I've been playing so many deconstructive video games lately that I'm starting to think of deconstruction as its own genre with its own conceits and tropes. (Like, it turns out that fucking with saved games is all but mandatory.) The latest: Doki Doki Literature Club!, which layers deconstruction on so thick its target genre starts breaking up into subatomic particles.
Content warnings: Exhaustive spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club. References to depression, extreme self-harm, death, and nihilism. Minor spoilers for the anime Elfen Lied.
Layer 1: The We're Not Fucking Around Moment
DDLC tips its hand somewhat via the content warnings at the game's opening. "Not suitable for children or the easily disturbed" clues us in that the spray of pink bubbles and crew of cheerful anime girls on the game's title screen hide something darker. But in a way, that only intensifies the player's dread as lighthearted dating sim gameplay leads into character arcs about the most brutal of mental illnesses. And when the game's first act ends with a childhood friend's death by suicide? Maybe you saw it coming, but it still brings about a sinking feeling of "oh shit, yeah, they went there."
That scene reminds me of the science fiction horror anime Elfen Lied, which attempted a similar tone shift but fell flat. EL introduces a cutesy secretary character in a brief comic relief scene, then graphically kills her during the story's inciting incident. It's meant as a "we mean business" moment, but it's too transparent an intention. We had no time to grow attached to the character, and her arrival in harm's way is so nonsensical that her role in the story is 100% reducible to "somebody we kill off for shock value." DDLC does it much better: the death comes after several in-game days and an hour or more of gameplay, wherein we've had a chance to learn about and care for the doomed character. It's legitimate emotional punch, not tawdry manipulation.
The cast. I bet they're all classic anime or visual novel archetypes, but the only one I know for sure is Natsuki (leftmost), the tsundere.
Layer 2: The Girls You Couldn't Save
In a conventional romantic visual novel, you choose a "route" through the game based on what character you want to pair up with. You do things to win their affection. You get closer to them. They reveal their fears and problems to you. And then, in the story's climax, those problems come to a head, and you must rescue your beloved from the brink of disaster, winning their heart in the process.*
One uncomfortable question might come to mind, though: what happens to the poor souls whom you don't romance on a given playthrough, when they're kidnapped or suicidally depressed or whatever? Do we suppose that someone else fills the protagonist's role in those stories, or do the jilted characters meet terrible fates absent the lead's attention? DDLC unreservedly goes for the latter interpretation. It shows you in grisly detail the "bad endings" resulting from your having chosen someone else. It highlights the absurdity of the protagonist's importance in such stories, turning heartwarming tropes into something monstrous. Just like the tone shift described above!
I'm critical of the ending overall, but this moment nailed it. So creepy!
Layer 3: The Conversation Through the Fourth Wall
Deconstructive games comment on themselves qua games, by definition. It's not uncommon to have that commentary crop up in naked text: a character philosophizing about the fact that they're in a game, remarking that their life is gamelike, etc. DDLC takes that to an extreme. In the final scene, Literature Club president Monika reveals that she knows she's in a game, and has been using that meta-level awareness to manipulate events in her favor. She dismisses the other characters as mere programmed scripts, to the point of "deleting" them from the narrative, and claims that only she and you-the-player are "real." But she too is a scripted character in a visual novel, which makes her vulnerable to the same tactics she used on the other girls. You defeat Monika by deleting her.
By putting the characters' nature as scripted constructs into the game text, DDLC forces us to stop suspending disbelief. We must acknowledge that we're not interacting with "Natsuki," "Yuri," "Sayori," and "Monika"; we're reading text and looking at pictures on a computer screen. A Ren'Py script doesn't love you. A Ren'Py script doesn't have an abusive father, cut itself to relieve anxiety, or suffer from major depression. A Ren'Py script is not the sort of thing it makes sense to feel sympathy for or care about, any more than a rock is. The emotions we feel playing the game are pointless and silly.
Given the themes of the emptiness of life that keep coming up in poems in the game, maybe that's the idea. Life is meaningless, as is this game and its characters. I find that sort of nihilism banal and self-refuting, though, so it's ultimately a letdown that DDLC's agenda lands that way. I'll take Undertale's message--that we're better people for treating game entities as worthy subjects of empathy--over "nothing matters" any day.
UPDATE: I've reconsidered some of what I wrote here. See my follow-up post for the what and why!
* I'm a sucker for that sort of thing, which is why I wrote a roleplaying game modeling that genre.
"Demiboy vs. Backlog" is a blog series where I play each game from my considerable backlog and share my thoughts about them here on Steemit! Doki Doki Literature Club was selected by Clyde Three. Check out the play queue and leave a comment here to point me in the direction of one of your favorites! Think my backlog still isn't large enough or is missing some must-play title? I accept gift games via Steam, and will slot any game thus received into the queue at the nearest opportunity!