowed it to be distributed through their service following criticism from users and media outlets such as PC
Gamer.36 The controversy came in the wake of Steam’s new laissez-faire rules on regulating their store content, yet even loose restrictions on content can still allow for a certain level of integrity and the decision to not distribute a game such as this would seem simple enough since the game was nothing more than a tasteless glorification of sexual violence against women. Still, when Valve commented on their decision to no longer distribute the game, they cited that the decision was made because it posed “unknown costs and risk” to the company and that the subject matter of the game made it hard for Valve to keep their commitment to allowing developers to express themselves and find an audience on their platform. One could argue that
Valve simply did not know about the content of the game, but the name of the game is straightforward. Instead, given Valve’s laissez-faire approach to how they curate the content they make available on their site, what is really implied by a vague statement like “unknown costs and risk” is that the concern was largely economic for Valve rather than being based on an ethical or moral issue. Of course, sthis wa not the first time Steam had been accused of their moral ambivalence as they had previously allowed games such as Active Shooter and Suicide Simulator to be distributed using their platform, only pulling them from the site following controversy and
36 Lahti, Evan, and Tyler Wilde. “Valve Blocks Rape Day from Steam.” PC Gamer, 6 Mar. 2019, www.pcgamer.com/valve-blocks-rape-day-from-steam/. 42 direct threats to their ability to make a profit. While the issues surrounding Spier and Valve refer to two separate matters, the thing that connects them is that the fear of losing money and alienating customers far outweighs the desire to take a firm stance on an issue.
The avoidance is not just characteristic of developers either, as gamers themselves have also come out in protest of games with overtly political messages even when the message should theoretically be one anyone can agree with. Yet, when Bethesda’s newest installment to the
Wolfenstein series, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, made the slogans “Make America Nazi-
Free Again” — an obvious reference to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan “Make America
Great Again” that is often tied to fascist sentiments — and “#NoMoreNazis” the focal points in its marketing campaign for the game, gamers called to boycott. The Wolfenstein has always been a series about fighting Nazis, so the decision to include them in their newest installment was not anything new. However, The New Colossus takes place in an alternate timeline in which the
Nazis are the victors of WWII and take over America. The message of the game is clear: Nazis are the bad guys and the player should spare no sympathy in eradicating them from American soil. Incidentally the campaign came only months after the “Unite the Right” rally in
Charlottesville, VA where one person was killed after a car ran through a group of counter- protestors and was one of the most alarming signs of how emboldened white supremacist and nationalist groups had become in the US.
Of course, while the message of Wolfenstein is much more explicit in its intentions it still aestheticizes the concept of violence and implies that it is justified so long as it is for the ‘right’ reasons. As is the case with almost any other video game, associating the abstract concepts of things like what is “good” and what is “evil”, both of which are constructions of human perception, to more concrete manifestations of such only informs the player on what good and 43 evile without ar much regard to the complexities of what either of those ideas can mean. To be good is to be like the American soldier, while evil looks like a Nazi super soldier. Jason Farman further discusses how video games can be used to train the body and the player’s perceptions of sociological conditions in his article “Hypermediating the Game Interface”. Though his assessment focuses on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and violent media, he does not argue that the player is being radicalized toward violence; rather, the bulk of his argument does speak to a type of technophobia that worries about how video games in their ever- increasing advancement toward realism and simulation will inevitably mesh with the Real to form a more single entity.37
Though he does not explicitly discuss Benjamin in his article, the connection can be made between Farman’s concept of “hypermediation” in the game interface and the ‘distracted critic’ in Benjamin’s work. Immersion into the gamespace is a form of distraction, the lack of clear boundaries between the real and virtual worlds and player input makes it easier for the player to subconsciously pick up on habits, and is only made more effective by the fact that the player must perform the actions of the character themselves — the mediation of which is done through the controller.
On the one hand, video games using themes of social conflict, war, etc. that put the player in the position of the hero who fights against an evil entity make for a very enjoyable experience.
But politics in games also have the potential to make people uncomfortable, especially when the player can draw a stronger parallel between the game world and their own lives. It is very clear that the tagline “Make America Nazi Free Again” is meant to target and agitate Trump supporters, but the irony of the situation is that even if Bethesda did manage to alienate a good portion of their fanbase who also happened to support Trump, Bethesda gains new customers
37 Farman, Jason. “Hypermediating the Game Interface: The Alienation Effect in Violent Videogames and the Problem of Serious Play.” Communication Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 1, 2010, pp. 100-106 44 who agree with their antifascist message. Therefore, the onus is on the developers and game distributors to ensure their products only touch on the idea of being politically aware without committing to anything concrete and to only make decisions on what kind of content to distribute when there is a threat to their ability to profit from it. Leaving marketing decisions or reducing the intentions of the game down to its most basic elements of exploring new worlds or fighting bad guys for the greater good, even when the connections are apparent to the player, makes it much easier to backpedal on the game’s greater meaning and that any further reaching implications are just speculation on the part of the player. Similarly, in visual novels, divisive situations can almost always be defused by simply choosing the right thing to say at the right moment, since the goal of these games is to just get a satisfactory ending. The characters revolve around the player participating in the game. What is more apparent in visual novels is their tendency to romanticize heavy subject matter rather than comment on it, like that seen in Katawa
Shoujo. As previously mentioned, the game revolves around Hisao Nakai, a young high school student who is recently diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia and is transferred to a school for other special needs students.
At this school, he meets a cast of characters — the majority of which are female — with whom he primarily interacts with and all of which have varying physical disabilities. Through them, Hisao learns to cope with having arrhythmia. Katawa Shoujo has very compelling stories and, for what it’s worth, is a good visual novel. This, however, does not really excuse the fact that the inclusion of disability and its effects on a person is not just a narrative conflict, but one that is made to be quirky in some regard and consumed by a mainstream audience. This is not to say that a person must be self-hating or reject the notion that their disability has an influence on their identity in some form for the performance to be realistic or valid, nor does this statement 45 mean to imply that disability and mental illness are things to be ashamed of, but they are not fun character traits either. Despite the narrative being a much more positive one compared to narratives on mental and physical illness that demonize mental and physical illness or portray people as monsters, such as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or David Lynch’s The Elephant Man,
Katawa Shoujo still exemplifies a more prevalent cultural phenomenon in society, one that takes the aesthetics of mental illness and disability and romanticizes or glamorizes them to be consumed by a larger audience. Granted, this visual novel deals with physical disability more prominently than mental illness, but it is still a romanticizing of the disabled body and a narrative of how disabled people can find love and live normal happy lives — and in this visual novel’s case a normal sex life — despite their disabilities.38
Oftentimes in the course of developing narratives on disability and the disabled body there is a tendency in mainstream media to still frame it from the perspective of the abled body and ignore the trauma inherent to such a portrayal. Cary Wolfe’s essay “Human, All Too
Human“ addresses this same issue in a much broader sense with regards to the field of cultural studies and how the “inclusive vagueness” of this discipline is only representational of a more pluralist ideology and acknowledges diversity at a more surface level, but still maintains a certain cultural hegemony.39 Likewise, Katawa Shoujo is still a narrative told from a relatively normative perspective. The conflict central to the novel is that Hisao is a ‘normal’ student who is suddenly thrust into a world that he is largely unfamiliar with. Since his disability is internal and only made apparent if he strains himself too much and has a heart attack, whereas the girls he
38 For more information, refer to” Lost in Representation: Disabled Sex and the Aesthetics of the Norm” by Anna Malinowska. Malinowska, Anna. "Lost in representation: Disabled sex and the aesthetics of the ‘norm’." Sexualities 21.3 (2018): 364-378. 39 Wolfe, Cary. "Human, all Too Human: "Animal Studies" and the Humanities." Pmla, vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, pp. 568 46 gets involved with have a more inescapable physicality to their disability, he is still able to keep a considerable amount of distance between himself and the other students and allows for the player to easily align themselves with him.
Fig.7. The scene in which Clay comes to realize his role in Hannah's death40
In more recent years, Netflix’s original series 13 Reasons Why (2017) uses the topic of suicide to tell a story of revenge that is narrated postmortem by the show’s victim, Hannah
Baker. The audience follows fellow high school student and close friend of Hannah’s, Clay
Jensen, as he listens to a series of tapes that Hannah had left behind identifying the people she believes were in some way responsible for her decision to commit suicide. The show is provocative not only because it depicts how detrimental things such as bullying and rape can be on a young person, but also shows how people’s inaction can play into the abuse continuing. The
40 Yorkey, Brian. “13 Reasons Why.” 13 Reasons Why, season 1, Netflix, 2017. 47 show could have offered a profound commentary on issues surrounding how sexual assault or mental illness are handled in society. But 13 Reasons Why botches its own message with how and why the story is being told. Hannah’s choice to make a series of tapes detailing the reasons why she is killing herself is implied to be methodical and that the act of committing suicide is the ultimate revenge on the people who have wronged her. The suicide itself is shot in an almost ritualistic manner as painstaking detail is given to her process going as far as to show the grisly act which leaves the audience to watch as she slowly dies. This is supposed to be shocking and the most climactic and raw scene in the show that, while it may have had the intention of sending the message to anyone who may be suffering from depression that the process of dying is not beautiful, it instead frames Hannah as a martyr. The scene has been linked to a phenomenon known as “suicide contagion” or copycat suicides, in which rates of suicide spike following a highly publicized one. The term is often used in reference to Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774) in which the title character kills himself after his love interest, Charlotte, marries his friend Albert toward the end of the story. The novel was immensely popular and spurred a trend soon after where young men who had identified themselves with Werther would dress up like him, but the novel also inspired many to take their own lives in the same fashion as him. Similarly, 13 Reasons Why was cited as a contributing factor in a spike in adolescent suicides shortly after the series premiered and caused Netflix to retroactively add trigger warnings to the show’s info page and the episodes that feature such triggering subject matter.
The show’s second season even starts off with a message from the actors that directs viewers who may be struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts to the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline and suggests that others “start a conversation” on mental health to raise awareness. 48
The issue posed by both video games and visual novels, pop culture media, and novels, is that the concept of mental illness is exploited for profit and presented in a way that makes it easier for the audience to consume. What is lost however, is the complex nature of how mental and physical disability affect a person and how the audience can truly help those who are living with disabilities. Among the people named in Hannah’s tapes is her close friend and the show’s main character, Clay Jensen, but unlike many of the other characters in the show who caused
Hannah physical or psychological damage in some way and are considered to be directly responsible in her death, Hannah prefaces Clay’s tape by saying she harbors no ill will toward him in the same way she does the others and that his inclusion in her story is integral to telling the truth about what happened. The reason why he is being included in the tapes is because he did not comfort her and instead complied with her wishes to be left alone. Yet, because this is one of the last reasons revealed to the audience, and centers on the show’s main character, it is still presented as being the most profound and damaging reason why she had to die. The issue with such an oversimplification like this is that it implies that the act of loving someone will
“cure” a person of their depression.
There are two things wrong with this line of thinking. The first issue is that it applies a normative lens to the topic of depression that implies it has a cure in the first place. The other issue is that it places the blame of why people have depression or why they commit suicide on the people around them because they did not outwardly reciprocate emotion toward them. One could argue that Hannah and the show’s producers have a point in demonstrating how something so innocuous as Clay obeying Hannah’s command to leave her alone has a much more profound effect than anticipated, but to frame the show in a way that implicitly holds Clay to the same level of scrutiny as the students who bullied and raped her also ignores the multitude of nuance 49 that comes with having depression or suicidal thoughts. Likewise, in visual novels, suffering is portrayed as something that can theoretically be resolved by spending enough time or saying the right thing to a character and accepting their flaws. Other times childhood trauma is used as a plot device to explain a character’s quirky personality trait such as shyness and arrogance and why they want to overcome it. In both cases, these narrative devices are not meant to serve as commentary, but instead are there to make the player or the audience feel as if simply accepting or loving people are the ways to defeat depression. It is this ideology that a game like Doki Doki
Literature Club! wishes to challenge.
Fig.8. The menu screen from Doki Doki Literature Club!41
2.2 Doki Doki Literature Club!
As previously mentioned, what makes DDLC effective at being both a psychological horror game as well as a platform for social commentary is that it uses something that is familiar
41 Doki Doki Literature Club!. PC version, Team Salvato, 2017 50 to a lot of people and makes it unfamiliar to them by not only taking most of the control over the game’s world away from the player, but also by breaking the fourth wall and juxtaposing disturbing images with the aesthetic of cutesy anime girls. It is a Brechtian approach to the genre by employing some of the alienating techniques found in his epic theatre. Granted, Brecht’s plays were not meant to scare the audience. Unlike most visual novels, DDLC has a relatively linear plot with few branching narratives and a limited amount of choices that the player can make. All of them revolve around the girls either by having the player choose between which girls they want to write their poems for or who they want to talk to, but none of the player’s choices have any real effect on the game’s story. It is more linear because the game has a specific goal in mind and to give the player more freedom to affect their playthrough would detract from the game’s intent of presenting a direct and focused social commentary as the player’s goal shifts from observing each scene in the game to trying to experience the story and get a good ending.
It is important to set up the narrative in the first act so that its subversion in the second act has a greater effect on the player. To reveal the “true” nature of the game would change the player’s perception of it. Of course, Salvato includes a warning at the beginning of the game that it is a horror game and makes the player consent to being subjected to potentially triggering imagery, but this warning’s purpose is to protect emotionally vulnerable people from witnessing something they probably should not see. This is also why DDLC takes such a long time to get to the scary part of the game instead doubling down on the “cute girls doing cute things” trope with its use of overly simplified and easy to identify character types characteristic of the VN and anime genres that the player is most likely to be familiar with. 51
Apart from Monika, the only “real” character in the game, none of these girls are fully fleshed out and are instead representative of common character tropes in anime. Natsuki is the most notable as her blunt and arrogant exterior that hides away a cute and gentle interior is characteristic of an archetype known as the “tsundere,” which is usually described as a female character who initially reacts coldly toward the player’s character but as they warm up to them, they reveal their sweeter side and more readily show affection to them. In the first scene in which all the characters are introduced, her immediate reaction to the protagonist is to be rude and arrogant towards him denying any inclination that she may be interested in impressing him despite having apparently made cupcakes specifically for him. She tells the protagonist “It’s not like I made them for you or anything,” which is a reference to the line “It’s not like I like you or anything” that is often uttered by characters like Natsuki. It is one of the most identifiable characteristics of a “tsundere” character. By contrast, Yuri is Natsuki’s literary foil as she is more introverted and socially awkward but opens up to the protagonist when they discuss topics she takes great interest in such as literature and writing poetry. The contrast between both girls is also expressed by their position next to each other on the main menu of the game. Natsuki looks at the player with a pouty expression and her hands on her hips, while Yuri shyly looks away with a sullen look on her face and her back turned. Sayori, the protagonist’s best friend, is presented as a generally cheery character who is also prone to being clumsy and forgetful and her stance on the menu screen implies that she is so happy to see the player. Monika is the smart and confident club president and her interactions with the protagonist are meant to show how caring and mature she is. Additionally, she is the only character on the menu screen to have her arm outstretched to the player as if to pull them into the game as she looks at them more head on. The protagonist, like many other visual novel protagonists, is a generally nice and easygoing guy who 52 goest wi h the flow of things in the club to get closer to the other girls. His mannerisms change accordingly depending on which girl he is talking to though ironically, he is also an unreliable narrator since he is guided more by his ulterior motives to romance one of the girls than he is by the idea of doing something for his friend that will make her happy.
What Salvato essentially does by setting up his characters in this was is employ a style of gestic convention like what Brecht had developed for use in the theatre. The first criteria for something to be subject to social gest is that the action must be grounded in reality, meaning that it must be an action that the audience themselves would make in the present time. The crowning of a king, while it is an action that has a specific meaning to it, would not be considered as such since the action is grounded in historical context rather than a contemporary social one.42 This does not mean that such a gesture has no place in Brecht’s plays given that many of his plays are historical in setting, yet the setting of the play is meant to remove any sense of familiarity the audience could have with the setting — which in this context meant avoiding making any strong connections to World War I — and that it was more or less just a backdrop for the political message. Mother Courage could theoretically be set in any time period (and it has been), the timing of the play is not so important to the plot. Where Benjamin then draws the distinction between social and historical gest is that the latter is based on imitation. What could make the crowning of a king gestic however, is when the gesture is taken out context and used to highlight the performative nature of such a gesture. Furthermore, Brecht had the advantage of using live actors who would merely ‘present’ their character to the audience. DDLC is a lot more rudimentary in that the player is confined solely to reading written dialogue. This, however, places more importance on what is being said and why it is being said. Every interaction the
42 Benjamin explains the function behind gest and what does and does not count in Understanding Brecht. 53 protagonist has with the girls is done so with the notion that the girls already like them and that anything the protagonist says or does will immediately be liked by them. Monika tells the player from the beginning that the girls cannot possibly hate you and that they will like anything the player writes for them. This statement has a double meaning though as one could infer that
Monika simply means the girls are just being nice to the protagonist since he is new to writing poetry, but what she is really implying is that the girls are programmed to like the protagonist and making them angry is an impossibility. This statement also reveals the level of performativity that underlines the game’s conventions since making a character upset would severely hinder the player’s ability to progress.
Aside from Monika, each girl immediately reads and comments on the player’s poem after they have been selected without hesitation and then after making a few comments on it, they give their poem to the player to read. Monika on the other hand is a bit more interpersonal as she takes the time to talk to the player before she reads their poem. It shows the relationship between both the player and the characters as well as Monika’s relationship to the other girls as her interactions are entirely different from everyone else’s. Where this application may fall short is that Monika herself also had to be programmed to act in this way, but in a sense, she acts more akin to rogue AI as she is implied to have gained a sense of self-awareness from her position as club president.
2.3 Scene On Repeat
Another feature DDLC shares with epic theatre is the use of repetition to repurpose scenes, character actions, and phrases to highlight the discrepancies between the game’s aesthetics and the underlying corruption that is influencing them that are meant to be analyzed by the audience. In Brecht’s essay “The Modern Theatre is Epic Theatre,” he describes how the 54 individual elements of the opera should function independently of each other rather than in conjunction with each other for the pleasure of the audience. This was in opposition to the
Wagnerian style of opera, especially since Wagner’s work had been appropriated by fascists, in which words and music were blended together with the setting (Gesamtkunstwerk) for the enjoyment of the audience and relied much more on aesthetics and conveying emotion than it did on communicating an idea. For this reason, Brecht degraded its function likening it more to that of film — in which scenes more closely resembled montage —and were only loosely related to each other rather that transitioning fluidly from one scene to the next. By breaking up the flow of a production in this manner, it prohibits the audience from getting to Similarly, each scene in
DDLC is more episodic than it is serial as the next scene does not exactly depend on the one that played before it. This makes it easier for scenes, music, and characters in the game to be interchangeable with each other and easier for the player to analyze each one based on its own merit. It also means that these individual aspects have the potential to work against each other.
These things become more evident in Act Two when the game begins to fall apart.
Yuri and Natsuki, the two characters most opposite of each other are also the most similar to an uncanny degree. Their interactions with the player are almost identical to each other as demonstrated in their one-on-one scenes with the protagonist which both involve inviting the player to read a book with them —Yuri’s titled The Portrait of Markov and Natsuki’s titled
Parfait Girls — and asks the player to sit on the floor as they read. On their own these scenes are just a way for the player to learn more about the type of books the girls like to read, but when played simultaneously these scenes would seem to highlight the illusion of choice in a visual novel and how the only real difference in these girls is their personalities. Later when the player gets to choose which girl they spend time with in preparation for the festival, they are reduced to 55
Fig. 9. The same scene in Act One where Sayori is introduced is replaced by a glitch in Act Two43
43 Doki Doki Literature Club!. PC version, Team Salvato, 2017 56 only choosing between either Natsuki or Yuri as the player is told Monika and Sayori are already helping each other and even if the player were to choose either one of them, the two girls intervene and essentially force the player to pick between them.
2.4 Act Two
Toward the end of the first act, Sayori reveals to the player that the reason behind many of her mannerisms and why she is always late for class or over sleeping is because she has depression. It is a candid scene and is meant to make Sayori out to be a more sympathetic character that the player wants to help. A few scenes later, she confesses her feelings toward the protagonist and marks one of the first “real” choices in the game — does the player also confess their love to her, or do they choose to remain her best friend? No matter what the player chooses however, Sayori hangs herself the next day which marks the end of act one. It is also the scene that truly breaks the fourth wall, revealing the true nature of the game. Sayori’s death is not only pivotal for breaking the forth wall, but also because it confronts the player with the possibility that their choices in the game are entirely meaningless when the problem is greater than just saying or doing what they feel is the right thing to say — something that shows like 13 Reasons
Why try to rationalize as a significant factor in suicide. From that point, the game restarts without
Sayori and any previous mentions of her have been replaced by unreadable text and glitching character sprites.
The player is forced to repeat all the scenes and dialogue that they had just gone through in the first act, but with significant deviations to them that break away from the game’s ‘cute girl’ aesthetic and undermine the ‘innocent’ nature of the characters. Slowly the game’s world 57
Fig.10. Both Yuri's and Natsuki's personalities change drastically in Act Two, which goes unnoticed by the protagonist44
44 Doki Doki Literature Club!. PC version, Team Salvato, 2017 58 begins to fall apart, and the fourth wall is further broken down with random character and scene glitches and backgrounds that slowly warp the longer the player stays on them. The latter of these has a physical feeling of depersonalization or vertigo attached to it that makes the player almost feel as if they are witnessing the conversation from far away. No one seems to react to this as it’s happening, and the scene continues to progress as normalOccasionally, the background of the Literature Club may also change and one of the posters on the wall may change to the image of Sayori hanging herself. If Salvato wishes to make a statement and constantly remind the player that they are playing a game, it would make sense for the game’s mechanics to subtly break the element of immersion given to the player via storytelling. Glitches in a video game normally tell both the game developers and the player that there is something fundamentally wrong with the game and are things that hinder the entertainment and immersion aspects of the game. These are also only things that only the player and Monika will respond to. Neither Yuri nor Natsuki are aware of them. The protagonist will also not comment on them as well.
A greater separation of elements within the game can be noticed in this second act. At certain points, Yuri and Natsuki will abruptly break character — which sometimes appears in the form of bolded text — and step out of their roles within the game to reveal to the player information about them they had previously been pushed to the background which not only contradict the aesthetics and the music of the scene, but also goes against everything the player knows about these characters from the first act. For Natsuki it is revealed that she has an abusive father who frequently makes her go without food while Yuri is introverted due potentially to a sense of isolation because of her obsessive tendencies and the fact that she cuts herself. This is important in relation to the first act as it shows that the behaviors the player had previously 59 witnessed as being cute and quirky are influenced by very serious psychological issues that the game tries to gloss over to uphold its sweet and adorable aesthetics.
By also stepping out of character in this way, it not only creates a sense of conflict between the player and the narrative but also highlights a discrepancy with the protagonist himself. Prior to Sayori’s death in act one, in her conversation with the protagonist on her suffering from depression, she goes into detail about her circumstances and how depression affects her ability to function every day. The protagonist is almost offended that she kept this hidden from him for so long since he is her best friend after all, and immediately moves to asking how he personally can help her feel better. The gesture is seemingly noble, but still glosses over the fact that Sayori’s condition is not so easily willed away and, if her well-being were a priority to the protagonist, he would have possibly inquired about it earlier as he notes the changes to her behavior at the very beginning of the game. In that same breath, he also remarks that he would get frustrated with waiting for her every day and left her behind instead of walking to school with her like they used to do prior to high school. Yet, in this moment and now that he views Sayori as a love interest, he is moved to act not because he cares about his best friend, but because there is something to be gained romantically from helping her through her own issues.
Therefore, the gesture comes off as both insincere and performative. Despite the protagonist’s promises to be there for her (regardless of if the player chooses to confess their love to her or remain friends), the protagonist still leaves her behind on the day of the festival. For this reason, the game takes away the protagonist’s — and therefore the player’s — ability to react to such a statement in act two while allowing the player to at least retain the ability to recognize when something is gravely wrong with these girls. Even if they could help though, what could the protagonist do to ensure the two remaining girls do not end up like Sayori? The other reason for 60 this complete subversion in the second act is of course to remind the player of two things: that they are still playing a game and that these girls are not real, could not exist in the real world, and that their adherence to character tropes and dialogue that make light of serious subject matter for the purpose of creating characters that are only designed to make the player fall in love with them is a gross simplification on how human interaction works. It is for this reason, as it is revealed toward the end of the game, that Monika overrides the game to prevent their inevitable fates. She initially starts by making the other characters as unlikable as possible, which meant amplifying Sayori’s depression or Yuri’s obsessive personality, in order to get the player to focus more on her. This of course does not work since Monika is not an option for the player to even romance.
Fig.11. Monika deleting the remaining two girls from the game45
45 Doki Doki Literature Club!. PC version, Team Salvato, 2017 61
The final alienating moments in the game come following Yuri’s death. At the end of day three, Yuri confesses her love to the protagonist. As with Sayori, it does not matter if the player chooses to accept or reject her confession; she will kill herself regardless. This forces the player to sit with her for two days rather than going home for the weekend to spend time with one of the girls and prepare for the school festival like they did in the first act. Meanwhile, Yuri’s dialogue box is filled with a constant stream of unreadable text. The ‘history’ button in the text box reveals that it is the game’s Steam description on repeat. After two days of staying in the club room with Yuri, Monika and Natsuki discover her body and Monika apologizes to the protagonist. To make up for Yuri making him waste his weekend and for the incredibly broken state of the game, Monika deletes both Yuri and Natsuki.
Fig.12. Monika guessing my name (correctly)46
46 Doki Doki Literature Club!. PC version, Team Salvato, 2017 62
The game then restarts again, and the player is left with only themselves and Monika in a room together. At this point, the fourth wall has been completely broken down. During this talk with Monika the game will try to figure out the player’s real name (by looking at the player’s
User files) and will detect if the player is playing the game through Steam or recording their gameplay; the latter possibly being done under the assumption that Let’s Players would play the game for their Youtube channels as the presence of recording software will cause Monika to try and scare the audience. She explains to the player that she knows she is in a game and is aware of when the game is currently running or not. Her awareness is what led her to discover that the other girls are just computer programs; just a group of autonomous personalities designed to fall in love with the protagonist and nothing more. Monika is using the Kantian definition of the word autonomy here as the girls are self-determining systems that are guided by moral reasoning rather than by subjective desire or free will. It was for this reason why she tried to do everything in her power to keep them from confessing to the player as they could not possibly comprehend a world of infinite choice when their own world only allows for a finite number of choices.
This section of the game will go on for as long as the player wishes as Monika will continuously try to make small talk with the player. In order to progress in the game, the player must break the rules of the game by physically go into the game’s files and manually delete
Monika. Much like Brecht’s repurposing of historical gestures such as the crowning of a king to reveal the performative nature of such an exchange of power, the symbolic gesture of deleting
Monika reveals the performative nature of visual novels and sends a message to the player that they do not have to play by the game’s rules even when they have been led to believe they must.
After deleting Monika, the game restarts one last time and the three girls — Sayori, Natsuki, and
Yuri — are restored with Sayori as the president of the Literature Club instead of Monika. It 63 starts off as normally as the first act did, but following the introductions of the club members,
Sayori reveals that she is aware of everything that happened including how the player deleted
Monika. She confesses her love to the player again, at which point Monika intervenes and deletes the game for good. 64
CONCLUSION: MOVING FORWARD
Doki Doki Literature Club! is a game that, despite its tragedy, has an important moral lesson.
The message behind Doki Doki Literature Club! is simple: Life cannot be quantified by a series of predetermined actions, and people are more complex than even the most ‘real’ video game characters. While the game may leave players with a general feeling of hopelessness as they come to realize how meaningless their choices are and how helpless they feel as they cannot save these girls from their inevitable fates, Dan Salvato believes there is a way out. In his interview with Kotaku, Dan Salvato explains that the games message should hopefully inspire people to do better by others and to change the things that they do have control over. It relies less on the gimmicks and platitudes of other media that urge the viewer to “start a conversation” without giving them the resources necessary to even approach that conversation, or that the solution to one’s problems are solely found in someone else and instead forces them to grapple with the uncomfortable notion that some things are not meant to be fixed with words alone and some topics cannot be approached in such a constrained and limited manner.
Yet, much like Brecht, Salvato’s message relies on the audience to recognize its message rather than taking it for granted. A great difficulty in trying to undermine the system by working within it is that the act of undermining also carries the potential to be reintegrated into the circulation of commodities. One can ask: “did Brecht fail?” Were his methods not radical enough to combat the cultural hegemony of a capitalist society? It is a possibility. Yet, it may be a bit unfair to approach the question with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ statement or to consider whether the intent of epic theatre was either a total success or an utter failure. Brecht’s methods may have
“failed” in the sense that the proletariat has not yet been liberated from the shackles of capitalism and bourgeois interests and, as previously mentioned, breaking the fourth wall is seen more as a 65 funny narrative convention and many of his more popular works have become commodity themselves by being turned into more contemporary hit songs which —in an ironic twist — have become copyrighted materials. Conversely, epic theatre has succeeded in creating at least a source of contingency which can better prepare its audience to better recognize the underpinnings of social injustice which exist even when society itself changes to, on the surface, appear more inclusive. In a similar fashion, Doki Doki Literature Club! is still a game and therefore still susceptible to being regarded as just being a source of entertainment for players.
On some level, this could be attributed to long-standing trends in game development that take for granted the player’s capacity for critical engagement with their media. What comes out of this is of course the argument that games should not be political. Yet, as evidenced by this thesis alone it should be apparent that there is more to this game that can be expanded upon. While many developers are still apprehensive to the idea of making games political or to take a stance when their games are inherently political, video games provide a platform that when utilized properly can be a powerful vehicle for social change that can help the player recognize such injustice in the real world. Some have of course already recognized the potential, Dan Salvato being one of them; and though he may not have anticipated the overwhelming success his game would have in the long run or how the techniques he used could be considered anything other than
‘psychological horror’, it shows how art has adapted for the modern audience and how the elements of epic theatre have not been completely lost in the 21st century. 66
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